Everyone is attuned to a particular kind of mistake. People have “pet peeves” that they’re more prone to notice, be bothered by, and seek to correct. Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with trying to make your corner of the world better, but correcting your particular style of mistake can quickly become a sort of addiction if you aren’t careful.

The problem is that people very rarely step back and establish “detail thresholds” for certain kinds of projects. Let’s say your particular pet peeve is when people use horizontal brushstrokes when painting instead of vertical ones. Minor in the grand scheme of things, but maybe it’s technically better to use vertical ones so all else being equal, you know that’s what you should do. Okay, so far nothing inherently wrong with the little quirk.

But now let’s say that you’re a major project leader for a huge real estate project. You’re in charge of the construction of a dozen six-story apartment buildings, and you have tight budgets and deadlines. If you spend any time or effort going from room to room during the painting process and tell individual workers to use vertical brush strokes instead of horizontal ones, you’re insane.

At that level of responsibility, you need to focus on aspects of the project that will have a large impact on the final outcome. Brush direction falls well below that “detail threshold,” but people don’t generally take the time to establish that concept at all. They look for problems, which is good – but they don’t rank those problems based on impact, but often based on their personal preferences.

Finding and correcting mistakes is not a free or effortless process. Based on the scope of the project and your level of responsibility, many mistakes will simply fall below the threshold where the marginal benefit of correcting them is worth that effort.

Before starting any project, take the time to think generally about that. Ask yourself what kind of impact on the project would be worth your time to address? A sinkhole that threatens the structural integrity of an entire building is well above the “mistake margin.” The wrong wattage of light bulbs in the supply closet isn’t.

Ask it like this: “For any given problem, what happens if I don’t correct it?” This isn’t about being okay with mistakes – it’s about prioritizing the ones with the biggest effect. What would actually happen if the painters used horizontal brush strokes? There’s the tiniest possible chance of a fringe scenario where a potential tenant, who also happens to be a painter, is exactly on the fence about whether to rent an apartment or not and notices the slightly worse paint job and decides not to rent the place, and as a result, it takes an extra few days to find a tenant for one apartment. Maybe a 1% chance of that happening, and even if it did, it wouldn’t change a thing about the final profitability of the project.

Don’t get addicted to a particular kind of mistake. Find the big rocks to move and move them.

A good reminder during the busiest times in your life: If you’ve gotten “behind” on some task or project, the worst thing you can do is try to “catch up” by dramatically increasing your output. You will fry yourself, and you won’t actually catch up at all. You’ll make more mistakes, you’ll get scattered.

The best thing to do is much harder to commit to. The best course of action is to reset. Imagine you’ve been trying to write a book. You committed to writing 500 words a day, and for a while you did it. Then you missed two days from writer’s block, so on the third day you say “Well, I’ll commit to 750 words per day until I’m back on target.” You know what happens? You get even more writer’s block! The best thing to do is just sit down and reset to 500 per day. In fact, it would be fine to ramp and reset – commit to only 100 today! After all, that’s still 100 more than the day before, and anything that isn’t zero is good.

You’ll be all caught up in no time.

When I ask “why,” it isn’t because I’m arguing with you. I’m not using it as a back door to disagreement. I ask because if you don’t know why you’re doing something, then you don’t know if you’re doing it right.

“Why do you want to build a garage,” isn’t me saying “building a garage is a bad idea.” It’s me saying “If you don’t clearly define your motivations and desired outcomes for building a garage, then you run the serious risk of building a garage according to some generic default assumptions that won’t serve your actual goals.” Maybe you want to have a garage to house all your hobbies, but one of your hobbies is fishing, and if you don’t think about that then the default garage size isn’t big enough for your boat, and you’re not helping yourself.

The point is, ask why. Examining the things you want to do is even more important than examining the things you don’t.

Lean into your talents. If you have a knack for getting people together, then the obvious answer to not having anywhere to go is to invite people over. We all have our social talents, and we all lack some. Use what you’ve got.

Rebuilding a totally burned bridge is safer than repairing a damaged one. At least in the former situation, you can’t make things worse.

That doesn’t make the latter not worth doing.

A house is not a fortress. It’s a shelter. It isn’t meant to keep people out; it’s meant to protect people inside. Why else have it? Open that door. The best armor for your life is friends.

Sometimes, after painfully slow progress toward a goal, you suddenly have a huge breakthrough. You gain a bunch of ground all at once. Great! But as anyone who’s ever ridden a bike over hilly terrain will tell you, that’s not the time to cheer.

It’s the time to pedal.

The sudden burst of speed that comes from going downhill is a gift. The way to maximize it is to build on that momentum, to pedal faster to build up speed, because just around the corner is the next hill to climb. Getting to the bottom of a new hill at a leisurely pace is a recipe for a very difficult ascent. But if you’ve got that burst of kinetic energy behind you because you capitalized on the last downslope, you can be halfway up the next hill before you even slow.

Cheer the breakthroughs, yes. Cherish them. But use them.

I dislike the word “review.”

