If you only know about something because of the news, then that thing isn’t important enough for you to stress over.

This is a kind of magic for children: take two delicious things and mix them. It feels so decadent, even if you just take half of each one. Dip a candy bar in marshmallow fluff. Put maple syrup on ice cream.

There is a joy in combining two things you already like. I don’t want that much sugar in my own body, but I’ll put potato chips on a sandwich. Or, you know, watch a great movie with a great friend, or read a great book while enjoying a beautiful day.

Put two joyous things together and it creates a whole new one. New wonders around every corner.

I dislike sarcasm. I try to be sincere in my words, and I don’t like dismissing the feelings of others. I’ve noticed that people who are especially sarcastic by default also tend to hear sarcasm when none is present, causing them to doubt even the most sincere expressions.

Don’t drink your own poison, is what I’m saying. Let the world be good to you when it will.

Not all progress is forward. The second edition of a book may fix a few grammatical errors. It also may edit out a favorite line that’s no longer in line with a publisher’s sensibilities. The newer model of a car may have more features, but be less reliable mechanically.

People change things for lots of reasons, and at least one of those reasons is “because I want to continue to have a job.” Just keep that in mind – the old version isn’t automatically better, and neither is the new version. Some things just compete against themselves.

I often see people agonizing over “who to trust,” trying to figure out if they can speak freely to a coworker, count on a business partner, and so on. They try to solve it as if it were based on the person, and that’s where they go wrong.

The question should be: why do you need to trust this person?

If you have some juicy workplace gossip and you’re wondering if the person who sits next to you is trustworthy enough for you to share it – then don’t. You’re not getting anything out of that trust, and you’re putting a lot at risk. The situation does not inspire trust.

In general, trusting someone should be based on that – the situation and need. If someone’s about to go into a combat zone with you, then you should know if they’re trustworthy. Because even if they aren’t, you’re still going into the fight. Your behavior should adjust based on whether you think you have your back covered or not.

Trusting someone is often a good way to get them to trust you. So if you’re trying to build a long-term relationship of any kind with someone then yes, you should start with some trust.

But trust isn’t for every random person you meet on the street. Trust is a burden you place on someone, a favor you’re asking them, a requested modification in their behavior. I don’t make it a habit of asking favors from every stranger I meet. Trust is worth more than a dollar, and if you wouldn’t ask a random person for a dollar then you shouldn’t ask them to modifier their behavior to be trustworthy, either.

People will show you who they are. When they do, you can put the trustworthy ones into situations where the trust is helpful – go into dangerous situations with them, build wonderful things with them. When you’re looking to do those things, remember who already “gave you the dollar” when you didn’t ask.

In a world of increasingly complex tools, a category emerges: the adapter. Sometimes you need to connect this electronic device to this one, or this power source to this thing that uses a different power source, or this modular piece of a tool to a different type of tool, or this pipe fitting to this different size pipe, or any other of a million things.

The world is modular, but there’s no universal standard. Adapters are like language translators. Two very smart people who don’t speak the same language can’t communicate and collaborate without an intermediary. Adapters are just the intermediaries of the gizmo world.

They’re physical arbitrage. I love it. I love the hunt for the right one, and the glorious satisfaction that comes from fixing a problem because you could connect the right sequence of tools or programs or whatever it was you needed.

All problems are solvable. You just need to connect the dots.

If you’re a running coach, you know that feedback cadence is as important as feedback. On a race-by-race basis, you’re giving a lot of encouragement and small pieces of feedback. You don’t do major overhauls of training and technique between every race; you need more data than that. You likely do that between seasons.

And you definitely don’t stop your runner mid-race to critique their running before sending them back in, hoping they’ll win.

Feedback has an opportunity cost. Leverage it correctly.

Imagine a scientist invents a miraculous new drug. It cures most diseases and extends human life by about ten years, with a dramatic increase in the quality of those years as well. It has a side effect, though; about once a month or so, those who have taken the treatment will randomly slap someone near them, probably delivering a stinging or even painful blow.

Is this a “good” drug? Right away, that’s a nuanced question. Undeniably the total good outweighs the total harm done by the treatment, but the effects aren’t evenly distributed. You get your disease cured; I get slapped in the face. Would I take a slap in the face once a month to have ten more years with my father? Absolutely. But I can’t assume everyone would make that choice, and I can’t make that choice for everyone.

