People who have been punched in the face are more self aware. Not only do you know how you’ll react – which you truly have no way of knowing until it happens – but you also know more about what you do that might be punch-worthy.

The point is that people who have never truly crashed don’t truly know how to fly. So when you crash – rejoice!

I notice something odd. Sometimes people believe something that makes them upset, but the thing they believe is not only false, it’s almost the direct opposite of the truth. So you’d think that learning the truth would make them happy! But it sure doesn’t.

To understand why, you have to go back to some really basic elements of human communication. Namely: “Talk is cheap.” To go a little deeper: The vast majority of communication done by humans isn’t done to actually engage in the transfer of information. It’s done to signal tribal affiliation and get points with your tribe, whoever they are. If you understand that, a lot of life makes a lot more sense.

Very recently (as of this writing) some children were killed in a horrific incident at their school. This is tragic and sad and bad. Whenever something tragic and sad and bad happens, people will often talk about how common that thing is “these days,” and so on. People lament especially that their children are less safe today than we were ourselves when we were children however many years ago.

So, here’s what they’re literally saying: “I’m sad because our children aren’t as safe as children were in the last generation.” If that was also what they literally meant, then the perfect solution would present itself! Because of course, the exact opposite is true. Children today are much safer, by every measure and in every category, than they have ever been. They aren’t perfectly safe, as occasional tragedies demonstrate. But any inference of declining safety is completely wrong.

But of course, what they literally say isn’t what they literally mean. What they mean is: “I would like to take this opportunity to signal my affiliation to my tribe by saying the things my tribe wants to say and hear. I hope many members of my tribe hear this and raise my status.” That sounds callous, but remember that they probably don’t actually realize that’s what they mean. Tribalism is so deeply ingrained in our psyche that it guides our actions without us realizing that’s what’s happening most of the time. People sincerely believe that they sincerely believe that children are less safe today.

Which is why they are very upset if you tell them otherwise, even though you’d think they’d rejoice.

If someone believes that they’re poisoned and about to die, you’d think they’d be relieved to learn that it was only water and they’re going to be fine. But if they believed they’d been poisoned because their tribe told them so, then they would at least be a little mad at you for dispelling that belief.

Now, let’s go just a tiny bit further down this rabbit hole before we’re through today, shall we? Remember that one of the surest ways to get people to do what you want is to make them angry or scared. Angry, scared people will do a lot of really terrible things, especially if they’re angry and scared as a group – angry and scared of the same things. It is very, very difficult to control people by telling them good news.

So when people tell you bad news, be suspicious. Don’t be committed to sadness. Don’t decide to be angry and scared. Decide not to be, by default. Sometimes there will be valid reasons to feel fear and anger, but it will almost never be because someone else told you to be. Trust your own senses and experiences and use a commitment to happiness as an inoculation against control. You’ll never be free of tribalism – it’s too deep within us. But recognize it. And be happy.

I worry often about settling into mistakes. Getting something wrong that won’t come around to bite me until much later, but then it’s far too late. Habits relating to personal health are like this – you can do a lot of damage to your body for years before you start to actually feel the effects, but by then the habits are very hard to change.

I don’t like to consider things settled. I like to keep change as an acceptable cost of living, a recognized element. It’s difficult, but worthwhile. Everything changes.

Survival is progress. It doesn’t always feel like it. But the arrow of time moves in one direction; every moment you spend “treading water” is a moment you aren’t drowning. In the great arc of time, we are dust. So if today all you did was “delay the inevitable,” then congratulations. Some days that is enough.

Preparation not only has diminishing marginal returns, it has – for most people – negative returns after a certain point.

If you’re going to give a speech on Friday, you should practice. You should practice until it sounds natural and you can deliver it while paying more attention to your audience than to yourself or your words. And then you should stop.

If you practice it four thousand more times beyond that point, you’re going to make yourself worse. You’re going to get in your own head, words are going to start sounding weird, you’ll get distracted by minute changes at the actual event, etc. Someone will cough and you’ll lose your whole rhythm because it didn’t happen exactly as you rehearsed – rehearsed so many times it wore ruts in your brain.

Some things, most things, only have so much of a range of possible results anyway. If you’re giving a toast at a buddy’s retirement party, there’s no way to do that so well that they build a statue of you or so poorly that your buddy has to go back to work for five more years. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, I’m just saying that you can reach the maximum level of “good” it can be pretty quickly.

That’s a valuable lesson in itself. Figure out the maximum positive result that’s realistic, practice until you’re good enough to hit that result, and then… go do something else. The minutes of your life are finite!

Context matters. Whether it’s linguistically, culturally, or anything else – when and where and how you say something matters. It’s the carrier for the vitamins, the vessel for the astronauts. You can’t deliver what you want without it.

