Not being asked to help isn’t an insult. You can offer to help, and someone can decline without it meaning that they don’t think you’re helpful in general. Sometimes people just need their own way, for a while.

It’s amazing what people leave behind. Even accidentally, nothing ever really disappears. It all just moves around, collecting in little corners and hidden places, waiting to be discovered. Junk becomes riches on a long enough timeline. Dig around a little. Find wonder.

I had a humbling moment the other day. I did something, expecting to get thanked. I wasn’t. I was cross for about ten seconds before I realized that I had been on the receiving end of that same thing multiple times myself, and had never even thought to thank the person that did it.

The small lesson, of course, is “Don’t do things because you want to be thanked. Do things because they’re the right things to do.” But the larger lesson is to look beyond the obvious. People are doing you favors all the time, every day. If ever there was a day to remember to say thank you for the non-obvious, this is it.

Many people feel daunted by the idea of stating a goal. Two things drive this anxiety: fear of failure, and uncertainty about methods.

Fear of failure is commonplace, though all the best advice applies: If you don’t try you’ve failed already; don’t look at the odds, look at the cost, etc. But the uncertainty about methods is a poor reason to avoid setting a goal, simply because a goal requires no methods.

If my goal is “build a house,” then knowing how to build a house is absolutely not a prerequisite to setting that goal. It’s a requirement to achieve that goal, and it will be part of the project plan that gets made. But the goal is absolutely the first step, and requires nothing else. Nothing but desire and ambition.

So if you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t want to set a goal of becoming a famous musician because I don’t even know how to play an instrument,” then you’re already cutting yourself short. You’ll never even learn if you don’t have some motivation behind the act. Whether your goal is to be a famous musician, a cool dude at parties, or someone with a more relaxing private hobby, desire cannot follow action. You won’t ever learn to play guitar at all.

So set the goal! Tactics come later, success or failure comes later, planning and action and iteration all come later. The goal, my friend. The goal must be set to be accomplished.

There is a moment after the fire. You look at the ruins, the rubble. All that was once built, gone. The moment of greatest despair is here. When the fire raged and all was burning, even amid the fear and anger there was some shred of hope and purpose. Some idea that you might act swiftly enough to save something, anything. To stem the destruction somehow.

And then you don’t. You look out at the ruins and you see failure. You see not only loss, but loss connected to you and your actions, or perhaps your inactions.

And more, even more than that. A house may be built upon an empty field and the work is hard and heavy, but from the very first breaking of ground you’re building. Moving up and forward. But the rubble, the ruin. It’s weight. An enormous burden of weight that creates an impossible distance between you and simple neutrality. Even an empty field is a distant dream.

It is easy to leave ruin in your wake, to walk away with nothing but your despair. So much of you is buried under that rubble. The weight smothers it. The work is impossibly hard, but if you leave it behind you will never recover. You have lost so much. It feels like you’ve lost everything. The horror is this: you haven’t. There is still more of you to lose.

It’s under there. Under the ruins. Despite the impossibility of the task, you must begin to dig.

Think of someone you admire. Someone close to you. Now imagine asking them, “What should I do today to be a better person?”

Do one of those things each day, big or small. Try not to do anything they’d be mad at you for. Work your way down the list.

There’s not enough goodbye in the world. I wish I could say it until you didn’t have to leave.

Whatever keeps you above water for a few extra minutes increases the odds that you’ll find a permanent solution. Grab whatever you can.

