Here is how to solve every problem in your life, quickly and efficiently: commit & iterate.

Don’t deliberate on ideas. Especially don’t sit around and try to figure out if a particular idea will work or not. It won’t! But it’s the toll – the necessary toll – that gets you to the idea that will work. You need to just pick the very first idea that you (or anyone!) thinks of and try it. Adjust your risk for how likely the idea is. When it doesn’t work, tweak it, but immediately try again.

Things must constantly be in action. Movement is the only path to solutions. You must always be experimenting. Science is a verb.

Ten failures and an eleventh success can happen in the time it might take you to even decide to do the first thing, if you let that net snare you. So don’t. Just commit to the process, and go!

How we react to errors and failures is very important – much more important than avoiding them in the first place.

I recently taught my children how to play a card game called “Bullshit.” If you’ve never played it, it involves lying about the face-down cards you play and lying about the contents of your hand. If someone calls you and you were telling the truth, they’re penalized. If they catch you lying, you’re penalized. The first time we played, my son lost badly because he was very trusting. The second time we played, he won – because no lie works on him twice. Each time he was fooled in some way, he was careful about that particular error. I told him I was very proud of him – not for winning, but for learning from his mistakes so well.

If you fail in a task, usually you’ll make some change before attempting it again. If you fail again, you now have two mistakes to consider! The first is the original error in overall planning, but the second mistake is that you thought your fix would work, and obviously it didn’t. To avoid cascading, chaotic failures, the second time not meeting your goal is really the critical one. Simple mistakes happen all the time, and simple fixes are usually enough. But if they aren’t, now you’re in “fool me twice” territory. You’re in danger of just flailing around instead of being purposeful.

That’s the time to go back to the drawing board. Look at the whole system you’re trying to navigate. Make a new plan. Get new information. Ask for a second set of eyes to look at what you’re working on. Take the time; by the second failure, it’s almost always worth it. Otherwise, shame on you!

For any given opinion you hold, the more it aligns with the mainstream opinion of your demographic and tribal groups, the more you need to be able to seriously defend it.

And the more skeptical of it you should be!

If everyone in my town thinks that maple syrup is amazing, then someone from my town espousing that opinion isn’t a surprise. But it’s also very likely that they’re parroting that opinion more than having reached it themselves. If I challenge it, there’s an above-average chance that they can’t actually defend it. But if they say something like “actually, I think honey is way better than maple syrup,” then at least they’re probably honest!

I’d expect Honey Guy to have reasons & arguments in favor of his position. Right or wrong, he’s probably much more capable of defending his claim, simply because he’s had to.

I like to believe in correct things. The less I’ve examined a belief, the more likely it is to be wrong. So I try to be very wary of beliefs that slip in without consideration, and “the popular opinion” will always be that.

Don’t ask permission to try things. In most cases, you’re better off if you just try the thing, even if you fail. Learn on your own terms, don’t waste a bunch of time looking for someone to say “no” to you. Better to seek forgiveness than permission if you want to achieve anything!

A funny sign of good leadership is that everything can seem worse, at first.

I’ve heard this from many leaders – when they start really putting in the effort to improve their team dynamics, suddenly it seems like there’s nothing but problems. They panic, thinking they’ve caused all sorts of issues with their new leadership style.

But what’s actually happening is much, much better. Those problems were already there, but now their team isn’t hiding them anymore! The team is willing to share feedback, expose issues, and even complain. That can seem scary, but remember: the alternative isn’t the absence of those problems. The alternative is that those problems fester until they cause disaster, and you never knew because your team didn’t have the trust and rapport necessary to work on them in the light.

Trust can be scary, but the very point of it is to get those issues out in the open where they can be solved. No team is perfect, so if you think yours is, that just means that all the messy stuff is being hidden from the scary boss.

I am a big proponent of “learning out loud,” showing your process, and inviting feedback. It’s a great way to learn faster and to showcase that you’re learning at all. This week I delivered a leadership development seminar with a co-facilitator, and I trialed a new method I’d developed for getting diverse audience participation.

At some point during the seminar, my co-facilitator told everyone that the organizational method we were using was a trial run, an experiment that I’d designed, and this was our first time using it. I felt myself gasp! My secrets! But I quickly realized – this was exactly what I said to do!

And wouldn’t you know it – because everyone then knew it was an experiment, they gave me a lot of (positive!) feedback on it that they wouldn’t have otherwise. I got a lot of great insights that will be very helpful in iterating the process!

It was two great reminders. One, always learn out loud. And two, take my own advice!

Few things are as satisfying as convincing a skeptic not to blindly believe you, but to commit to an experiment. To open their minds to a possibility. And then to watch the experiment prove you right.

As an adult, you should ask the same questions of “can’t” that too many adults tell children NOT to ask.

“You can’t do that.” Why not? Who said? Why did they say that? When will I be able to?

We think kids are being petulant, but asked with genuine curiosity those are exactly the questions you need answered if you want to turn “can’t” into “did.”

Responsibility, not caution, is what earns trust. Imagine two neighbors each ask to borrow a tool from you. One neighbor is extremely cautious with your tools, definitely beyond a reasonable amount. But accidents happen no matter how cautious you are, and one time this neighbor broke a power tool he borrowed. Because of his claims of being extremely cautious, however, he claimed that the accident “wasn’t his fault” – and therefore he should have no obligation to replace your tool.

The other neighbor uses tools in the normal way. Over the years, he’s broken three of your tools; each time unintentionally of course, but these things happen. He replaced each one immediately with an equivalent or better model, without having to be asked, and delivered them to you promptly, always with a small extra token of gratitude & apology, like a meal or a six-pack or something.

Which neighbor do you actually want to lend the tools to?

It’s not about being cautious. It’s about being responsible. Accidents happen that are nobody’s fault, but they’re still someone’s responsibility. If you take the responsibility along with whatever favors you ask, you’ll find your font of favors will always be full. And if you don’t, it runs dry quickly, no matter how “careful” you are.

If you tell someone that they drive more recklessly because they have an airbag and seatbelt, they’ll loudly object. And they aren’t lying, per se: they definitely don’t perceive themselves as being less cautious just because they have those safety features. But ask them a different question: “If I disabled your airbag and seatbelt before you had to take a drive through busy traffic, would you be more careful?”

The point is this: Everyone behaves the way they do because of what they (consciously or unconsciously) perceive to be the costs & benefits, the risks & rewards, of doing so. They don’t always like knowing about it, but they do. Change the conditions, and you’ll change the behavior.

Knowing this formula, changes in behavior are easy to predict, even if people get really mad at you for predicting it. So hey, keep it to yourself – but act accordingly.