And it doesn’t always translate. When I meet someone who grew up where I grew up, is around my age, and roughly my socio-economic class, I can talk to them in a weird patois of Simpsons references and 1337-speak and they’ll understand it perfectly. In a different country, to a different age group, etc.? Definitely not. And we’re not even discussing language yet.

It’s not just about adjusting the context, either. I can’t say a great idea is a “home run” to your average German and have it mean anything, but I also can’t just change that phrase to “goal” just because the German likes soccer. A goal and a home run are different, and they mean different things as an analogy. In other words, some contexts can’t carry certain information at all.

Communication is hard. But it’s even harder if you assume it’s universal. Respect the limits, and ask about context more than you assume it.

There is a very basic rule of the universe that most people seem to forget. If you remember it, your life will be much better – largely because you’ll avoid wasting a lot of effort. Here’s the rule: The easier something is, the more people will do it.

Why is that rule important? Because people often lament that something is too hard, onerous, or bothersome – and then also complain that too many people are doing it. But one of those things is balanced against the other!

The example that shows up for me most frequently is career-related: people want job applications to be easier. And sure, some of the requirements these days are ridiculous. People don’t want to fill out eight forms, record five videos, design an app, interview sixteen times, and take a blood test just to try to get a job. They want to push one button called “Apply” and be done with it!

But if you pay attention, you discover that the other side of the problem is that ten thousand people apply to every job in the first five minutes that it’s posted. And look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but… you cannot solve both of those problems at once.

Anything that makes it easier to apply to jobs will increase the number of people who do so. And the only way to decrease that number is to make the application process more involved. Those are two sides of one scale.

This has nothing to do with whether the process is even good. Forget about whether whatever hoops companies are creating actually find good candidates or filter out bad ones. We aren’t even at that problem yet. We’re just talking about the math. And the math at this stage is – unfortunately – simple.

The economics language around this is “there are no twenty-dollar bills on the sidewalk.” Think like this: if a twenty-dollar bill was on top of Mount Everest, it would stay there for a long time, because very few people could get it and it wouldn’t be worth it for anyone to try. On the other side of the spectrum, a twenty-dollar bill just laying on the sidewalk would be picked up instantly – by someone else. The easier the bill is to reach, the more people are reaching for it.

If you want getting the bill to be easy, someone else got it. If you want no one else to be competing with you for the bill, then it has to be so hard to get that it’s not worth it – even for you.

Now, I’m not a doom-and-gloom guy. I offer solutions and opportunities.

The world is complex, and in that complexity there are opportunities for improvements – maybe not to an entire system, but definitely to your own life. Don’t lament that the mountain is too hard to climb or the sidewalk is too crowded – find a third way. There may be two ten-dollar bills just down the street, you just have to play a different game.

In practical terms, remember: There is almost always someone on the other side of the problem. To go back to the job example, this is also a problem for companies. It’s a different problem, but it’s a problem. Believe it or not, companies aren’t making this hard as a punishment for you specifically. When they make their application processes difficult and weird, they’re doing it because they’re trying (and I grant you, often trying very ham-fistedly) to reduce the number of candidates to a manageable level while still retaining the best ones. Most of them fail miserably (that’s a whole other post on why), but they’re definitely looking for solutions. That’s your angle.

Don’t play rigged games. If a process is crazy difficult and five hundred people are still engaging in it, then that means the process simply can’t sustain the weight of the math. So skip the process. Email the CEO directly. Do something weird and a little difficult, but that you want to do. Cut the line, in other words. It might not work! But the main process definitely won’t.

But understand this problem when you see it. This math dilemma is a brick wall, but it’s not universal. Go around it whenever you can.

People can deploy falsehoods so easily that they have no choice but to fall back on emotional tactics if challenged. If someone says something in support of their overall position, but you think that thing is untrue, you need to be prepared sometimes to be attacked.

This is true even if you agree with the position! I agree, for instance, that we jail non-violent offenders too readily. But if someone says “Police in this country jail non-violent offenders over a million times per week for an average of fifteen years,” I would point out that this probably isn’t true. I would challenge it, ask for sources, etc. And the speaker might say something like, “What are you, in favor of the police state?! Why are you making such a big deal about this?!”

That’s an old trick. My desire to be accurate and know the truth isn’t the same as support for one position or another. How can I even know what positions to take if I don’t know the truth? That has to be upstream.

If you’re getting upset because someone wants more information, then that’s a sign that you need to reevaluate. And if someone gets mad at you for wanting it, then that’s a sign that they’re not a source of truth.

“I love talking to you. It’s like watching a TED talk.” – my daughter, age 12.

I can’t remember a better compliment from a more important source. Some days you just feel like you’re doing it right.

Happy New Month!

My goal this month is to build new independencies in my children. Their own walking patterns to school, library cards, new bikes, anything that gives them more keys to the world. It’s a great month for it. And they’re great kids.

May you be independent too!