If you make a loud noise when you sneeze, you can change what noise you make. You can should “hadouken!” Try it, it’s super fun.

But the point is, we have a lot of reflexive actions. Sometimes the reflex is just to take an action, any action. You might have as easy of a time fighting the reflex as you would just changing the default action.

Imagine that someone did something unkind, unjust, or harmful to you. They never apologize directly, but you notice that after the incident they do change their behavior such that this act never gets repeated. How would you feel?

It’s an odd one, right? One on the one hand, there are few things I dislike more than empty apologies. Give me changed behavior any day! But we often seem to think that changed behavior needs acknowledgement from the changer, don’t we? If they never acknowledge the harm they caused, how can we be sure they’re actually changing their behavior in accordance, and not just behaving differently by coincidence, only to change back next week?

But I don’t want someone being too embarrassed to apologize to be the reason they don’t correct the mistake, either!

Still, all things considered – if someone apologized to me after a demonstrated week of changed behavior, I’d certainly take it more seriously than if they apologized and promised to change in the future. Wouldn’t you?

You need to regularly hang out with people who disagree with you. They can have beliefs or views that are opposed to yours, or they can simply have more moderate versions of your beliefs, but ideally a mix is best. It’s really, really important.

One of the reasons it’s so important is that people who agree with you in a given area will generally not tell you when you’re being absolutely batshit insane in that area.

Partially it’s because tribalism makes us support people of our own tribe regardless of what they actually say. As long as the person is from your ingroup, you’re predisposed to view them sympathetically and, even if you disagree with them, keep quiet about any dissent.

But equally it’s because in-groups tend toward ever more extreme versions of their core views over time. Know your Maslow – once you’re in a group, you want status. And if the group’s “thing” is Belief X, then you gain status by claiming the most extreme version of X that you can stomach. The most extreme are thus the highest status and the Overton window moves over time.

But as your in-group’s views become more extreme, they deviate from society’s norms further and further. If you’re isolated in that echo chamber, eventually you’re saying or even believing things that are absolutely bonkers but gain you a lot of status with a hyper-narrow group. But your life will collide into “normal society” frequently, and if your most extreme bonkers views leak out – especially if you don’t realize that they’re looney tunes – you can have a real problem.

The solution is cosmopolitanism. You don’t have to dilute your deeply-held beliefs, but you should know where they fit. You should know which things are considered the absolute craziest, even if only out of self-preservation. You should challenge your wildest ideas and be able to defend them against the challenges from the middle of the Bell curve, or you shouldn’t have them.

Talk with many people. Sharpen your wits, stabilize your emotions, and control your beliefs (rather than the reverse). Otherwise, you won’t even know what your problem is.

Everything is a chemical.

Everything you feel is some combination of chemicals in your brain and body. There’s a chemical for stress, a chemical for happiness, a chemical for love. There are blends and cocktails of these chemicals, and all sorts of outside stimuli cause your brain to generate different mixes. You can introduce outside chemicals like alcohol or caffeine, but they aren’t the only things that can alter the mix.

Addiction is a mental pathway. Your brain starts producing chemicals you don’t like – or even ones that harm you – in the absence of either the chemicals you want, or the stimuli that makes your brain generate the chemicals you want, or both.

Relatedly, the more something becomes normal – your baseline – the more any deviation from it can seem very unpleasant. If someone gave you a free hundred dollars every day for a year, then suddenly stopped without warning, it can feel very much like they’re harming you or taking something from you even if they’re not, especially if you got used to the extra hundred dollars and incorporated it into your budget.

The combination of these things means you can become “addicted” to basically anything. So what does “addicted” even mean?

It means that you need something badly enough that you become a worse person if you don’t have it. You become angry, or sad, or pained, or some version of yourself you don’t want to be.

Now, we all need certain things; in a way, I’m addicted to food and water by this definition. So it’s worth noting what kinds of things you can be addicted to: Positive, neutral, and harmful.

You can be addicted to things that have a positive effect on your life. If you get really used to the sensation you get from seeing your children smile, then not getting that can put you in a really bad mood. But since the smiles of your children are wonderful things, the feedback loop here is okay. There are neutral things like video games – fine on their own, but being addicted to them can lead to negative effects because of what else they crowd out. And then there are things that are actively harmful on their own, like heroin, so an addict is choosing between two very bad experiences.