Let’s imagine someone has a problem that’s costing them a thousand bucks. You have a solution that will fix the problem, and you sell that solution for a hundred bucks. Shockingly, they don’t want to buy your solution. You’re frustrated because it seemed like a pretty clear win/win situation. Don’t be frustrated! Instead, let’s look at the reasons this happens:

1. Certainty. How certain are they that this solution will actually fix their problem? Even you aren’t 100% certain, so they’re significantly less so. If they think your solution only has a 5% chance of fixing their problem, then the solution is only worth 50 dollars to them – less than what you’re selling it for.
2. Problem Misidentification. They might not actually agree that their problem is costing them a thousand bucks. Maybe they think it’s less severe. Not every problem has an easy price tag. Someone with bad advertising for their business might not agree on what it’s costing them to not fix it.
3. Source Misidentification. Maybe they do agree on the cost of the problem, but they disagree about the root cause, and whatever they think the root cause is won’t be affected by your solution. Their water bill might be a thousand bucks a month, and you’re selling a plumbing service to fix the leaks for a hundred. That’s a great deal, but if they think that the high water bill is actually caused by their children showing for too long, then your solution doesn’t address that.
4. Alternatives. Even in the scenario where they agree on the source of the problem, the cost of the problem, and the likelihood of your solution fixing it, they still may not feel like your solution is the best one. Maybe someone else out there can fix it for 80 bucks.
5. Immediacy. Budgets are real. Spending a hundred bucks to save a thousand is a no-brainer, but if the spend is a hundred thousand to save a million? Even if you agree on the solution itself, you might just not have a hundred thousand bucks laying around. Even if you do, it might be going toward solving problems that are costing even more than a million bucks.
6. Trust. Of course, all of the above questions have to get filtered through the lens of belief. Your solution could directly address the root cause of the most important and expensive problem they have with a high likelihood of success and with no better alternatives, but do they believe that?

So you set out, essentially, to sell someone a thousand dollars for the low price of a hundred dollars. They turned you down. If every one of the above points was addressed, then a “no” would be insane. So, how do you address every point?

Solve certainty with statistics. If this solution worked for this problem in 95% of prior cases like yours, then that’s close to a 95% likelihood that it will solve yours, too. Solve for problem and source misidentification with data and discovery. Show them how to identify and label their problem and make sure they get to the same conclusion before you do anything else. Solve for alternatives by being easy and effective. Remember, finding an alternative doesn’t mean that alternative is better, even if it’s cheaper. And the cost of searching is non-negligible when you have a costly problem right now! Be easy to work with, offering low-stakes contracts or easy revisions if they find something else, and they’ll rarely look. Solve for immediacy by making sure they can see the return on investment quickly – if you can solve a thousand-dollar problem for a hundred bucks, can you solve 200 dollars of their problem for 20 to get started? That frees up operating capital and lowers risk, if there’s some version of that you can do.

And you solve for trust by doing all of those other things. You don’t ask for trust until you’ve shown that you deserve it.

So the next time you try to solve a problem, remember what they need to get there. The win/win isn’t always visible from both sides at first. And it’s your responsibility to get it there.

We have a hierarchy of needs that we require from our jobs or careers. These needs must be met in order; we can’t care about higher-order things until the basics are covered.

The very base of the pyramid is the job itself. We need to have some sort of source of income, our employment. Until that need is met, it’s hard to think about things like pursuing a passion or deeper purpose.

The next level up is Steadiness. We need to feel like the money is coming in predictably, that our employment is reasonably secure, and that we aren’t one errant sneeze away from losing our job. If we’re in that kind of fear state, we can’t think higher.

Once those two levels are covered, now we can start thinking about a team. We want good coworkers, pleasant managers, etc. To some extent this level affects the level below it, but until we’re generally not going to be picky about our colleagues until we’re sure we can be without threatening the basic employment. (But this is why you can’t win people over with a pizza party if they’re worried about steady employment – they’re too low on the pyramid for them to care about team-building yet!)

If we have steady employment with a good team, the next level is caring about advancement. Once we feel like the job is safe and has good people in it, we want to start growing and building. We want to put down roots and get promoted. We want to build that team, not just be on it.

The highest level of the pyramid is passion for the work. The other rewards have to be met before most people can really dedicate themselves here. It’s hard to be passionate about work, even work you love, if you can’t pay your rent and your boss is a jerk. Asking people to care about “the mission” under those circumstances rings hollow.

Understand where people are in the pyramid of job/career needs, and you’ll understand how to help them and motivate them.