The past is only useful in one regard, as information used to direct or predict the future. Suppose I review a contractor’s work on my house. In that case, I have one of two goals: I either want to change one or more aspects of future work from that contractor when I hire them again, or I want to inform my friends/family/community about that contractor in a way that affects their potential future with them. If I never intended to use that contractor again and I didn’t think my review would help anyone else make future decisions, I would never bother.

However, many people seem to focus their “reviews” in any context on the past. If I’m scolding my kids for some behavior, I’m not trying to change the past behavior. That’s absurd! I’m trying to affect the future – and that’s how I start that conversation with my kids, every time. “Let’s talk about how we can make sure this doesn’t happen again, okay?”

(Parenting side note: This helps reinforce that redirects from a parent are about changing behavior, not “being mad” at a person!)

So here’s my tip, the future I want to see: When you give feedback, review something, or comment at all on the past, start by thinking about the future you want to see.

Let’s say one of your employees makes a costly mistake that loses a client. You’re stressed, frustrated, disappointed, maybe even a little angry. Naturally, you want to talk to the employee about the mistake. But pause. Because what a lot of managers naturally do as “feedback” here is describe the mistake. They talk about how severe it was. They talk about the impact on the department, company, even themselves. They act, in other words, like the future they want to see is “My employee feels super bad, their confidence is shot, and they have a worse relationship with me.”

Look, the employee knows the severity of the mistake. Your goal isn’t to vent your frustrations, right? It’s to prevent similar mistakes in the future. And to attempt to reach that goal, you have two choices: You can get rid of the employee if you feel like they’re too much of a liability, or you can correct their behavior to minimize future risk. If you evaluate that employee as too much of a risk, then that’s fine – but that’s the only necessary action then. Venting your frustrations doesn’t help! And if you want them to correct their behavior in the future, then you have to think about whether each thing you say to them moves toward that goal or not.

Does telling them how mad you are give them better information about how to do that? Do you think that the reason they made the first mistake was because they didn’t know how mad you’d be? Because they didn’t realize that losing a client would have a negative impact on the business? No, of course not. People make professional mistakes because they lack information, expertise, or skill. Your goal is to give them that skill, if it’s possible to do so.

So picture that future: “My employee never makes this mistake again, because they have the tools that they were missing when they made it the first time.”

(Incidentally, this is why I think firing people because of big mistakes is so foolish. Experience is the best teacher – why get rid of someone who is probably so likely to never make this mistake again?)

Once you picture the future you’re trying to reach, you may come to a startling conclusion: You barely need to talk about the past mistake at all. You can mention it as the context for the discussion, maybe you can answer questions about it, but don’t dwell. Just get to the tasks at hand! Fuming, blaming, and venting aren’t feedback. They aren’t directional. And they don’t lead to the end you (hopefully) have in mind.

Boy, apologizing is cathartic. Imagine gripping a sharp piece of glass. Gripping it hard. No matter how strong you are, you won’t win. You might want to crush the glass, but that isn’t what happens. What happens is that your own strength is your very weakness. The stronger you are, the more harm you do to yourself. The glass will always win.

Holding a grudge is gripping the glass. Not dwelling on the past loosens the grip a little. But apologizing lets the glass fall from your hand. Your wounds begin to heal.

If someone has wronged you, hurt you – done something worthy of the grudge in the first place – you may find yourself balking at the idea that you should apologize to them. You may accept the premise that holding the anger isn’t healthy, but apologizing? For what?!

Let’s start with a shocking but helpful axiom: If you are angry at someone, there is absolutely something you could apologize for.

If you start with that as a given truth and begin to truly look, you’ll probably find something. Even if you can’t find a single thing you should own, maybe because you were truly the target of some random attack, then you still have one last resort – apologizing for being angry. Reacting in anger and hatred instead of understanding and patience.

I can hear the resistance. “Someone randomly attacks me and I owe them an apology for being angry about it?!”

You don’t owe them anything. This isn’t about them.

It’s about you.

Apologizing is a way to build empathy. To release anger and hatred from your heart. Where, let me be clear, it is killing you. You don’t want to grip that shard of glass in your hand, right? Well, you certainly don’t want it in your heart.

When someone wrongs you, you can be hurt once or twice, and it’s your choice. The first hurt is what the other person inflicts on you. The second and far worse injury is what you inflict on yourself if you shove that glass deep down inside your heart.

Don’t. No one ever died from an apology.

Being able to limit hope without becoming hopeless is a tricky but essential balancing act.

Imagine you’re locked in a cage. You have to escape. You start brainstorming, but all your ideas involve objects or people you can only find outside the cage. “If only I could get my power tools, I’d be out of here in no time!” Pal, if you could get your power tools, you’d be outside the cage.

So you have to write that stuff off. But that doesn’t mean that you have to give up hope. It just means you have to confine it. You have to create positive thought, but not let it go where you can’t. It’s a nice dream, having those power tools. But it’s an unhelpful dream.

Sometimes your situation is bad. And dreaming about all the ways you could make your situation better if only your situation wasn’t bad to begin with is… well, it’s not very productive.

If you never escape that cage for the rest of your life, there will still be a side of the cage that’s less drafty. A more comfortable corner. An angle from which you can see the sunrise. Whatever it is, find it. Hope for it, even. Dream of a better here and now – and not a pleasant there and then that doesn’t help you get there.