You have X tasks, problems, or obstacles, the combination of which is stressing you out and providing a barrier. You need to solve for the most efficient number of tasks and problems to tackle right now in order to progress through the list in the most effective way possible. What’s the formula?

It’s 1. X is 1. It’s always 1.

There’s a trap you can get yourself into. You take on a new type of task, probably professionally. You’re too concerned with being “productive” too quickly, but you’re new to the work. You lack expertise, so you make up for it by working harder and longer. The work begins to burn you out and you don’t seem to be making any headway. Years may pass without you improving your skill or efficiency, but now you’re also locked into your way of doing things. Your brain has mistaken time for expertise.

I’ve seen it happen often. Professionals with ten or more years on a task who don’t have certain fundamental skills in it. Why? Because they never gave themselves time to learn. Instead, they used all their available time right away trying to “produce,” never taking time to practice.

Practice isn’t the same as just doing. Yes, some skill gain happens over time without you concentrating on it. Some. Much, much more happens through deliberate learning. If you play basketball every day, you’ll get better at basketball. But you’ll get much better if you get coached, learn fundamentals that exist outside of the game actions, gather complimentary athletic skills, and so on. Without those things, even the modest skill gain you get from just playing will quickly plateau.

When I was in sales, I’d see this constantly. Someone would join the profession and just hit the pavement or the phones and start selling. They’d be desperate to hit quotas and make money so instead of dedicating any time to learning, they’d just dial or knock or what have you for hours extra every day. And they’d get a little better! Then they’d quickly level off in skill; now they can make an okay living by only working 60% harder than they should have, instead of twice as long. Meanwhile, they’ve still never read a book on selling, attended a workshop, sought mentorship, or anything else that might truly level them up.

Organizations can create this in their people. If the focus is constantly on production in the short term and not on knowledge and skill growth, employees can be funneled into this trap by the company they work for. This is as frequent as people doing it to themselves.

You learn pretty much everything you’ll learn “by osmosis” in the first year of a task. After that, you’re not going to be making any appreciable skill gains unless you’re actually seeking knowledge outside of your daily tasks. If it’s been a while since you’ve done that – now’s the time.

The shiny parts of the house don’t stand up on their own.

People often want – or even demand – the shiny results. They unrealistically demand this of themselves, of others, of the world. They don’t always want all the results immediately, but people get very upset if they don’t see progress toward results almost instantly.

But often you just have to pre-heat the oven, you know? A foundation has to be laid first, and while that’s real work, it’s often invisible. If you pay someone to ghost-write your book for you, they’re doing tangible research work for weeks before the first word goes on the page. If you’re the kind of person who yells “It’s been three weeks and you haven’t written one word?! What am I paying you for,” then you’re not going to get many quality results in life.

For any project of real substance, ask that question first: “What foundation is needed here?” Being aware of the need will help keep you patient and realistic. And that’s a solid foundation all on its own.

How we talk about ourselves is so much more important than we realize. Our willingness to attempt things is so driven by our belief in our ability to navigate that attempt – how likely we are to succeed, at what cost, and at what risk. And all of life’s joys and successes are borne from the attempt.

This is probably not a universal experience, but it’s certainly common enough for many: You’re playing a team sport and someone on your team has the ball. You have a clear path to score if you get it, so you shout “I’m open!” Sometimes you get passed to, and sometimes you get passed over. The deciding factor is how convincing you were to your teammate about your ability to score – and that is driven, at least in part, by how confident you were in that fact.

In life, we’re constantly shouting “I’m open!” to people all around us. We ask for people’s faith in us all the time – to employ us, to date us, to buy from us, to vote for us. Very few dreams can be realized in a vacuum.

Communication skill matters. But that’s the steering – the engine is your belief in what you’re communicating. Motive power without steering will at least get you somewhere; you should learn to steer, but at least you’re moving. Steering without movement is pointless. The self-belief must come first.

You must always believe that you’re open – that given the chance, you’ll score. You must have the conviction to even take the shot and inspire confidence in others to pass to you. None of that works if you tell yourself that you’re closed.

Some creative endeavors favor mastery. Others favor adaptability. It’s rare to be able to have both, so it’s a good idea to know which category you’re in. I call this the “cooking/baking axis.”

Cooking is an art. You play. You mix and match, taste and adjust. You modify as you go, you put a little pizzazz in it. You can throw an extra dash of something in and leave out something else and the whole thing can come together like magic if you’re good at it. Getting a sense of all that can take practice, but you’re always weaving.

Baking is a science. If you don’t put the right amount of everything in, at the right temperature, for the right time, heck at the right altitude, you don’t get cake – you get sludge or charcoal. You can’t just decide to throw an extra stick of butter in there without consequences. You can’t decide to make your pineapple upside-down cake al dente. Mastery is important. You practice until it’s perfect.

This is the difference between a gymnastics routine and improv comedy. In the former, you need perfect mastery to get it right (and not get hurt). In the latter, practicing too much can make you rigid, and rigidity actually makes you worse.

People tend to gravitate toward one or the other, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But then sometimes they choose endeavors that don’t always line up with their natural style, and that can be frustrating. It’s worth it to look inward. Next time you’re going to a potluck, observe what you’d rather make. You’ll enjoy your enjoyment more if your creativity matches your methods.

