Here’s advice to any young person in your life (or you, if it applies!): Like your first job.

No matter what it is, figure out a way to like it. Like things about it, or like people you work with, or learn to make the stories funny. But train yourself to like it, so you learn to find opportunities to improve it. And yourself. Don’t train yourself to hate working before you’ve had a chance to find your niche.

The mechanics of a device are often hidden behind various things to keep it out of sight. The “guts” are almost never exposed. The pipes and wires in your house are hidden in the walls, the electronics in a device are covered by paneling.

There are some good reasons for this, sure. Some of it is safety, both to the user and the equipment; exposed electrical wires in your house probably aren’t a good idea. And some of it is aesthetics; most people want their tools to look like they’re functioning by magic, safely ignoring how the sausage actually gets made. And some of it is, no doubt, because people who thrive on fixing those things don’t want you to be able to do so yourself. There’s a reason that cars (often serviced by the same companies that make them) have gotten progressively harder to work on as an individual. It’s bad for business if you can fix your own machine.

Of course, all of those reasons – good or bad, deliberate or not – make things harder to fix when they break. Some plumbing problems are actually easy to fix, but getting to them can be a huge pain, because the pipes are hidden behind inconvenient corners or panels. Hiding the fix even means sometimes hiding the damage; a leaky pipe might be a small problem at first, but if you don’t notice it until your walls have filled with mold, that’s a bigger issue.

All this is to say – when you can, make the guts visible! You can’t do it every time, but you can do it more often than you think. And I like seeing the machine. It looks cool, but also, I like knowing when there’s an issue and being able to fix it!

Back when I was a kid, there was this toy called a Beanie Baby. It was basically a little stuffed animal, and there were many different ones. There was a brief but intense craze where huge numbers of people were absolutely convinced that these things would be a massive collector’s item someday, and so people were buying them in enormous quantities. Naturally, they’re not worth anything special today – one of the things that makes something a collectible in the future is scarcity, so if everyone thinks something is going to be a collectible someday and hoards it, that pretty much guarantees that it won’t be.

Anyway, buying Beanie Babies as an investment was dumb – not just in hindsight, but even at the time. However, buying Beanie Babies because you liked them is just fine! Why? What’s the difference?

The point of all your work, all your toil and struggle, is to ultimately reap the rewards and find joy. Along the way, you make various investments – you buy tools, you educate yourself, etc. – to potentially magnify future rewards by amplifying the value of your efforts. But the end goal is consumption; spending the fruits of your labor on things you enjoy.

The difference can be subtle, but it’s vital. For instance, you can buy a pickup truck that you hate driving because it enables you to more efficiently run your side hustle and make money. But someone else could buy that exact same pickup truck because they love it and want to drive it around. For you, it’s an investment, but for the other person it’s a consumption good.

Why does this matter? Because consumption is the end of the road for our wealth. Whatever you buy with this mindset, you’re planning to consume; you don’t plan to resell it or make money off it. If you did, it would be an investment. And you have to think about these things diffeently.

If you buy something as an investment, you have to consider whether or not it will actually yield a positive return. If you buy something as a consumption good, then you only have to worry about whether you can afford it and whether it’s better than whatever other consumption goods you could afford.

So, back to the truck. As an investment: Will you make more money with this truck than without it? How much more? Over what time period? How long will the truck last? Will the truck make you more money than it cost in the time that it runs, and is there a different investment that would do better along these metrics? These are the sorts of questions you need to ask when you’re spending money with the express goal of getting a return.

But as a consumption good: Do I have enough disposable wealth to buy this truck? Will I like this truck more than the other things that cost similar money – a vacation, a hot tub, etc.? That’s pretty much it.

There’s no upper cap on investments as long as they’re yielding positive return, but they do need to do that. There’s absolutely an upper cap on how much consumption you can do, but you don’t need to burden yourself with silly notions about whether it’ll “pay off” in the future. It doesn’t have to; the payoff is joy, now.

The most critical thing is just understanding which things you buy are which, and being honest with yourself. If you want to get drunk, party with your friends, and talk about Hemingway for four years, that’s dope – but it’s absolutely a consumption good. Don’t pay $100,000 for a label on all that called “Bachelor’s in Literature” and lie to yourself that it’s an investment.

The people who understand and are honest about the distinction are the people who end up being able to afford a lot more consumption goods in the long run.

Imagine that someone tells you as a young adult that there’s a huge market for artisanal butter-churners in the big city. They’re really convincing, so you believe them. You invest a bunch of time and effort into learning how to churn butter; you’re even pretty darned good at it. You buy or even make some really good butter churns, adding to your investment. Maybe you even take out a big loan to buy a cow, confident that it will pay back dividends.

