People need both routine and novelty. Novelty without routine to deviate from is just chaos and uncertainty. Routine without novelty to mix it up is a rut.

Be the novelty in another’s life if they’re in a routine, and be their rock if they have chaos. Use that as a guiding principle, and be a boon for everyone.

People are paradoxically more likely to engage with something meaningfully if you don’t try to tell them it’s meaningful.

Telling someone “this drink is a miracle elixir that will change your life” will cause them to dismiss it. Telling someone “this drink is pretty good and once or twice a month it can really clear up digestion issues” then that’s a verifiable claim in the realm of reality. It can be engaged with. And if the drink is good and has good health benefits, people will drink more of it!

The point is, overselling comes across as lying, even if the claim is totally true. Ease people into things, let them come. Even if what you have is life-changing, you can’t change everyone’s life overnight.

Children, if they’re polite and raised correctly, express gratitude by saying “thank you.” This is good and there’s nothing wrong with it, but the reason children do this is because in general, there’s not much else they can do. When you do something for a child, you generally do it out of responsibility or simply the joy of making a child’s life better, because it’s not like the child is typically going to give you much more than a smile in return. (Not to knock the smiles of children – they’re one of the best things in the world!)

If you’re an adult though, saying “thank you” falls short. I’m not saying every favor or gesture has to be “paid back” in equivalent measure. That’s not always possible or practical; if someone saves my life there might be nothing I could do that could repay them. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try!

I consider it a moral duty of a responsible adult to put those positive externalities back into the world whenever possible. A basic example: If someone notices a fire outside my house and quickly puts it out, they may have saved me a great deal of money, effort, even harm. Cooking them dinner, buying them a gift, or something else doesn’t come close to the cost of what they saved me, so why wouldn’t I at least do those things? Why think the words “thank you” are enough?

Be an adult, and take care of your community – especially those who take care of you!

There is a weird sort of problem that comes up over and over again, any time you see a system where you pay some flat amount for an unlimited amount of a given service.

Here’s the problem: If the service itself is opt-in, then the only people who will buy it will be people who believe they’ll be getting more than the value of what they paid.

Want an example? Okay, a while ago there was this thing called “MoviePass” (as of right now it’s actually coming back, but you can research that yourself if you like). You paid a flat monthly fee and could see an unlimited number of movies. The problem is that the only people who would buy such a thing are people who expected to see enough movies that they’re paying less if they buy the pass.

Predictably, that meant that the MoviePass people started losing money. But the thing is, you can’t solve that problem by raising the price!

Let’s say a movie costs $10, and a MoviePass costs $25. No one who sees 2 or fewer movies a month would buy it, and anyone who sees 3 or more movies a month is getting a great deal (and costing the company money!) if they do. So uh oh, MoviePass raises the price to $45. But all that changes is that the people who see 3 or 4 movies a month drop their subscription and only people who see 5+ movies a month use it, so you still have the same problem.

There are only two ways a system that has everyone pay the same no matter how much they use can work. One is if it’s not optional, so everyone has to buy a MoviePass even if they see no movies ever, and then the MoviePass people can price it higher than the average cost. On average, everyone is getting ripped off, but a few people get enough out of it that they benefit at the expense of everyone else. Or, if the system is voluntary/opt-in still, you can get by for a long time by being really obscure about the costs, pricing, quality of service, etc. that people are getting. So if you think about an all-you-can-eat buffet, some people eat more than others, but almost no one knows the exact cost of the food they’re eating, etc.

(Medical insurance finds a way to do BOTH, which is why it remains so lucrative, and so terrible for most people.)

I’m always very wary of any service offered to me at a flat rate regardless of my usage. Either the service is going to be ripping me off in some way, or they’re not – and then they’ll go out of business.

I recently saw an online interaction in which a bunch of people were speculating about a particular individual. None of these people knew this individual, they were just speculating on things, as people do, based on their presence in the public eye.

As it happens, I do know this individual directly, and fairly well. So I started to join the conversation, to correct a few misconceptions and add some clarity.

