When you have to make a decision, committing to “think hard” about it first is usually just an excuse to spend longer ultimately justifying your emotional impulse. Yes, it’s better to take some time rather than just fire off a response to an important decision, but unless you’re spending that time in a truly data-driven process, it’s only a little better.

Try this: Right now, without any major decisions looming, decide on a process for making important decisions. Maybe you’ll assemble a council of intelligent, trusted advisors and commit to following their majority input. Maybe you’ll commit to making a list of pros & dealbreakers before settling on the final answer. Or any number of good decision-making techniques might work for you, but the point is to commit to that process now, before you have any specific decision that you’re trying to make. The more you commit now, the more likely it is that you can overcome your emotional rationalization when the time comes.

The more you know, the more you should learn. Think of the glorious chain reactions as some new piece of knowledge connects to some existing one, sparking a chain of a thousand insights. That becomes more possible the more bits there are to interact. As you gain more knowledge, you need to learn more just to keep up with yourself.

The most unpredictable input in your life is what other people do.

You can control so much of your own actions with discipline and mindfulness. The biggest “wild card” is how other people behave. For example, people often talk about how certain demographic factors in your life, such as race, gender, or even height can have a profound impact on how your life plays out. Dwarfing them all, however, is simply whether or not the people who raised you were good, noble people. Nothing else comes close to the advantage or disadvantage that gives you. And you had zero control over it. From your perspective, it was all luck.

Smaller versions of this play out everywhere. You can be an exceptional worker but a new manager comes in who is absolutely terrible, and you had no control over that. You can be a great partner but it turns out the person you were initially attracted to becomes a lunatic. Sure, in both of those situations you can exercise some control and leave, but even if you do there’s damage done along the way.

So the biggest source of randomness and uncertainty in your life comes from other people. But in a great sense of cosmic justice, that means you have a tremendous amount of control over other people’s fortunes.

You can be an amazing parent, leader, or partner. You can be kind to strangers. You can put the shopping cart back. In other words, you can be the reason that someone else’s luck is very, very good. No matter what cards were dealt to you, you can be the pocket aces for someone else.

I am pro-whimsy.

I love putting magic into my kids’ lives. I do the “Elf on the Shelf” thing at Christmastime, and I go all out. One time I deliberately made a mess in my kitchen at night, put several of my kids’ stuffed animals and dolls around it, and then in the morning scolded them for making a mess while playing, just so that they would be convinced for a while that their toys came to life at night and caused mischief. I love the dad in Calvin & Hobbes.

As my kids got older, this sharpened their bullshit detectors (a welcome side effect!), but they also started playing along, creating fun whimsical tales of their own to explain the world to me.

But, as in all things with children, you must be careful of their hearts.

My son recently told me that he was worried that if he asked me a serious question, I wouldn’t tell him the real truth. More importantly, he said that this belief made him hesitant to even ask me important questions in the first place. That is a dangerous place to be, and I never want that.

So first, I apologized to him. Genuinely. I told him that his trust was the most important thing to me, and that I would tell him the whole truth from now on.

He told me he still wanted the funny stories, though. So his suggestion was to give me a code word that meant “I want the real truth this time.” I thought that was amazingly mature of him (he’s 7!), and I gave him my word that I would always adhere to the code word’s command.

Whimsy, magic, and wonder are all vital. But all children deserve truth from their parents when they request it.

One principle I try to remember is “everything is obvious when you know the answer.” People are bad at riddles, and when you know the solution it seems easy to solve. That’s a good principle when designing riddles, but it’s a great principle when remembering to communicate. People can’t guess what’s in your mind, even if it seems incredibly obvious to you what you’re hinting at. So don’t leave clues – give the solution that you want someone to know.

A small tip that works for me to minimize distractions when I’m trying to get a lot of work done: I schedule some.

I don’t schedule “breaks,” because I have a tendency to want to DO things on my breaks. It might be a break from work, but then I still want to squeeze in a quick workout or run some unrelated errand, and I’ll feel the same creeping sense of misplaced energy if I don’t. So instead, I schedule the things I know distract me, right in the agenda.

There will be an entry for “go poke around in your board games for a bit,” and knowing that I’ve accounted for that will keep me from wanting to do it until then. And then I do it, and it actually gives me quite a boost of mood and energy. As a result, I take better breaks than if I’d tried to take a normal one!

What works for me might not work for you, but you can always give it a try.

Imagine reading a series of books. You really enjoy them, and the story is building wonderfully. You finish the fourth book in the series and go to find the fifth, only to discover that there is no fifth, and there never will be – perhaps the author has passed away or has concretely retired from writing. Isn’t that frustrating?

I don’t mind taking my time. I don’t need to finish a seven-book series in a week. But I want to know all seven books exist before I start.

Today, I faced a fairly major inconvenience with terrible timing, as the result of actions taken by a small business owner I had hired. He’s a young man; younger than me by quite a bit. He’s a hustler, and good guy, but he did something careless that caused me quite a spot of trouble.

By itself, that wouldn’t be too bad. Accidents and mistakes happen; such is life. But when I brought the matter to his attention only a few minutes after he departed, he got himself fired. How? Instead of fixing the mistake, he told me he could only come back and fix it if he canceled another job and thus would have to charge me. Basically, to complete the job I’d already paid him to do.

Now, I really do think he’s a good guy. I think he’s just inexperienced in the ways of business. I’m open to the idea of him making a high-integrity play and earning back my business. In fact, I’d welcome it! But the lesson I hope he takes away is that doing good work is necessary but not sufficient to keep loyal customers. Your ethic matters, too.

We did have a nice talk where I explained this to him. He apologized and we were both well-mannered. The door isn’t shut forever, definitely. But this lesson in business comes courtesy of my father – though it went through a better filter, first. My father wouldn’t have been well-mannered.

And I didn’t “pass on” the problem. My kids were home, and they volunteered to help me, but I was clear that they didn’t have to. And I didn’t yell at them or treat them like they’d done something wrong. I kept my frustration from weaponizing itself into multi-directional anger, in other words.

Another filter.

We can take the best of the generations before us, all their might and wonder, and still leave behind a few of their flaws. The better filter of time and lessons is us.

If things are going well and you’re comfortable, that’s exactly the time when you need to disrupt yourself a little. You need to push to a new goal, take on a new challenge, or assign yourself something new to build. This is even more true the older you get.

It’s not just because it’s good for the soul, even though it is. It’s because it’s inevitable that your comfort will be disrupted anyway, from the outside. No machine lasts forever, and you will have new challenges thrust upon you by life, whether you want them or not.

When that happens, it’s not good to be out of practice. If you’re too comfortable, too sedentary, then those challenges double in difficulty. The very act of building a new machine becomes overwhelming, regardless of the inherent difficulty in the task itself, simply because your life is so solid. It’s good to have solid walls, but they go both ways.

Is your life good right now? Excellent – go find a way to make it a little harder. Just choose a good payoff for your challenge, and you’ll grow in all ways, and your new machine will be even better than your old one.

Happy New Month!

It’s time to revisit old goals. There are wins and losses, and I’m generally a forward-facing guy. But some of the goals I’ve failed to meet this year are important, and it’s time to build on what progress I made and cross a few finish lines. So this month, I’m taking stock of where I want to be by the end of the year and comparing that to the goals I’ve set so far and refining the plan. There are things to do before 2025 is complete, and I have four months to accomplish them.

Wish me luck, and may your own goals be revisited well!