Then you get to the big city and what do you know? Everyone just buys butter in the store, where it’s a cheap and plentiful. Very few people want to hire you to churn artisanal butter for them, and only a few buy the butter you make, since despite it’s quality it’s very expensive at the farmer’s market or wherever you sell it.

In this situation, have you been harmed? Yes! Definitely! Someone did you dirty!

But should you blame all the people who don’t buy your butter?

Imagine doing such a thing! Imagine that you focus your ire squarely on the people who buy butter from the store. They’re the villains here! In fact, someone should intervene. Store-bought butter should be illegal! People should have to buy their butter from honest churners like you – or if not, then at the very least store-bought butter should be taxed extremely heavily and the proceeds should go to supporting and subsidizing the artisanal butter-churner population.

That’s insane, of course. People don’t owe you their patronage, especially if what you’re selling is more expensive than the next option. You were harmed, but the villains here aren’t the masses that don’t want what you’re selling. The villain is the guy that told you this was a good idea.

Does some blame lay with you? Sure, of course – if you didn’t verify those claims, seek other opinions, etc. But you were young and naïve, and that guy was a convincing pillar of your community. He was well-respected! He even gave you a good deal on the butter-churning courses, lent you the money to buy that cow…

…oh.

Look, you got swindled. That sucks. Your primary course of action should be to stop being swindled. And by that I mean, stop throwing good money after bad. Ignore the sunk cost and stop trying to be a butter-churner. Yes, you’re behind. But that can’t be helped now, so start doing the smarter things today so you’re not still behind in a few years.

After you course-correct, it’s natural to want some recompense for being hoodwinked. If you seek that out, and if the juice seems worth the squeeze, then at least go after the right people. Don’t blame innocent bystanders whose only crime was not being swindled alongside you in such a way as to make your investment actually sound. It’s not “society’s” fault that the thing you got good at isn’t a thing anyone cares about, and society doesn’t owe it to you to care about it. Blame the person who lied to you, and stop defending them.

Imagine this scenario: Your job gets 25% harder. That’s it, that’s the whole scenario. In whatever way you want to imagine, your job becomes 25% more onerous and difficult to do.

Now ask yourself – what would your reward have to look like in order for you to be as happy with that harder job as you currently are with your real job?

And I’m not just talking about pay, although certainly that’s part of it. Would a 25% pay increase do the trick by itself? I’m guessing it wouldn’t! That doesn’t scale linearly – if your job became 200% more difficult, a 200% pay raise might be nice for a little while, but you’d burn out fast.

Here’s the thing – your job is going to be 25% harder at some point. Either because your job duties grow in complexity over time, or because you get a harder job as you advance in your career. In fact, if your job 5 years from now wasn’t 25% more difficult than the one you have now, chances are good that your career is stagnating. The question isn’t whether you’ll face increasing difficulty in your life. It’s whether or not your reward will ramp up alongside it.

If your reward, in terms of recognition, mastery, autonomy, or whatever else you want, grows with the difficulty of your job, then you’ll stay satisfied. But that’s not automatic! You have to advocate for your side of the bargain, and that starts with knowing what you even want your side to be.

So don’t skip over this question. Really take the time to think about it. What reward would make you satisfied with the increased difficulty? You’ll get the difficulty either way, so you should know!

Four years is a long time.

On this day, four years ago, I got the worst phone call of my life. My father had passed away.

He was ready. I know that’s strange to say, but he’d told me. He was in pain. And he’d lived a full life, if not a long one. His adventures were legend. He was legend. Larger than life, in every way.

And then he was gone.

But he isn’t. Not really. He never will be. The stories will carry me home.

My two youngest children learned the origin story of Spider-man today. As endlessly redone as that story may be in popular media, it’s still a great story with a great lesson, and when it lands, it lands big.

I love these stories. I love that my children see these as true lessons, as their own modern parables that help guide their moral compasses. It’s a testament to the power of storytelling as well as the stories we choose to tell.

We owe it to the next generation to tell them good stories. It is, after all, our responsibility.

If a new object doesn’t improve your life significantly in the first few days of ownership, then you didn’t need it and it’s clutter. Make those decisions swiftly, or be buried.

A distraction requires two things: a void, and something to fill it. We so often focus on the “thing” that we miss the essential first component.

Did you open up your phone to check a notification, and then suddenly realize 45 minutes had passed? Sure, the flashing lights were distracting, but that ignores the fact that there was a desire in your brain. A need unfulfilled. Why was some new piece of content able to grab you like that?

We talk about the algorithm, how it learns our wants and fills them. But that’s because you starve yourself! Temptation only works on the discontent. What have you fed your hungry brain lately?

When my mind is racing with ideas, nothing can pull me from it. Ideas come from real depth – when I read a book, go for a walk, have an engaging conversation. They don’t spawn from two-minute bursts of color and sound.

Feed your head, people. Don’t try to shut out the distractions – replace them.