The senses are linked in weird ways. You can change the way things taste by holding your nose when you eat them, because those senses work together to form the actual profile of what you’re eating in your brain.

I’m always wowed by the way sight contributes to those things. Want to know why putting a band-aid on a kid’s bruised finger makes them feel better, even though that makes no sense? “Pain” is just a signal from your body to your brain that something is damaged and you need to do something about it. But sight does that, too! If you see a big bruise on your arm, it will hurt more than the same bruise if you can’t see it.

Visual cues can make us calm or anxious, angry or happy – even hungry or hurt. If you put a snack on your desk while you work, you’ll get hungry and want that snack sooner than if you didn’t.

Which means, ultimately: control your vision. Put things in front of you that are visual cues to the behaviors and attitudes you want, as often as you can control such things. And put the other stuff far, far out of sight.

My eldest daughter is a few weeks into her high school journey. She’s having a marvelous time.

When she researched this school, applied, and got accepted all on her own, I was partially excited and partially relieved. High school was an abysmal time for me, overall. It had its bright moments, of course – my childhood in general was good, so naturally those years weren’t all bad. But the time spent in school specifically was miserable. It was a prison – one I barely escaped from. I worried for a long time about my children repeating that experience, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to prepare them for it.

But here’s my eldest, my Beanstalk, and she’s already made a dozen friends. She’s landing smoothly in her academics, and she’s a delightfully social creature; she’s much more like I am now as opposed to being like how I was then. She’s planning a birthday party for one of her new friends as I write.

She’s a perfect example of something so often hard to remember: Children are people. From the moment they can walk and talk, they’re living their own lives. You, as a parent, are a big part of those lives, but you’re far from the only part. They aren’t clones of you, no matter how much of you they inherit.

Be a stable base for them, and they’ll be so, so much better.

One of the greatest feelings in the world is when the training wheels come off. You needed them to get started, but now that you’re past them, you expect it to be harder – only to find that you’re more powerful than you could have imagined. You squeaked along, and now you can fly.

We don’t have to be great at everything ourselves. Everyone is great at something, and for every “something,” there’s someone who’s great at it. And those people share! They demonstrate and model.

Take that within. If you find yourself being bad at small talk, think to yourself, “Who’s the person I know that’s best at small talk?” Then ask yourself why you think of that person as good at it. You can probably list two or three things you’ve observed about their behavior – and if you can’t, go chat with them.

There you go; now you have a model of how to be at least a little better at small talk. You don’t have to figure it all out yourself, you just have to ask yourself that specific series of questions.

How can you tell that someone actually wants to be talking to you? Give ’em an out.

Look, you should watch for signs. If someone puts on their coat and puts their bag over their shoulder, then they want to leave. Let them! But the signs aren’t always as obvious. So make sure you’re giving the opportunities.

Here’s an easy one: let them talk last. If they say something nice, give an easy “thanks!” and then don’t respond right away. If they say something else to start a new thread, then great! They want to continue the conversation. Check in like that every few minutes and make sure you’re asking more questions than you’re answering, and 99% of the time you’ll be in conversations the other person is enjoying.

It’s easy to trap people and hard to be self-aware. So build the patterns, give ’em an out, and spend your time with people who want to spend time with you.

We sometimes imbue suggestions or requests with far more power than they warrant. I’m often surprised – though perhaps I shouldn’t be – when people tell me they “have” to do something, even though they literally only received a request to do that thing.

Don’t interpret requests as anything but! You can decline; and you should, if the request doesn’t fit your life right now.

You might think that the “polite request” is actually an order in disguise. All the better reason to say no! If you’re going to order me around, you’re at least going to admit that’s what you’re doing.

Until you do, it’s only a suggestion.

You don’t have to be upbeat just because others are. There’s a pressure not to “bring down the vibe,” but that mustn’t replace your integrity and honestly. You don’t have to ruin a good time to simply not participate.

If something is important and you don’t have it, don’t lament. Replace!

Siblings are an incredible boon; if you only have one child, it’s great to give them siblings. But if you can’t (or don’t want to for other reasons), find surrogate siblings! Find the kid they like best in the daycare or school and become absolute best friends with their parents.

