It’s amazing the way we can trick ourselves in to caring about dumb stuff that we’d never care about organically.

Here’s an example: my son doesn’t like tuna. Unless I don’t tell him it’s tuna. If I fry up a whole tuna steak and serve it to him but never say the word “tuna,” he eats the whole thing and tells me he loves it. If I make a tuna casserole but tell him it’s just “casserole,” he asks for thirds. But if ask him if he wants to try a bite of tuna, he makes a face!

(I haven’t actually tried, but I wonder what he would say if I made him chicken but told him it WAS tuna!)

I remember when I was a kid, there was this pervasive joke on pretty much every TV show that broccoli was gross. I’ve got news for you, broccoli is delicious. Every kid I knew that didn’t like it had never actually tried it, but they sure watched TV.

But this applies in tons of areas. I knew a guy who was about 5′ 10″, and was convinced that girls wouldn’t be into him because he wasn’t six feet tall. His reasoning was that on dating apps, he’d seen girls whose profiles explicitly said they only wanted to date guys who were six feet and over.

Now I could comment on why that’s a silly thing to put in your profile to begin with, but that’s not the point of this post. The point here is that if you organically meet someone and flirt with them or whatever, they have no idea how tall you are. Nobody sees someone and feels an organic thrill of attraction but then says, “Wait, before I allow myself to be interested in this handsome, charming stranger, I’d better make sure they’re not 5′ 11″ tall!”

The takeaway is this: Just enjoy stuff and don’t worry if it’s a thing you don’t want to believe you can enjoy, and don’t spend time in spaces that require arbitrary trivia about yourself as an entrance fee if you don’t want to. Eat the tuna, date the not-tall guy, live a fun life. You wouldn’t know anyway unless I told you.

My eldest daughter, all on her own, researched an alternative high school that she’d like to attend. All on her own, she applied, and worked her butt off on the extensive requirements. Today, she got the letter that she’d been accepted.

All on her own.

This is what I’ve strived for with every day as a parent. To raise children who are, above all else, capable. I won’t always be here. I will open doors for my children when I need to, but the best use of my time is to give them firm ground, instead. A base from which to train. To jump. To fly.

I am so proud I could burst.

The more something is your area of expertise, the harder it is to become aware of what novices or the general public know about that thing. If you’re a cardiologist, it can be really easy to forget just how little the average person knows about heart health. It’s not “very little.” It’s “worse than nothing; almost everything they think they know is wrong.”

That’s the default for most areas of expertise. That’s just the nature of knowledge and mastery. But if your job is to teach, inform, or interact with novices within your sphere of genius, then it’s really important for you to check in now and then on the state of general knowledge.

For example, if you’re not just a cardiologist, but a professor of cardiology at a medical school, then it’s pretty important that you understand where people are when they first come through your doors. If you assume that they all have even 20% of your knowledge, then you’re going to be teaching in a very ineffective way, because you’ll be trying to build on foundational knowledge that isn’t there.

Every now and then (at least a few times per year!), have a chat about your area of expertise with a few people who have no formal exposure to it at all. Listen without judgement. Take stock of what small bits of knowledge could have the most impact. But never lose sight of how deep you are in the rabbit hole when you’re trying to give directions to people on the surface.

Our human brains understand stories much better than raw data. We inherently need to construct narratives to explain the numbers or discrete pieces of information we observe. Those stories help our understanding – but they also restrain it.

The moment you create a narrative, your brain is crystalizing. You’re narrative becomes “true” to you in a way that then closes you off to alternative explanations for the data or even new data that contradicts what you think you know.

So double-check yourself. When you feel like you have an explanation for what you observe, train yourself to ask: “What else could explain this? What data would disprove it?” Your story might be the real one – but it’s always good to have some humility.

There is a trick that sometimes gets pulled, and I want to show it to you so you’re less likely to fall for it. The trick happens in three steps:

Step 1: I show you a picture of a really brutal car wreck. Multiple cars, many fatalities, flaming wreckage, really the worst example of a car accident. I tell you (truthfully!) that this car accident happened in our county.

Step 2: I tell you (again, truthfully!) that our particular county has 5,000 car accidents a year.

Step 3: I ask you for some small amount of support – money, votes, signatures, whatever – in order to enact some plan to reduce that number.

Did you notice the trick?

I first showed you an extremely non-typical example of something. The vast majority of those 5,000 “car accidents” are fender-benders with no injuries, let alone fatalities. In our small county, it’s mostly people bumping into each other at a stop sign or even single-car collisions with mailboxes or what have you, but they all get recorded in that statistic because that’s technically what they are. After you had a very vivid (and terrible) image in your head, I told you how many car accidents there were each year, knowing full well that what you would picture is 5,000 flaming wrecks with multiple fatalities. This would seriously inflate the severity of the problem, making you more likely to acquiesce to my request.

