Here is a good formula for living a life with as few regrets as possible: Always help when you can.

Once, many years ago, I saw a young woman walking in the rain, looking cold. I was about to pull over to offer her a ride, but I let fear get the best of me. I was an adult man and she was a teenage girl, and I feared the risk of my intentions being misinterpreted. So I didn’t speak to her, and instead drove off.

I’ve thought about that once a week for two decades. I tell myself all sorts of stories – we were in a populated area, not a lone stretch of wilderness highway, so she probably wasn’t walking far. She could have gone into any store for temporary shelter if she was really in distress. Maybe I even misinterpreted her look as distress; she could have just been wet but perfectly content to experience the rain.

I tell myself those stories as a defense against the guilt of regret. Because my brain also tells other stories – what if she was in real danger, and you didn’t help? What if she was trying to get away from someone? What if she was walking in the rain because she was disoriented or in deep emotional distress? The potential answers to those questions haunt me.

In all the years since, I’ve never once regretted helping someone. Those little gestures – grabbing a door for someone, offering to carry something, helping someone pick up something they’ve dropped, offering a hand if they’ve fallen. None of those have ever turned out bad. I’ve never been burned by any of them, or lost time or effort I couldn’t afford.

In fact, all those little gestures have brought me much joy! As a result of that pattern I’ve made friends, held babies, found new friends for my children, and all sorts of other boons – not to mention the great happiness in my heart that comes from living your life that way. I’ve never had a moment of awkwardness or embarrassment or anything else negative as a result of trying to help. But I’ve had two decades of guilt and regret from the notable time that I didn’t.

Even if someone ever did respond poorly to my offer of help (and no one ever has!), it would be easy to shrug off, since I know I was just trying to help and my intentions were good. So there’s almost no way it could turn out badly.

I try to offer advice rarely, instead just “living my life out loud,” talking about my experiences, and letting people take what lessons from it they will. But in this instance, I will offer the advice very genuinely: Help people. Build it as a habit to give those small bits of assistance whenever you can. Your life will be so, so much better for it.

The ability to tell stories is a wonderful ability. Stories inspire, entertain, and educate – all more memorably than facts and figures alone. So being able to weave a good yarn is a great skill to develop.

But there’s another benefit. A while back, I got my kids into a great bluffing card game. In addition to learning how to bluff, the other (and some might say even more important) benefit is learning how to spot a bluff. The same is true for stories. If you’re good at telling them, then you’re also getting better at being told them.

What elements might the teller be leaving out, exaggerating, or changing altogether? Why this story, framed this way? What’s the takeaway the teller wants me to have – and do I want it?

Learning to hear the world, as it really is, makes us wiser. So tell a few stories!

My father loved trash-pickin’. We’d do it all the time. Pick a nice neighborhood on their trash day and drive around, looking for whatever cool things might be going to the curb. We’d find all sorts of neat stuff – some of it just cool to look at for a minute, some of it in perfect condition, some of it fixable by us. We’d keep some, give some away, throw some back, even sell some.

It’s a very fond memory, and I’d told stories of it to my own children, who loved them. So tonight was a nice night… and off we went.

You’d have thought we were going to Disney Land. They were so excited, talking about opportunities and discussing the world. Why people replace things, what that might mean about those things, how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. We got some food, made some jokes, sang some songs.

We also came back with a cool table that they kids spotted!

Activities like that – ones with no real failure state, just “let’s do this semi-specific thing until we decide not to, and talk about it along the way” are such perfect avenues of fellowship.

My father’s spirit with us. Treasure from trash.

Observing without reacting is a powerful statement. Making it clear that you can see, and that you are therefore choosing non-interference with whatever you observe, makes it clear that you hold no immediate objection. Your attention grants permission, grants freedom.

Don’t react to every little thing. Not everything needs your opinion, permission, or endorsement. You don’t always need to weigh in. Give people space and respect – and yourself some calm.

A balance between using your time off to recharge and using your time off to prepare seems, to me, to be the necessary factor for low-stress and happiness.

When I have a day off, if I spend it entirely in “relaxation mode,” I end up feeling stressed and often depressed by the end. But if I’m productive all day, I often feel… well, like I need another day off!

I need to unwind, but like a good watch, I need to be rewound again.

In your view, what’s the primary goal of the education system? What’s the point?

No matter what your answer is, you’re going to have lots of people who disagree with you. Some people might agree that it’s one of the goals, but not the primary. Other people might not agree that it’s a goal at all! They might say it’s a nice secondary effect but not something to specifically strive for, or they might say it should actively be discouraged.

Here’s the core of the problem I’m describing: the education system in America doesn’t have a single, stated primary goal. According to the Department of Education, their goal is to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

But like oh so many mission statements, that one doesn’t mean anything. At best, it’s a vague philosophy, not a goal. “Promote achievement?” Sure, but what are we trying to get them to achieve? Anything? A specific thing? Fostering excellence is meaningless unless you define excellence in the first place. What is excellence? Test scores? Graduation rates? Employment rates as adults?

It’s all too broad. People want too many different things to be able to group them all together and say “we’re going to promote more goodness and less worseness” and have it mean anything.

Why is this important? Because it makes more acute conversations about specific educational policy really, really difficult to have in a productive way.

For example: A given school district has gotten a minor grant for an additional program. Should it allocate that to an arts course or a gifted and talented program? It’s a rhetorical question – I’m sure you have your view on the actual question, but I’m not debating that here. What I’m pointing out is that the question itself can only be answered from the perspective of what you think the ed system’s goals should be.

