You watch a man begin to build a grand tower. He works very hard and very diligently, taking each step in turn. He pours a solid foundation, carefully laid. He selects excellent building material and creates a solid frame. He fills in floor by floor. When he’s placing the last stone in the grand façade, he lays it slightly crooked. Upon seeing his mistake, he demolishes the entire tower. Not only that, but he never attempts to build another – he starts completely over with a totally new kind of building.

You’d think the man was insane, right? Instead of simply correcting the mistake and, at most, picking a different stone as the final piece, he scrapped everything he had worked on.

Insane as it is, I see people do exactly this all the time – usually in their careers.

I see people carefully research an industry to give themselves a foundation of knowledge about the work. They build a great resume, start networking, and practice interviewing, all for that field. They land an interview and take it through several rounds. Then, they don’t get the job – so they abandon the industry entirely, declaring firmly that they were wrong and it isn’t a good fit for them, after all.

Crazy! Persistent, tenacious people who will overcome any number of hurdles on their journey will nonetheless abandon the entire endeavor if they don’t overcome the last hurdle the first time they reach it. And I get it, that last hurdle is the most demoralizing. When you’re literally one step away from the goal and you get a setback, it stings more than if you stumble on something in the middle. But you’re still 99% of the way there, and all your other work is solid – after all, it got you to that last step, didn’t it?

Don’t overcome 99 obstacles only to let the final one defeat you. Your grand tower is only one last step away!

Today I took a squad of kids into the woods for a nature hike. They walked around barefoot in the lake, caught some interesting bugs, identified some plants, all that good stuff.

But at one point, my son shouted out, “I found treasure!”

He was as excited as could be. The treasure he’d found? A nickel and a golf ball.

But here’s the thing: that was treasure. Treasure is just novelty! It’s anything you don’t already have and don’t expect to find. It’s something in a weird place (like a golf ball in the woods, many miles from the nearest course). It’s anything that causes your imagination to wander, speculating on how this thing could have gotten to this place. (My son had no less than a dozen theories.)

If what you find does all that, then it’s worth it’s weight in golf balls.

If you’re the kind of person who likes debate and discourse primarily as a way of discovering new information and getting closer to the truth on a particular topic, it can be really disheartening when the other party reveals that they weren’t doing that at all – they were either trying to convince you of their point of view regardless of validity, or they were trying to score points with whatever audience there is.

I don’t like that any more than you do, so here are my tips to spot that mentality early so you can gracefully exit the conversation before you waste much time:

1. The other party tries to tell you that your point of view is based on some personality trait or personal aspect they find repugnant. If you state something you believe to be a fact, and their response isn’t to counter or question the fact, but to claim that you only said that because you hate a particular group of people, or because your economic position benefits from it, or whatever, that’s the perfect time to bow out. (Bonus: Since sometimes this is true, because motivated reasoning can come for us all, this works great as a self-filter as well. If the other person accuses you of this, you should bow out because of them if they’re wrong, and you should stop arguing anyway if they’re right. So either way, it’s a great signal that the conversation won’t be productive.)
2. The other party changes the definition of terms relating to your debate. For example, if you say 2 + 2 is four, and they say it’s five, and then you prove that it’s four – watch out for them trying to use a different definition of “plus” than “putting the two things together into one group.” That’s a sure sign that they’re not after truth, and they’ll dodge any facts to stay in their own comfort zone.
3. The other party rejects talking about their own points. If you ask for clarification on a point they’ve made and they can’t provide it, then they’re likely just parroting things and you’ve reached the limit of what you can learn from them. Thank them for what they’ve already said, and depart!

Seek truth, but beware – there are many distractions along the way.

The person who takes a thousand steps, each one in a random direction, doesn’t get as far as the person who takes twenty careful steps in the same direction.

Activity doesn’t always equal progress. The formula is: “Action + Planning = Progress.”

When we want progress and we don’t have a plan, often we try to correct by increasing our activity. But while certain kinds of activity are generally always helpful, just throwing stuff at the wall isn’t generally beneficial unless you’re deliberately doing it to experiment – and experiments require intentionality and planning!

So if you feel like you’re always going, going, going, but never getting anywhere, then the answer is probably to stop. Look around a little. The activity surge isn’t what you need; you need a plan. Calm down for a day or two, and fight the notion that a break means you’re falling behind; you can’t fall behind by stopping something that wasn’t getting you ahead.

There’s a certain type of old video game where you start moving, and the whole point is just to avoid obstacles for as long as you can. You can swerve back and forth, but you can’t just stop – you keep moving and the obstacles keep coming (often with increasing speed) until you beat the game or you perish.

Life is like that, too.

Sometimes you don’t want to do something. You get a request to do some task, an offer with an opportunity, or a need to be met. It’s fine to not want to do that, whatever it is. But you don’t get to just pause your life. You keep moving forward, like it or not. You have to do something, in other words, even if you don’t want to do that thing.

You can’t say “no,” only “no, but…”

You can give yourself alternatives. You can swerve, juke, and pivot. In fact, you should! But you can’t just halt so the obstacle never comes.

The next time you don’t want to do something, pick something else. It doesn’t even have to be something you’d love, just something you’d hate less than the first option. Keep picking less-bad options each time, and your life will look pretty great before you know it.

Here is a parenting “trick” I’ve used for many years: I allow exceptions to the normal rules for the children as long as the exception includes something I want them to do more of.

Here are some examples: I don’t allow the kids to have food outside of the kitchen. But if the food is raw veggies, then that’s an exception. The kids love being able to have snacks in the playroom, so they eat more carrots and cucumbers. I extend bedtime by 30 minutes, but only if they’re in their beds reading. Kids tend to value ANY extension of bedtime very highly, so they do more reading as a result.

As an adult, no one makes you do good, healthy things like read and eat vegetables. But you can certainly do so yourself! Trick yourself – put your phone charger across the room instead of next to your bed, and put books on the nightstand instead. Put bottles of water in your game-room mini-fridge instead of beers. However you do it, attach some healthy habits to your indulgences and watch the benefits come along for the ride.

One of the strangest things about memory is how different two people’s can be. I’m not even talking about error, just perspective. Context. One person experiences an event so differently than another, and then twenty years later those memories have interacted with such different lives. The factual account of the events might be identical (though probably not), but even so the memory has such different meanings for those people.

Don’t trust what you remember. Trust what you can learn now, and stay curious – even about your own past.

Today I had the opportunity to do a good deed that was very minor in effort for me, but very meaningful for the recipient. I still had something I’d bought for my departed best friend, something we never got to actually do together. I have no reason to keep it – it’s a game we were going to play together. But it’s sat on my shelf for some time.

A random stranger happened to have that same game stolen from them. They were quite upset, naturally – but Chalie is here to save the day, still.

I am grateful for the chance to add light to a dark world.

There is a version of jealousy that breeds hatred. If you covet what your neighbor has without admiring what they’ve done to get it, it’s easy to ruin your joy and darken your heart.

But some jealousy is a good thing. You should admire the fruits of just effort! If your neighbor has earned a good life and your jealousy inspires you to live better, then hurrah!

Live well, and show it. Be a light for others to follow.

In any contest, you should cheer for the side that’s morally correct. If – as is often the case – there is no side that’s more morally correct than the other, you should root for the underdog.

Why? Because the world is more interesting when the winners don’t always win and the losers don’t always lose. Because the underdog story is more inspiring. Because humanity needs examples of beating the odds.

Because an upset of the order is a chance for new life.