People will do this all the time, and it’s so subtle most people won’t ever notice it. An especially insidious element of this trick is that if you do object to it, someone might say, “Oh, so you think car accidents are just fine and you’re okay with them?” Of course not – but the price I’m willing to pay to prevent 5,000 fatal pile ups is much higher than the price I’m willing to pay to prevent 1 fatal pile-up and 4,999 fender-benders. The whole category might be bad, but since we can’t assign maximum resources to fix every bad thing, we have to take an accurate measure of how bad each thing is.

People trying to raise resources for their thing don’t want you to do that, though. So they do this. Just be aware of it.

Anything you think of as something you should be allowed to do must necessarily come with responsibility, and that’s on you to own.

Let’s use driving as an example. By default, you should be allowed to drive. If you can buy a car, no one should be allowed to tell you that you can’t drive it around. But that right comes with responsibility – you need to drive safely, be aware of the basic physics and mechanics of the vehicle, remain sober, pay attention, etc. If you fail to uphold your responsibilities, then the right to drive imposes too much danger on your fellow humans.

This applies even to things that don’t have any official legal requirements. You should never use the legal requirements as the bare minimum responsibility for yourself.

“Be more responsible with your rights than you are legally required to be” is a pretty good fundamental axiom, in fact.

There are two kinds of risk. There’s the risk that you won’t gain what you want, and the risk of actual loss.

If you get a job, there’s risk! You might lose that job, you might not like it, etc. But what you’re wagering is opportunity – i.e. you’re “wagering” any other job you could have gotten. You might end up back where you started, but other than the time you spent (which isn’t nothing, of course), you’re not worse off.

If you build a business, there’s risk too – but a very different kind. Let’s imagine that you have to spend $50,000 investing in said business. If the business fails, you aren’t getting most of that money back. You’d be much, much worse off, and that’s on top of the fact that you also have to spend time as well – and probably more than it would take you to discover a job was a bad fit.

The point is, calling something “risky” isn’t automatically a point of comparison. You need to know what you’re wagering, not just your chances of success.

Dan and Stacy play chess. Dan is very good at chess; Stacy is pretty mediocre, but thinks she’s quite good. During their match, Stacy captures many pieces – more than Dan, in fact! But Dan still wins, achieving the objective of putting Stacy’s king into checkmate.

With a huff, Stacy says, “If the winner of chess was whoever captured the most pieces, I would have won!“

Is this a valid statement from Stacy? Explain your answer.

Okay, now on to the explanation: Of course it isn’t. Dan should smirk at the statement. But why? Stacy did capture more pieces, didn’t she? Yes – when the objective was to put the opponent’s king in checkmate! Dan, being much better at chess, was perfectly aware of how many pieces he was sacrificing, willingly giving them up in order to better position his remaining pieces to win the game. He played the way he did because of the rules and objective. If the objective had been “capture the most pieces” from the beginning, then he would have played with the same amount of skill but very different strategy!

You will see this specific sort of post-loss complaint in a lot of different spheres. “If the prettiest tower of blocks was the winner, then I would have won!” (But yours didn’t fall over, so you won.) “If the candidate who won the popular vote won, then we’d have a different president!” (Maybe – or maybe the candidates would have both campaigned differently, knowing that was the case.)

The point is that there might be very legitimate complaints about the way a particular contest is evaluated. But the time to figure that out is before the contest, not after when you’ve accomplished something other than the evaluated objective.

Dying on the hill of your own ignorance is a hell of a way to go.

It’s fine to not know anything. It’s even fine to think you know something, and be wrong. But for the love of all that is holy, don’t fight tooth and nail for a vague guess with no background.

If you get good at one application of self-awareness, let it be this: Learn to recognize when you have made a vague guess with nothing backing it up. Let it crumble into gentle curiosity at the very first piece of real evidence that you’re wrong. You don’t have to automatically adopt the opposite position – the problem is that you’re adopting any position with no actual knowledge.

Just… just be okay saying, “huh, neat, tell me more” and stop being a huge jerk.

You’re going to lose. Sometimes, inevitably. And when you do, there’s a cost – to your attitude, your energy, your overall mental resilience.

You can – and absolutely should – build up your resilience. You should get used to losing, and make losing not hurt as bad. You should build up a tolerance, in other words. Work on yourself. But no matter how good you get at it, you can only minimize the psychic cost of losing, you can’t eliminate it.

And that’s why you should choose your losses carefully. Don’t lose for no reason.

First, make sure the competition (whatever it is) is meaningful. Would winning be a great boon? Then the risk of losing is worth it. Would losing devastate you in more ways than one? Be careful. Spend your risk like a budget.

Don’t compete just to compete – in other words, don’t lose just for the sake of losing. Know the rules. Know how to play. An early, easy loss to learn the rules (or build that tolerance!) is fine. But if you’re in a slump to begin with, do some building before you do some gambling.

You’ve gotta lose. Lose smart, when you do.