When I was an adolescent and teenager, I had a marble notebook that I carried with me everywhere. It was full of truly awful poetry, broody letters, cut-and-pasted items I thought were interesting (or at least made me interesting), and so on. It was, by the parlance of today’s youth, “cringe af.”

I don’t regret it at all. Part of me, in the classic Millenial cliche, is glad it was only a notebook and not eternalized social media posts or videos. But I don’t regret the time in my life when I was… whatever I was.

Cringe is part of growth. Cringe is good. We all try on scores of identities as we explore what makes the world interesting. As we figure out what we truly have to offer, we seek and struggle for something that both sets us apart and includes us. We want to be different, but we want people to notice that we’re different and admire it. Full admission: I would never, ever show anyone that notebook back then, but I always hoped people saw me writing in it and were intrigued by the mystery. I wanted more than anything for someone to want to read that notebook, to care enough about me to try to pry out my secrets.

That actually did happen. But it wasn’t until years and years after I didn’t write in it anymore. I still had it for a long time, a piece of nostalgia maybe. But someone who already knew me and cared about me discovered it in some corner of my closet and then was interested, because by then it was an artifact. Something about who I had been, rather than who I was now – and maybe some sense of the journey from one to the other.

We read it together, and of course it was cringe af. But I enjoyed the reading. I enjoyed seeing that young man’s exploration, trying to figure out what he thought was cool, what he thought other people might think was cool, and reconciling how he felt about both. That young man grew up into a guy that’s pretty sure-footed when it comes to dealing with the opinions of his peers. He became a pretty socially fearless guy, as a matter of fact.

I tossed the old notebook, after that. I don’t put a lot of stock in physical objects like that, and it had now served its full purpose. That part of the journey was over, and I was happy with it. No desire to go back, and no regrets about the time I was there.

Cringe is good. It’s just the sense you get when you try things on and they don’t quite fit yet. But trying things on is all of life, if you want it to be worth living.

There is always just a little more in you, for when you need it. Don’t ever forget that nothing has killed you yet, and much has tried. But that heart has a few more beats in it yet.

All animals are both social and competitive. Cooperative and hierarchical. Humans want to work together, but they also want to know who’s in charge. It’s in our blood. We enter a new environment, and we immediately look for weaknesses in others while hiding our own. We try to project strength, even if we’re trying not to threaten (and maybe we are trying to threaten a little, even when we don’t know it).

The point is that a lot of our behaviors are explained in this model. You don’t want to speak up in the meeting with the new team because some part of your brain is worried that they’ll kill you and eat you if you mess up. They probably won’t. Let them peck if they want to. You’ll be fine.

You could eliminate half the words you say without any effect on your life. Scratch that – it would almost certainly have a positive effect on your life.

Talking (or writing, as it were) feels good. We have someone’s attention, and a big part of our brain just wants that and nothing more. So we talk more and more. Talking is like junk food; it feels great in the moment, but the long-term consequences are terrible for us.

I’m a very outcomes-focused person. That not only means that I care about the results of my actions, but it means I tend to be pretty good at recognizing what will actually affect those outcomes – as opposed to what couldn’t possibly.

Big outcomes are made of small details, but very often a wide range of variance within those details will produce exactly the same result. Let’s say I could take one of five different routes to an event, and as a result I could arrive at said event at five different times, all within the same 15-minute window. Does it matter which route I take?

Not even a little. I mean sure, if I get in a car accident along one route I could end up dwelling on whether I should have taken another, but given that I couldn’t have known that to begin with, there’s no reason to stress about this decision. There might be a sixth route that crosses three state lines and takes the long way around Lake Michigan, and I probably shouldn’t take that one – but I probably wasn’t going to.

The point is that some details are certainly important. But very rarely are they worth any stress. My favorite painting is Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Assuming you find it as beautiful and moving as I do – can you point to one solitary brushstroke that, if altered by fifteen degrees in angle or by a slight shade in color, would ruin the experience of gazing upon it?

Not even a little.

