My children, all three of them, have a keen eye for clues and pattern recognition. They love to watch monster movies. They almost always guess the monster’s hidden weakness in the first few minutes of the film, even with the most subtle of clues.

It might not be the most practical skill directly, but indirectly it’s amazing. Being able to pick up on what kinds of things annoy or delight a person early in knowing them is a great way to navigate complex social situations. They might not be “monsters,” but everyone eventually gets a boss they’d like a few clues about.

There’s an expert on everything, no matter how obscure. Today I had a meeting with people who were well outside my area of expertise, but who needed my help. They weren’t just shocked that I was an expert on learning modalities, they were shocked that anyone was. It was so far outside of their normal zone that they hadn’t considered it as a subject that someone could master.

But that’s the nature of human knowledge! What you know is a drop, and what you don’t know is an ocean. You can be an expert on that drop and still no next to nothing, broadly speaking. So when you’re troubled by some dilemma, fear not – just do a little searching. The expert on that particularly troublesome drop is out there, waiting to help.

There’s a line between allowing yourself to become overly reliant on certain comforts and being a silly masochist.

I once knew a guy who never let himself eat a full meal, not because he was afraid of gaining weight or anything, but because he didn’t want to let himself get used to the feeling of not being hungry, since he couldn’t be certain he’d be able to eat tomorrow.

I get that, to a degree. I get that you don’t want to let yourself become too reliant on something that someone else can control and take away from you. If there was only one person in the world who supplied food, that might be valid. But you can maintain a sense of self-reliance and internal fortitude without living a life of misery.

The thing you’re working hard for is a good life. Don’t throw that life away just to prove you can earn it.

There is always a way to engineer a solution. Some combination of spare parts and ingenuity will improve your life no matter what the dilemma is. This “dirtbag engineering” is a skill to hone – or at least, to look for in potential friends. The haphazard life you build may look odd, but it will work better. Don’t be afraid of weird solutions.

If you care about winning a particular game, contest, or competition, the most important thing isn’t honing your own skill or preparing your mentality. Those are vital, yes! But not the most important thing. The most important thing is making sure that everyone is playing by the same rules you are.

Imagine playing a game of one-on-one basketball with someone. There’s no ref or anything, it’s just you and the other person. But the other person decides that what they want to happen is to ruin your day. They “win” if they take the ball, throw it over the fence into the river, and then laugh.

Guess what? They will win.

They’re playing a totally different game than you, and that means you can’t win at the game you want to play, even if you’re much better at that game than your opponent.

There are plenty of examples in life. Before you dedicate yourself to trying to win, make sure everyone else is at least trying to play.

Sometimes someone really, really dislikes you. It’s unavoidable – even if you’re a complete people-pleaser willing to always be a spineless sycophant, someone will dislike you for that. So you might as well just try to live a moral but honest life, be nice to people as a default, and let the chips fall as they may.

But you also shouldn’t worry too much about it, and here’s why: The actual danger of your enemies doesn’t come from how much they dislike you. It comes from the cross-section of how much they dislike you versus how much actual power they have to influence your life.

Sometimes you can’t make someone like you, but more frequently than you realize you can reduce the power they have. If your direct boss doesn’t like you, that can be a problem! But finding a new job is a great solution, even if you wish it wasn’t. If your neighbor doesn’t like you, that might be hard to change – but so what? What can your neighbor even do in most circumstances?

So don’t lose sleep over powerless enemies. Just be nice anyway, and live a happy life in the rest of the world.

A vital critical thinking skill is being able to understand a baseline fact or idea and keep it separate from exceptions that may exist.

Here’s an example of a baseline idea: Food is good for you, and you should eat it.

Now, can you picture things you shouldn’t eat? Of course. Can you imagine a way to obtain food that is immoral? No doubt. Can you think of a scenario in which it would be a bad idea for you to eat? Absolutely. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a half-dozen examples of each.

Absolutely none of those examples disprove the basic idea that “food is good for you, and you should eat it.” Caveats and addendums exist; few rules are absolute. But if you can’t think past those exceptions to understand the base rule, then that is a major flaw in your thinker.

Sometimes the world dishes out injustice and harm, and all you can get from it is a reminder of the rules.

We can, and should, work to make the world a better place. But in order to do that, we must acknowledge the way the world is now, with no rose-colored glasses to confuse us. We must understand the structures of power, we must be aware of who benefits from the world being bad. And we must not look to those people to save us.

My father always told me that making mistakes was inevitable, but that I should try not to make the same mistake twice.

Of the many pieces of wisdom my father bequeathed me, I really internalized that one. In fact, I consider it a deep character flaw to ever have to apologize for the same thing a second time.

That doesn’t mean you only get one failure before you must succeed at any given task! It just means that it’s a character flaw to fail for the same reason more than once.

Consider: You forget your friend’s birthday one year, and you apologize for it, vowing to not miss it next year. If you simply “try harder” and miss it again, you’ve messed up. However, if you write the friend’s birthday down, put a reminder in your phone, and then your phone breaks? You still missed your friend’s birthday, and you still owe them an apology, but you’re apologizing for a different thing now. You didn’t rely on your fragile memory, you made a genuine effort to adapt your behavior. You own the outcome, but at least you’re no longer apologizing for making the same mistake twice.

If you mess something up twice, do an honest accounting: What did I actually do differently the second time? If you can’t point to a concrete thing, then you’ve made a grave mistake.

Try not to make it twice.

Whenever I had a problem to solve, the first step was to call my father. I valued his advice, because the chances were good that he’d both tackled that particular problem before and because he’d probably have a wild story about it. He would definitely have tried an unorthodox solution and either found a hidden gem of wisdom or encountered a disaster he could thus prevent me from repeating. In either case, we’d have a great time swapping stories and I’d come away more prepared to tackle my own version of the dilemma.

Problems all seem harder, now. I’m more capable every year from my own experiences, but just knowing that font of wisdom is no longer a phone call away adds a weight to carry. I used to relish the moments where I’d found my own unorthodox solution and could call my old man to tell him about it – or better yet, grab some coffee and cigars and tell it in person. Now I like to tell those stories to my sister, my mother, my aunts or cousins; anyone who knew him well enough to give me my favorite compliment in the world: “Just like your father.”

I’m absolutely not just like him, of course. No one could be. But in those moment, though I miss him the most, I am most pleased with my performance.