As a professional coach, one of the central pillars of our profession is that we don’t impose a goal on our clients; we help them refine what their own goals are, and then we help them achieve those goals through better processes and decision-making clarity. So if one of my clients asks me something like “Should I take this new job,” I’m not answering whether I would take that job, or even if I think it’s a good idea overall. What I’m doing is running that question through a fairly simple formula with the client.

First, we go back to their Main Goal. Then, we work through whether or not taking the new job (or whatever decision they’re facing) is likely to move them toward or away from that goal. Since we have a Main Goal, this process is much easier than it would be if we’d never defined a Main Goal to begin with. Without a Main Goal, pretty much every decision has pros and cons – the job has higher salary but is farther away, it has a better manager but worse public visibility, etc. – and we don’t know which factors are more important than others because we don’t have an objective to measure them against.

I started off by talking about the education system because it’s a great example to illustrate this problem, but it’s far from the only example. Any project, organization, or endeavor needs to be aimed at something. The more goals you try to mix together, the worse you are at accomplishing any of them. Likewise, the more people who work on any given enterprise, the harder it will be to keep them aligned and communicating well. So big projects with lots of goals have both of these problems.

In general, try to break your goals down into their smallest cohesive endeavor. And before you try to influence someone on what should be done, make sure you’re in agreement on the baseline goal of what you want accomplished! Otherwise, there’s not much point to the discussion.

A tree that falls in the woods with no one around to hear it does not make a sound.

For the exact same reason, a sunset is not beautiful. Roses do not smell sweet.

All that is beautiful in the world is the result of random physical inputs being assembled like a glorious symphony by the incredible machine that is your mind.

The smell of a rose is just bits of rose particles drifting against your olfactory nerve. A sunset is just photons emitted by the sun, bouncing around against particles in the air and curving around the gravitational horizon of the Earth. A symphony is just the rattling of strings and reeds, ricocheting off the air around it.

“Just.”

Of course, all of those things can be sublimely beautiful. But that beauty is in you. We imagine that if we were to vanish, the sunset would still be there – but it wouldn’t be. Not in that way.

A platypus can sense electrical impulses from a distance. Migratory birds can sense magnetic fields. If you had either of those senses, then sometimes you would sense an electrical impulse or a magnetic field that was gorgeous. That would touch you in the way that the most transcendent mountain view or soaring symphony could.

If that’s difficult for you to picture (and I imagine it might be!), then remember – if you can’t imagine a magnetic field being heart-wrenching, then a creature who could detect magnetic fields but who didn’t have a sense of sight would probably have an equally hard time imagining how a sunset could be beautiful.

Imagine a migratory bird became sentient and could talk to you. It has this extra sense you don’t have, the ability to actually perceive magnetic fields. It doesn’t “see” them or “hear” them – those words describe other senses. Human language doesn’t have a word for that sense, because humans don’t have the sense itself. So the bird coins the term “kleet” for the sense. Then the bird says to you one day:

“If a magnetic field shifts and there are no birds to kleet it, does it make a kloot?”

Does it make a what? “A kloot.” Well, I don’t know. What’s a kloot? “A kloot is the word for something you kleet, the way a ‘sound’ is the word for something you hear.” Okay, then that answers your own question – if a kloot is just the word for when a bird kleets a magnetic field, then of course it doesn’t make a kloot without a bird around. The kloot is in the bird, not the magnetic field. I can’t kleet a magnetic field, after all.

Of all the phenomena in the universe, a tiny percentage is perceivable by humans. Within that tiny percentage, our brains make incredible beauty and bestow it upon our hearts. What a fortune it is to be a human, to be alive.

Sometimes you find yourself in a bad situation, but the best proposed solution makes you anxious. Maybe you have a bad boss making your job miserable, and the best solution is to set some boundaries with them, but you’re worried about their backlash. Or maybe your car is starting to make weird noises and overheat, but you’re worried that if you take it in to the shop you’ll be faced with a big bill. Insert any example you like.

The solution might make you anxious, but you always have to remember the grim alternative is staying in the bad situation! Yes, your boss might get mad if you set boundaries. You might even get fired! But what happens if you don’t? You just stay in that bad job forever – or, more likely, you quit or get fired anyway as it gets progressively worse.

Bad situations often have thorny exits. But exit you must. Because otherwise, you’re accepting that the bad situation is the best you’ll ever have.

The kids are back in school today! They’re all so excited. I love that they love learning, they love the social environment, and they love challenging themselves.

I try never to push them toward grades. They’re plenty smart, and if I focus on evaluation I’m focusing on the wrong thing. I want them to enjoy the pursuit of their own goals, and to take pride in their own accomplishments. I ask them about what they care about, not about how other people judged them. I praise them for helping others, for being kind, and for being curious.

Too many things in this world push you to check boxes, pass tests, and sacrifice your own joyous pursuit of learning on the altar of some arbitrary accomplishment. I will not be one of them.

My middle daughter asked me the classic question regarding some long division: “When will I need to know how to do this?”

Now, I could think of a few circumstances when being able to do long division would be helpful, but that answer wouldn’t be the honest one. The honest answer is: “Probably never.”

But I gave her a different honest answer instead, one with a deeper truth. Here’s what I said:

“Right now, your brother is in the other room doing pull-ups. He’s not doing that because he’ll ever need to do pull-ups. He’s doing it to get strong. You aren’t doing long division because you’ll ever need to do long division. You’re doing it to train your brain, to get smarter, to exercise your mind. You’re braining.”

That did the trick. She doesn’t love math, but she does love being smart. Anything that she can view as brain-training, as braining, instantly holds her attention.

Life isn’t a series of things you need to do. It’s an adventure – one that you get to enjoy even more if you’re healthy and smart.