And then I stopped.

Because… well, I’m not the horse, am I? Information from me is still secondhand. Who am I to speak on behalf of this individual? I could let them know, direct them to the conversation – but I already know they wouldn’t care at all, which is the correct, sane response.

More and more, I find it difficult to ever come up with a reason to talk about someone. I mean sure, in the sense of “Oh, Jack said he can’t make it today,” stuff, that’s fine. But to comment on other people’s motivations, behaviors, ideas? Why?

My middle child had a recent interaction where she was upset because a friend of hers told her that someone else had said a mean thing about her. It was a great opportunity for a valuable lesson – don’t react at all to such things, because there are about a million reasons they could be untrue. If you don’t get your information from the horse’s mouth, consider it nothing worth thinking about. (Lo and behold, upon investigation the other girl’s comment was a mundane one, simply misinterpreted by my daughter’s friend, as is so often the case!)

So don’t talk about people, and don’t listen about people, and read more books. That last one just helps with the first two.

My local town’s snow plow got stuck in the snow. Borough offices, schools – all closed.

But the local bar & grille is open, with $2 meatball sandwiches.

I love this town.

My town has a little Facebook page for townies to discuss local news, events, what have you. Today there was an interesting discussion on there.

We’re due for a major snowstorm. Someone posted a complaint that a local shop “ripped him off” by charging him a lot for a bag of salt. They shouldn’t be that much, you see. Price gouging and whatnot.

The interesting part of the discussion was the many comments, all of which were variations on one of two observations: One kind of comment was echoing the man’s experience, saying they had also gone into such and such a store and been “ripped off” at a similar price point. The other half of the comments were all saying where the bags of salt were only their normal, un-inflated price, but with the caveat that “they were completely sold out.” (One person even commented that he had personally bought 20 bags at one of the normal-priced stores.)

It’s as if all these things are related somehow…

The train rolls along the track. Steady, unchangeable.

There are people on the train. They’re debating whether or not it’s a good thing for the train to exist. Maybe it should exist, but it should be going somewhere different. Maybe a different person should be the conductor, or maybe the entire concept of a “conductor” is wrong; immoral, even. The people debate whether or not they should voice their protest of the train only verbally, or if graffiti on the interior walls of the cars is warranted. Some of these people explain to others how bad it is that the train exists, and scold them for getting aboard.

The train rolls along the track. Steady, unchangeable.

My father once said to me that you don’t need new jokes, you just need a new audience every few months.

While that’s a funny quip about my stale humor, it’s also true that the same points of interest gain a lot of new life when you discuss them with new minds. Branch out! Engage with old friends or new, but try those ideas out with a wider audience. You’ll be pleasantly surprised, refine your own ideas, and encounter new ones.

I once had a particularly bad manager, but their style of ineptitude was fairly common (if not always so severe). She would give me a task to do, but if I asked for any specifics at all about the desired outcome, she’d hem and haw. To illustrate how infuriating this was, imagine your boss asking you to make a sandwich. When you ask what kind, they don’t answer; instead, they question whether or not you know how to make a sandwich. When you insist that you do, but you need more specifics in order to make sure they get what they want, they tell you to just start and check with them at each step.

So you say, “Okay, I’m going to start with a slice of bread, how’s that?” And they tell you they’ll get back to you. A few days later, they do, and tell you that it’s fine.

At this point, I realized the truth about this particular manager. She wasn’t necessarily dumb; she was a coward.

Her boss had told her to tell me to “make a sandwich,” and she didn’t question it. She didn’t ask for specifics. So she didn’t have any to give me. When it took her several days to confirm that “a slice of bread” was fine, it was because she was going back and asking her boss. And her boss was probably going even further up the chain!

It was a madhouse. If you’re a people leader, it’s even more important that you call out your own bad leadership, because if you just pass it along, it compounds exponentially. One person not being able to clarify an objective is bad, but a whole chain of command that can’t give an instruction specific enough to generate a sandwich is a recipe for disaster.