Let us hope without reason. Let us be excited without expectation. Let us share joy as an act of defiance, breaking our pattern of logic and deduction. No matter how bad things have been, let us know in our hearts they will be better. Shed the old times like a snake, born anew from its molting. We need drag nothing with us but what we choose.

As a general rule, try not to anchor too much emotion to very small moments in time. Improve the average of your life, don’t just rest on the extremes. If you lose at something, the moment of loss is a split second, and instant – and then it’s gone. The time you spent having fun or the time you spend getting ready to go again make up such a larger percentage of your life. Don’t make all that experience rely solely on the split second to have meaning. Have fun all the time.

Some things I want to do as infrequently as possible, even though they’re essential. Car insurance, for example, often has the ability to pay for six months at once as opposed to making it a monthly bill; I always choose that option. Apart from usually getting a small discount, I just like not thinking about it for longer.

You can’t do that with everything, of course. Some things are essential, but you can’t do them in bulk. You could pay all your bills for the year on January 1st if you had the cash, and that would be great. But you can’t call your mother 52 times on January 1st instead of once a week (and why are you only calling your mother once a week, anyway?!).

Side note: Unfortunately, eating appears to be one of those things you have to do every day, instead of in bulk. I really wish I could eat like a snake – just swallow a whole deer, sleep for two days, and then not worry about eating again for a month.

The point is that since there are many things you’ll have to do on a regular basis, you should make those things enjoyable. You shouldn’t view those things as chores. You should, as best as you can, find ways to be proud of them, or enjoy them, or combine them. For instance, you have to clean your house every day. You also have to play with your kids every day. So hey, make cleaning up the house a game you play with your kids!

These little maintenance things aren’t tasks to get through in order to live your life; they are your life. Knowing that, try to choose tasks that you can find ways to enjoy. And all the ones you can do in bulk and just get them out of the way? Do so! Remove extra stressors and decisions from your life so you can give more mental energy to enjoying the things you have to do anyway.

Craft your life in such a way as to enjoy it. If you aren’t, break it. There’s no deeper prize, so tune the radio to the station you want to listen to, you know?

When you seek to improve yourself (and hey, since you’re reading this, I hope you are – this blog is 90% about self-improvement so what are you doing here if not?), there can actually be a very dangerous mindset shift that happens. Be careful, because this can harm you far in excess of whatever benefit you’re getting from your chosen path.

The dangerous shift is this: You start to resent others who aren’t doing what you’re doing.

You’ve seen it happen. Someone who’s been a lazy slob their whole life starts to get in shape and healthy, and suddenly they’re admonishing people who live the way they only recently used to. Or someone starts donating their time to a charity and then starts to get mad at all the people who don’t. Or even someone just trying to be more kind and considerate getting bitter about it not being reciprocated.

This is a poison, and you need to spit it out.

You can’t improve yourself and then get mad that the world hasn’t come along with you. It isn’t about the world – it’s about you. The world will get better, bit by bit, as the people in it do. But you have plenty of work to do on yourself, and getting mad at others who aren’t is hindering that work.

Look at it this way: the very definition of being the best person you can be is to rise above the average expectations of your society. The average society in your time and place condones or allows many things that you truly should rise above, or at least attempt to. But if you’re even marginally successful, that means that most people won’t be doing that same thing. That, by itself, is good! But don’t let it turn you into an isolationist, an island, a judgmental jerk.

Be better so you can help more. Improve, above all else, your soul.

My father taught me that if you can do something for the humans around you, then you have a responsibility to do so. This is not an admonishment to others, but a maxim for the self. You have tremendous superpowers if you simply have a roof over your head, food in your cabinet, boots on your feet. If you have hands that can lift and eyes that can read, you can do wonders for the world. A safe space, a hot meal, and a kind word for the people around you might mean everything – they do mean everything, when you don’t have them.

The interactions between people are complex. Sometimes we hurt each other, and rarely is that hurt contained in a single, discrete word or action. Far more often, there are patterns and sequences that we get caught up in, webs of hurt we weave around each other, even when we don’t mean to.

If you are genuinely remorseful of that (and hopefully you are!), you may be driven to apologize. Good! Do it sincerely. When you do though, you may discover that the thing you feel the most need to apologize for isn’t the thing the other person was most hurt by. (And vice versa.) The thing you’re apologizing for, the thing that weighed so heavily on your soul, barely registered to the other person. Meanwhile, some other thing you thought so minor it wasn’t worth mentioning has been lodged in their heart ever since.

This can be complex, difficult, and painful to navigate. But there’s a benefit, too – if you truly care about that person and want to use the opportunity for apology as a way of strengthening a personal relationship, then you’re in luck. You can use this experience as a way of truly getting to know something deep and meaningful about another person – how they experience pain. We almost never get the opportunity to really understand another person’s pain, and seeking that knowledge, even if it bruises your own ego, is an essential part of expressing ownership of the harm that you caused.

It isn’t punishment. It’s growth.

I hope you and all of your kin are finding peace, solace, and companionship. And if you have any left over, spread it around. Merry Christmas!

Be just a tiny, itsy bitsy little bit kinder to yourself today. Make that your gift, and then pass it along.

The most critical element of delegation isn’t trust. It’s patience.

Absolutely nothing can be delegated in less time than it would take you to do it, if you’re handing it off for the first time. The process of giving away work is work! The whole “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself” mentality is just a side-effect of being impatient.

Don’t delegate because you’re busy. Delegate because you want to grow.

There are some mistakes you won’t ever undo, time you won’t ever get back, wrongs you won’t ever right. That’s not an excuse to keep making those mistakes. Sometimes you find out with certainty that you’ve lost the opportunity to win the race, and for a lot of people that simply makes them give up on even finishing it. Don’t. Crawl across that finish line in dead last if you have to, but don’t abandon the effort. It matters.