Obsess over the technique. Obsess over getting good at the things you do, to the point where the details take care of themselves. And then you can live in the outcomes, not in the process.

When people’s only job is to do one thing, and them continuing to have gainful employment depends on them doing that thing, then they will – guess what? – do that thing.

Some people’s job is to find fault with things. So they always will. Don’t sweat it.

The hardest part of winning a relay race isn’t running fast. It’s handing off the baton correctly. Any time there’s a transition, there’s room for error. Friction that can spark an explosion.

Too often people pay enormous amounts of attention to the part, and not nearly enough to the connection between parts.

One of humans’ greatest strengths – and most insidious curses – is our ability to adapt to nearly any change in our circumstances.

It’s not always, of course. Sometimes a great tragedy befalls someone and they never recover. But most of the time, they do! People get life-altering injuries or make career-ending mistakes, and life goes on. They not only adapt, they ultimately return to baseline happiness. They find new things to give them joy. The fact that most humans do this is why it’s such a tragedy when a few can’t.

Why did I say it was an insidious curse, though? Because it works the other way, too. When things go well for us, humans very quickly raise their new baseline expectations. I’ve seen it happen so many times. Someone is living quite happily on $50k/year, and suddenly they get a job that pays triple that. For whatever reason, it doesn’t last more than a year, and the person goes back to making $50k. You’d think that would be no problem, right? But no. The adaptation process has to happen all over again, and it’s often slow and painful.

My father used to tell me that the best position to be in was “playing with house money.” In a casino, you walk in with whatever money you have and you start gambling. If you’re under what you came in with, you’re betting your own money. You’re probably losing it, too. You might be responsibly having a good time with a budgeted amount, but you’re still losing that amount. On the other hand, if you can get an early win or two, my father said, you should immediately put away all the money you originally came in with. For the rest of the night, just gamble with your initial winnings. If you “lose everything,” then you’re – at worst – back where you started, but having had a pleasant evening. Gamble, in other words, with house money.

It has other advantages besides protecting your stake. When you play with house money, you can have more fun – you can take more risks, try wilder things. The important thing to remember is that it is house money. It’s not yours. Don’t start feeling entitled to it.

That lesson stuck with me. I remember when I was a young man, I lived with some roommates and (being too poor for a car at the time), I walked to work. One of my roommate’s friends left a car with us for a few weeks while they went out of town, and my roommate immediately started driving to work. I would be fine borrowing the car for a night out, but I didn’t change my daily routine. Sure enough, when the friend came back into town, my roommate had a hard time adjusting to walking to work again, even though it had only been a few weeks!

Good times and lean times both come and go. When the good times come, enjoy them – but remember that they’re house money. Don’t instantly adjust your expectations of life up to the maximum. If you’ve made $50k for a long time and you suddenly get a big raise, keep living like you make $50k. Put the rest away. Maybe you’ll never go backward – but many people do.

And sure, you can adapt. But why make it harder on yourself? Playing with house money rules. But don’t quit your day job.

There are different forms of rest, and getting the wrong kind can be as bad as getting none.

No one can go go go forever. You need to recharge, but “recharging” doesn’t just mean sleeping. If you don’t believe me, picture a life where you get nine hours of sleep every night, but you spend the other 15 hours each day working – every day. Do you imagine that you’ll feel rested? Will you be able to maintain it?

Satisfaction, engaging other parts of your brain, leisure and enjoyment, productivity on other priorities – these are all ways “resting” and getting back the energy you need to be able to give to the world in exchange for its bounties. Don’t neglect them.

I’m probably more obsessed with containers than most people. I like having my things organized and ready to use, but I also like the constraints. If there’s something I like (for instance: board games), then I might be tempted to get… let’s just call it “way too many.”

But if I start with a container – a shelf, a box, a backpack, whatever – and say “this is my container for X,” then I can easily lock that in within my brain as the hard limit on how much of X I can get.

This works for time as well as space, more often than you realize. We start committing to things as if time wasn’t a hard limit, as if we could shove more things into the back of that hour the way some of us try to shove more things into the back of the closet.

You can’t, in either case.