I love the concept of “failure as a resource.” Engineering your attempts so that they’re always giving you information or skill or something, even if they don’t get you to the goal on that attempt. There’s so much to be learned by flipping the wrong switch!

There’s a strategy to it. Setting up the failures that will reveal the most information first, for example. Being prepared to track results so you don’t have to re-tread failed ground.

Whatever you do, get closer to the lightbulb. Then it’s never a failure: it’s a resource!

A little rain? Bah! Won’t stop us from our first fire of the season – the kids all came hungry, undeterred by weather. We roasted hot dogs and s’mores and I watched with great glee as children laughed and played and experimented and learned. Together, outside. They weren’t forced; in fact, they were unstoppable. Darkness fell and still they called out and played. They earned their rest with play, rain be damned.

The world is in good hands.

Sometimes I see people roll their own cigarettes. I asked a person who did this if they liked them better. They said (surprisingly to me) that it was the same when smoking them more or less, and not especially cheaper, either. But they enjoyed the ritual. Plus, they said, as an added bonus they smoked fewer of them overall because of the extra effort.

What struck me is that they separated those two benefits. But really, those are the same thing. The point of ritualizing something is to add consideration to it – both during and before, when you’re deciding if you’re willing to put in the effort.

Making yourself food is slower than getting takeout, but that’s the point. If it’s healthier or cheaper than takeout, it’s because you slowed down to do it. To take time to involve yourself in the process. To think about it more deeply.

The actual added benefit is that the rest of your life gets pushed away for a bit. While you’re rolling a cigarette or cooking a meal, that’s what you’re doing – not answering emails or scrolling your phone. You’re just present in the act of doing something for yourself.

Take the time and do it more. It’s good to slow down and smell the cooking.

I think arguing is fundamentally silly most of the time. I think it’s especially absurd when the thing people are arguing about is available information.

There are basically three “levels” of disagreements you can have:

1. Matters of pure taste/opinion. This is silly to argue about, obviously. But it can be interesting to discuss – if I think The Wall is the best album of all time and you think it’s something else, we can have a great time exploring music together, even if we don’t actually “convince” each other to change our tastes.
2. Matters of philosophy. This is the one area of argument that I think is worthwhile, because debate is how we test out ideas of morality and purpose. However, the number of people who can debate this intelligently is vanishingly small, so I don’t recommend doing so unless you’ve vetted your debate partners very thoroughly.
3. Matters of objective fact. This seems to be the most common type of argument, despite being the stupidest! I hear people getting absolutely heated in arguments, fighting for days on end, about something that would take 30 minutes to research, verify, and understand.

“Is Mexican food good,” is a matter of opinion, so there’s no sense in arguing. I’ll treat you to my favorite Mexican place and if you still don’t like it, oh well. “Is it worthwhile to pursue experimentation in our personal diets,” is a matter of philosophy, and therefore good to discuss with the right people. But “are there any Mexican places near me” is a dumb, dumb thing to argue about.

Tonight I ate three bowls of an absolutely delicious garlic potato soup. And now I have heartburn. You could say, “Well silly Johnny, of course you do – that much garlic would give anyone heartburn, you shouldn’t have eaten it.”

And to that I say: Bah! Bah, I say!

If you’d told me at the first bite that I would suffer this discomfort, I’d have said, fie! Bring it on! I choose life! Life, again and again. I want the spectacle and smorgasbord that life has to offer. May I never run from heartburn, for it shows I have a heart!

Imagine that you want to become better at baking, and a great baker you know is willing to talk to you. If you ask “How do I become a great baker like you,” you aren’t likely to get very helpful advice. Their advice will likely be generic and broad, stuff like “Practice every day,” etc. But that’s because the question was generic and broad, and so there wasn’t anything to latch on to.

Instead, bake a cake yourself, give them a slice, and ask them what they would improve. You will get detailed, relevant, and extremely helpful information – info which you can understand even better in the context of having just made a cake!

The point is that discussing actual work will always yield more relevant and specific insights than talking general theory. Get your hands dirty, and then show the dirt to the master. They’ll have more to offer you; more to say than they could about clean hands.

(Yes, I know it’s “Ides.”)

There’s a silly little prank/riddle you can try on your friends. You say, “How would you pronounce ‘Y – E – S?'” And they’ll say, “yes.” Then you say, “Okay, how would you pronounce ‘E – Y – E – S?'” And since you’re reading this instead of hearing it, you’ll get the gag immediately: The word is “eyes,” but many people will get tripped up by the odd juxtaposition and say some nonsense word pronounced “ee-yes.”

Some people won’t fall for it, of course. But it’s not really about smarts, per se. Instead, the people who don’t fall for it are generally very high-visualization. Some people will see the physical letters appear in their minds, and those people will then recognize the complete word “eyes.” Other people are non-visualizers, and those are the ones who will get tripped up.

So this trick doesn’t really suss out smarts, but it does detect high-visualization thinkers, which is neat!

If you’re going to eat something, kindness to that thing comes in the form of quick, painless, purposeful death. No waste, no unnecessary cruelty. But it’s life does not have to conform to a standard of “niceness” that only I would have the context to understand anyway. Don’t kid yourself.

I took my girls to a “Daddy-Daughter” dance tonight – their ages are such that this will be the only year where they’re both in the window to go. We had a wonderful time, in no small part because they wanted to have a good time. They decided not to be embarrassed or bored or anything like that. They decided in advance to dance and have fun and let their lame dad hang out with them.

Always decide in advance to have a good time. You’d be surprised how often that’s all it takes.

People don’t plan to be wrong enough.

I don’t mean “intend to be wrong.” Intent or no, you’re going to be wrong sometimes. People don’t plan for that; they don’t insure against it. They just operate with a life plan that requires them to be flawlessly correct about everything.

This is why people lose their money or their jobs or get in car accidents. They aren’t planning for the times when they’ll be wrong.

If you see someone driving with only a scant few feet between them and the car in front of them while doing 70 on the highway, that person’s life plan requires that they are flawlessly able to predict and react to any sudden movements from the car in front of them. That’s a bad life plan, because they can’t – they’ll be wrong, and it only takes being wrong once in that scenario to give you a very, very bad day.

Don’t live your life in such a way that only works if you never make a mistake. Give yourself zones of safety, trusted people to double-check your thinking on important decisions, and backup resources. Intend to be right, but plan to be wrong.