This mentality works for all sorts of things. People can be important figures in your or your family’s life without having been born to the title. Don’t chase them away just because they aren’t the “genuine article.” There’s no such thing, only those who genuinely bring joy to your life.

Something I try to stay very aware of is this: Your World is not The World.

Everyone is so, so much smaller of an information sphere than they think. “Everyone is talking about this!” No they aren’t. That’s your world; lots of people in your world are talking about that, sure. Most people in The World have absolutely no idea, interest, or inkling in it.

So when I see particular shifts in the topic de jure, I often wonder: what am I not hearing about?

There must be hundreds of thousands of such bubbles at any given time. So many interesting things are happening! I like to go looking around. I’ll share whatever interesting things I find with you.

Everyone is different. Just getting that out of the way first.

I want to help people. Primarily, what I want to do is help people help themselves; to teach them how to fish, so to speak. Of the millions of things a person can be good at, I’m better than average at a handful – just like everybody else. So typically, my way of thinking is “If I’m good at a thing that a lot of other people struggle with, then maybe I could benefit them by sharing how I go about that thing.”

There are some big barriers to this.

First is just general humanism: People don’t want advice unless they explicitly ask for it, and a lot of times not even then. When people complain about their situation, they typically want one or more of these three things:

1. Someone to magically solve it for them.
2. Someone to tell them that they’re blameless for the situation, absolving them of personal responsibility.
3. Pity, “victim status,” or some other form of preferential treatment or consideration as a result.

So if someone says, “Ugh, I’m so broke, life isn’t fair,” they’re absolutely not asking you for help with their personal finance and budgeting. Even if someone explicitly says the words to you: “Hey, could you help me with my personal finance and budgeting,” then there’s only about a 30% chance that they actually want that, and a 70% chance that it’s a covert way of asking for one of the other three things.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, but the short answer is basically just to live your life in a way that makes the things you’re good at very visible, and if people ask for your help in one of those spheres, carefully evaluate whether they actually want the help. If they do, give them as much help as you possibly can.

But there’s also, I’ve discovered, a second layer to this problem. Namely: I don’t always know why I’m good at something and other people aren’t.

Here’s a real example that comes to mind – I would never have the hubris to say pointedly “I’m a good parent,” because only time will tell. But I can confidently say I’m a non-stressed parent. The existence of my children and their presence in my life and my day is a joy, and it never causes me stress, frustration, etc. Their behavior aligns to my expectations well, I’ve had to give my children any sort of “punishment” fewer than a half-dozen times in my life, and I never find myself rubbing my temples and wishing for “just five minutes of peace and quiet” or anything like that.

Meanwhile, I see other parents doing that sort of stuff all the time. Lamenting about chaos or stress, trying in vain to correct the same behaviors in their children over and over, feeling crushed under the weight of the responsibilities or sacrifices of parenting.

I want to help! But here’s my barrier: I’m pretty sure (though definitely not certain) what works for me. Why only pretty sure? Well, maybe I’m really good at managing all that stuff. But maybe my kids are exceptionally good! Maybe I wouldn’t actually do as well with a different set of kids, so my success is partially – or largely – due to good fortune rather than my skills as a father. I can’t exactly run a double-blind study here.

Also, I’m not sure at all why other people, individually, have this level of stress. I don’t have a camera in their house; I can observe maybe 2% of their total parenting time when we’re together or cross paths at events and such. So maybe their kids are unusually stress-inducing!

Heck, maybe I’m just a genetic freak with unusually low cortisol levels, or theirs are unusually high. Life is complex, parenting doubly so. Everyone is different, like I said. Even if 100% of my success is due to my direct effort (which almost certainly isn’t true), that doesn’t mean my methods would duplicate perfectly in another home.

A core life principle I believe in is this: If you want success in a particular sphere and you’re not getting it, but someone else is, you should examine how they’re achieving that success and at least experiment with those methods instead of your own. Because I do that myself, I try to make myself available for the reverse: If I do have a lot of success in a particular sphere, and others don’t always, then I want to help. But when people have a problem that’s not my problem, personally, it’s not always clear the best way to do that.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try, of course. I can always look for someone who has a lot of success helping people with problems that they don’t personally experience, and ask them how they do it!