It can be hard to face facts when it comes to our own shortcomings. Always remember: even if you ignore them, the world doesn’t. And the farther you let your version of reality drift from the version the world sees, the less the world will consider you worthy of interaction.

If you’re a teacher and one person fails your class, you can say that it’s on that student or it’s a fluke, etc. But if you’re a teach and everyone fails your class, then you’re a bad teacher. And no matter what else you point to as evidence that you’re a “good” teacher, you have to face the facts. There’s ultimately one measure of how good a teacher you are, and that’s how well your students learn.

No teacher wants to admit that they’re bad – no one ever wants to admit that they’re bad at one of the primary things they identify as. I’m okay with admitting that I’m a bad golfer because I don’t care about being a good one. But if presented with evidence that I was a bad father, a bad friend, a bad coach – these would be harder for me to accept. But I have to face those facts if they’re presented to me.

If I loudly and belligerently proclaim “I’m a good father” while my children violently attack everyone around them, steal things, destroy stuff, do drugs, go to jail, and so on, then the world will (correctly) realize that I have no interest in changing my behavior as a parent. The world will then lose any interest in helping me. I’ll be written off, and likely so will my children. If instead I say, “I don’t know where I went wrong, but clearly I’m doing something incorrectly,” then the people in the world who might be able to help me do better are far more motivated to do so.

How much you want to be good at something isn’t a measure of how good you are. It can be a great input; wanting to be good at something is the first step. But it isn’t, itself, a measure. The results are the measure. And if you don’t face that, you’ll never actually be good.

I want to live a long time. But that doesn’t mean I’ll pay any cost to add any amount of time to my life. Like all things, the marginal benefit must exceed the marginal cost.

Consider that not all years of your life will be equal. How much worse are you willing to make your 30s and 40s to add one year to your 90s? One month? One week?

There are many variables – too many. Some people like salt more than they’d like a few extra weeks as an octogenarian. That’s a reasonable trade-off.

Everything has a cost, and the time between paying that cost and getting the benefit can be decades, if you get it at all. Buyer beware.

Imagine you attempt to make a gingerbread house for the first time. You mix the frosting that holds it together with a little too much water so it’s not as strong, and your walls don’t stick together as well. An experienced mentor points this out to you, correcting your error so you can build more effectively. You probably feel good about this – you’ve saved yourself a lot of time and headache and you appreciate the input from the knowledgable mentor.

Now imagine instead you mixed the frosting wrong the same way, but no one told you. For the next ten years you made your gingerbread houses that way – they don’t hold together very well and you have to spend a bunch of extra time holding walls together until they dry, using extra frosting, etc. Even still, the houses fall apart more frequently and look worse from the drippy frosting. Now that same person tells you that you’re putting too much water in the frosting. They use the exact same tone of voice and say the exact same words.

You’d be furious, wouldn’t you?

“I know what I’m doing! I’ve been making gingerbread houses for ten years, don’t come over here and tell me how to mix frosting! How dare you!”

This is why feedback needs to be frequent, everyone. Because if you don’t learn that you’re making a mistake early, you have a tendency to integrate that mistake into your identity. It’s the sunk cost fallacy – it’s easy to admit you made a mistake once, especially when you don’t think you’re very skilled at the task yet because you’re just starting out. It’s much, much harder to admit that we’ve been doing something the wrong way for a long time – wasting effort, losing opportunities, etc. Let someone make a mistake long enough, and you’ll never correct it.

I once had a very good manager who absolutely destroyed me when he told me: “Your willingness to work extra hours to make sure the job gets done is not a virtue.”

He explained that because I came into each day with no boundaries about how long I’d work, I worked inefficiently. I didn’t challenge myself to work smarter because I was willing to work harder. I didn’t search for improved practices because I was willing to crack another energy drink. The end result was that I worked harder, but I didn’t actually get more work done.

The sculptor is a fascinating artist. You start with a chunk of marble and your glorious statue of the most beautiful human form is already done, it’s just covered in other bits of marble that you don’t need. The exact molecules of marble that are in Michaelangelo’s David were already there, in that exact configuration, before Michaelangelo even started. Michaelangelo just cleaned it. A sculptor is like a paleontologist who can’t use any tools to find the fossils except their own mind’s eye.

That’s the kind of artist you need to be with your time. Don’t be a painter, always adding more to make the painting more robust, more detailed. Be the sculptor – clear away everything except the most perfect minutes, and use only those. It will take some time to learn what those minutes are, just as it took Michaelangelo time to learn which marble to clear away.

But he never added marble. That was his virtue.

Often you have to contribute positively to the world, even if you didn’t receive the benefit you’re contributing.

You have to be a good parent even if you had bad ones. You have to treat your employees well even if your boss treats you poorly. You must teach even if you weren’t taught.

Your own bad experience can’t become your excuse for abandoning your duties to others. You must hold yourself to a higher standard than the world has presented, or you’ll always sink to the lowest level the world has to offer.

Cycle up, heroes. You are founders of great and mighty works. The seeds you plant will shade generations of the grateful.