Unless the “thing” is very positive, you want to avoid addiction. Dependency. That’s often easy to see with regards to negative things like hard drugs, but is much harder to realize when it comes to neutral things in the first place.

So how do you know? What are the warning signs?

Well, if the thing itself is neutral – say, watching television – then look for the signs of dependency. What happens if you don’t watch TV for a day or two? Are you irritable, thinking about it constantly, upset that you’re missing it? Then that might be a sign that it has more control over you than is healthy. What happens if someone else suggests watching less TV, or even just doing something else for the evening? Do you snap at them, push them away, or view them as antagonistic? Your brain is looking for the chemicals it craves, and it’s not going to get them from the friend who wants to go for a jog with you, it’s going to get them from the shiny lights of the television.

Anything to excess can lead to an unhealthy life. And addiction generates excess. Be in control of your choices, and moderate them with wisdom.

I have an almost surefire way to tell if someone is generally a confident, comfortable person who has actual talent and isn’t faking their way through life. If you’re not sure if someone is a “phony” or if they really are a talented, intelligent person, this simple method will tell with 99% accuracy: Tell them about a minor accomplishment of yours.

If they’re the real deal, they’ll be happy for you. They’ll congratulate you, or ask you interested questions about it, or just generally act in a way that contributes to your sense of pride in what you just told them. If they’re not, then they’ll do the opposite. They’ll one-up your story, or they’ll find something about it to criticize or belittle, or maybe they’ll even just shrug it off like it isn’t a big deal.

The latter person’s sense of self-worth comes in comparison to others, and so they subconsciously (or maybe even consciously) need to diminish others so they don’t lose their sense of self. A person confident in themselves can celebrate others’ wins all day without losing an inch of their own stature.

Pay attention to how others treat you when you share a small victory, and surround yourself with the people who make it a big deal.

When someone makes light of something that someone else finds serious, the person making fun is almost always in the right, as long as their intentions are pure.

We shouldn’t mock a person in pain. But we should mock pain itself, show it that it cannot control us, that we do not find it a serious threat. Let pain know who’s boss. Turn tragedy into laughter, so our lives can be funny instead of dour.

Learn this lesson early – don’t take pain’s side against joy.

Eat your eggs however you like. Who’s eating them? But try them every way. They’re eggs, you’ll like them no matter what. How else will you know?

Life isn’t that complicated. Try stuff until you find what you like, and then do what you like, no matter what anybody thinks.

There’s a phrase I like: “We tend to judge others by their actions, but judge ourselves by our intentions.” I think it’s an accurate phrase and offers helpful insight when it comes to empathy. But I think people only take half the lesson from it that they should.

The lesson everyone takes is to be more sympathetic to others’ intentions. The person that cut you off in traffic wasn’t deliberately being a jerk, they were late and stressed and had a crying kid in the car. And that’s fine; more empathy to our fellow humans isn’t a bad thing.

But the other half of the lesson that I wish more people would take is that you need to judge yourself by your actions more frequently!

If you harm someone, you need to own that, even if your intention wasn’t to do harm. If you have a perfectly valid reason that your actions (or inactions) caused that harm, that is not an excuse. The “why” behind a harmful action is a helpful tool for you to examine, so you can avoid it in the future.

“I forgot your birthday because I have ADHD,” doesn’t mitigate the harm you caused to a loved one. The reason is valid and understandable, but it’s still on you to mitigate the impact of those things, or own the consequences.

I just finished teaching a leadership development course. One of the topics is “appreciation,” and the participants are encouraged to send little notes of appreciation to their teams, never assuming that the team “already knows.” A little bit goes a long way!

At the end of the course, the participants handed ME a note. That they’d all signed and put little words of encouragement in. The double-whammy of both being appreciated AND feeling like my words sunk in has me feeling very, very lucky.

See? It works!

People try to solve problems from afar, far too often. A surprising amount of the time, if you can’t figure out how to solve the problem, the best advice is “go and look.” Up close, in person. Many mysteries reveal themselves when you just see for yourself.