But now here’s the real nuance – what should be done about the treatment, as the scientist, or the scientific community, or anyone able to influence them?

I think there are multiple wrong approaches. I think one wrong approach is to get rid of the drug entirely. The medicine is good; society-wide, it’s better than the alternative. But, importantly, I don’t think that justifies the opposite approach. The opposite approach is to say “Look, this is the greatest medicine humanity has ever seen, and if that means some people have to get slapped in the face, then suck it up because it could be a lot worse.”

The right approach is the hardest, most nuanced path. The right approach is to be glad of the wonderful boon that the medicine grants, while still working hard on eliminating or mitigating that side effect, and making sure that your work to do so doesn’t get rid of whatever element makes the medicine work in the first place.

This is the analogy for… pretty much everything. Lots of things, from countries to companies to relationships to jobs to homes to everything fall into the category of “overall good, but with some problems.” And very often, depending on which side of that you’re experiencing now or just your overall values, we err too far to one side or the other.

We say “This job makes me work 15 minutes of unpaid overtime on Tuesdays, so I’m going to quit,” despite the fact that it’s overall a good job overall that serves your life well. Or we say the opposite: “I would never even think about trying to object to that unpaid overtime, because the job is the best job I’ve ever had otherwise and being unemployed is way worse.” The nuanced view is much harder. The nuanced approach requires us to advocate against unpaid overtime, while still keeping the job, and making sure that the way we’re advocating against the bad policy is consistent with building the rapport that keeps the job.

Sometimes good things have “load-bearing problems.” That’s a term I’ll give to unpleasant aspects of a good thing that somehow are essential to that good thing’s existence. You love your dog but hate cleaning up its poop – but guess what, the dog pooping is essential to the dog continuing to exist. So the nuanced view requires you to find better and better ways to mitigate the bad thing, like training the dog not to poop on the floor and investing in a scooper gadget, etc. It involves neither getting rid of the dog entirely nor saying “It can poop wherever it wants, because having a dog is awesome and no one should say otherwise!”

The nuanced view also requires a level of serenity in our interactions with others. If someone complains that there’s always dog poop on your floor when they visit, you can’t treat them like they hate dogs and have suggested you not own one. And if someone says they love dogs, you can’t treat them like what they just said was “I love poop.”

(I get that one a fair amount as a dad; when I say how much I love kids, especially babies, there’s usually one childless person who will sarcastically comment “Oh, so you love crying and screaming and changing diapers?!” Same principle.)

We should always seek to improve the things we love, be realistic about their flaws, and be graceful to others who may experience more of the flaws than the benefits. If a thing is good, then it’s worth it.

Some fights you lose. Just a fact of life. Lots of people – myself included – insist on sometimes losing the same fight more than once.

I don’t even mean fighting the same kind of fight multiple times, or going back to the mat for rematches, etc. Getting back on the horse and trying again is admirable, to a point. I mean that some people will take a single instance of a single fight, lose it, and then insist on suffering that loss more than they have to.

Here’s the first tip: When you’ve lost, admit it. See it and say it. A whole lot of the pain or consequences that come from losing will cease the second you admit defeat, because then you can start learning, preparing for next time, and removing yourself from the conflict. When someone still sees you as an adversary, they’ll keep hammering you. When you tap out, they often stop.

Plus, the stress level drops considerably. A bad finish is still a finish, and you can start turning off the parts of your brain that are giving you constant agony and frustration.

Let go of the anchor. No one likes to lose, least of all me. But stop beating yourself up about it! Adversaries will do that enough, you certainly don’t have to.

My eldest child and several of her friends from school have started a sick punk cover band called Antispiral. This is the greatest thing ever and I cannot wait for everything that comes of it. They’ve produced no music but several Instagram reels so far. They look rad.

Learning to shape your universe through your actions, instead of simply reacting to and navigating the shape it already has, is such an essential part of life. Some people never do it. Some people do it for a while, and then hit a certain age and stop – as if they were only able to do this when they were teenagers, but then had to “accept reality” as an adult.

Hogwash. The more you learn and the more resources you command, the better you can do exactly that. As long as you never stop believing you can, never get to scarred over from the pain of being wrong sometimes that you stop pushing for the universe you want. Some people stop trying new things entirely, and then enter a downward spiral the rest of their lives – a spiral of complacency and regret.

Don’t. Do the opposite. Live the Antispiral.