It’s easy enough to say “handle one thing at a time” when you feel overwhelmed. But life is funny. Sometimes, the things you need to handle don’t arrive in such a way that affords you that luxury.

On a long enough timeline, it’s inevitable that sometimes four time-sensitive things are going to get hurled you way at once, and you simply won’t be able to order them. You either handle them all at once, or you don’t handle at least some of them at all.

When that happens, I’m reminded of some great advice I once heard: If you find yourself juggling too many balls, some are going to fall. Your job isn’t to find a way to break yourself to catch them all – that’s impossible, and you’ll just end up dropping all of them. Instead, you need to decide which of the balls are made of rubber, and which are made of glass.

Some of those balls will break if you drop them. Not only will you lose that ball, but you’ll have glass to clean up, too. But some of those balls are made of rubber! If you drop them, they’ll bounce. They’ll roll away, maybe even under the couch. But they won’t break, and you can put them back up in the air tomorrow.

Catch the glass ones. Keep juggling.

I work best when my long-term plans are carefully set, and then run on auto-pilot. Most likely, so do you.

Study after study has shown that constantly second-guessing yourself loses you momentum. If you want a successful long-term financial investment, the best strategy is to sink money into the S&P 500 and forget about it, not try to constantly cherry-pick stocks day by day. In the long run, nobody successfully out-performs a consistent set of rules.

And even if you could, by a few percentage points – at what cost? If you spend an hour day-trading every day and beat the market by 2%, you’ve lost an incredible amount of resources. That hour was more valuable if you did anything else with it!

Any time you want something to impact your whole life, you have to just create a pattern and then let it run. Choose your diet, your financial plan, your activity level, and your family accordingly.

Of all the reasons I’ve ever heard not to put something off, my favorite is this: If you feel good enough to do the thing now, seize that opportunity. You might not have it later.

We are subject to many forces we can’t control. Our ability to predict the future generally leans only on the ones we can. You look at your calendar and see that you have time tomorrow to complete that project, so you decide to do it then instead of now. But your calendar can’t tell you if you’ll feel sick, or if your car will break down, or if any of a hundred other little emergencies will daunt you.

If you have the health of body and mind to do the thing now – especially if it’s a thing you want to do! – then seize that opportunity. You never know what misfortunes you may grapple with tomorrow.

You don’t have to do something forever for it to be meaningful. Most of us at some point have hesitated to give of ourselves because we fear that any gift is also a promise – a promise to keep on giving, for ever after.

It’s not. You can volunteer at a shelter one day, and even if you never do again, you’ll have helped. You don’t have to make a monthly pledge commitment in order to give to a charity once, and the charity is still better off.

Grabbing drinks with a co-worker after work one day isn’t a promise to be their best friend forever, or even to ever grab drinks again. For that matter, doing a job isn’t a commitment to always do that job no matter what.

When you make promises, you should keep them. But don’t guilt yourself into keeping promises you never made.

Fun is the most fundamentally important social force. Honor, love, and altruism are all important. But fun trumps them all.

If you love someone, you need to play together. You need to enjoy time with that person, and you need to enjoy it more because they’re with you. You need to be a positive addition to their fun as well. Nothing will bond you closer.

Play games with your children, your parents, your dearest friends. Do wild and silly things. Make jokes, and learn to laugh easily. Say yes to as many offers of playtime as you can.

If you aren’t having fun, what’s the point?

The vastness that is art allows an infinite variety of expression. It doesn’t have to be anything. It’s just novel language! Ways of communicating things that don’t have words or sentences built around them yet. So if you need to express something and the expression takes the form of bottle caps glued to your ceiling, do it. It’s only for you, anyway. You – and those who speak the language.

How do you actually develop a growth mindset if you don’t have one? Let’s say you’ve realized that a growth mindset is something good to have, but it’s not your natural way. Your patterns of thinking still default to a fixed world. What can you do to build better thinking habits?

Try this exercise: The No Trigger. Whenever you say “no” to something (or any variation, like “I can’t,” or “that won’t work,” or what have you) immediately say “Unless.” Write the word on your arm if you have to, anything to trigger that thought.

Then finish it. Unless what? What are the factors that make the idea untenable? What would it take to remove or circumvent those factors?

It’s a baby step, but it’s the first of a wild explosion of creativity. You don’t have to turn every idea around. But you want to start thinking about how you could.

When in doubt, laugh through it. If you don’t understand it, it’s a game.

If you have a perfect day with one bad event, that was a perfect day.

Easy things are often the most valuable.

If something is easy, we can think of it like having a “low cost” in terms of time and effort. Think about things you buy with money. If you find a widget you like for a dollar, and then you find a widget that’s 10% better but costs ten thousand dollars, which is the better deal?

A meal that takes you ten hours to prepare might be delicious, but the meal you can throw together in five minutes that’s still really good is the meal you’ll actually eat.