When your mood is low and you need motivation, do you think about the future or the past?

I know many people often call up a treasured memory or happy moment to think about, waxing nostalgic to improve their mood. That never worked for me – I have plenty of happy memories, but they never did anything to improve my mood if my current situation was stressful. Instead, I always focused on a specific point in the future: the moment when the stressful situation would be over.

I’d project my thinking to that moment, absorbing the feeling of relief and determining when it would be. Like a happy memory in reverse. It always gave me a sense of focus that would help me get through what I was dealing with.

Give it a try.

You can say this for truly selfish people: they aren’t spiteful.

If you are truly, 100% selfish – you truly make every decision and action centered around maximum benefit for yourself – then you can’t be spiteful. Because being spiteful never benefits you.

While I believe in helping your fellow humans in most spheres of life, there are definitely individual situations and scenarios where you should be maximizing your own returns. And sometimes, within those spheres, you encounter jerks! It’s natural to sometimes want those jerks to get their just deserts, but that’s foolish – even if there were zero percent chance of backlash against you (and that’s never the case), the simple act of whatever petty vengeance you want to visit costs you time, energy, focus. You spend juice to make someone else have a bad day, with no benefit to yourself.

“The best revenge is living well.” If your professor took points off for you being 30 seconds late to class because they’re a petty tyrant, what should you do about it? Get your grade and get out, that’s what. Whatever else you might want to do will inevitably hurt you in some way.

Whenever you feel the urge to be spiteful, just remember: be selfish, instead. Make your life better instead of anyone else’s worse. Maybe make someone else’s better, too.

As I look out at my lawn, it looks mostly green. Most individual blades of grass are green, of course. As a percentage, few are brown. Yet simply because there is so much grass in total, if I told my kids to go out and find all the brown blades of grass, they’d never run out.

Imagine if every person in your neighborhood sent you a picture of every brown blade of grass they found in their own yards. Your phone would melt from all the texts. Despite the fact that most grass is green, you would start – very rapidly – to get the sense that the opposite was true.

Now imagine if everyone in the country sent you pictures of their brown grass. Everyone in the world.

This is more or less a good approximation of what we actually do. Most things are good – most people, most events, most situations. Despite this, there is an endless amount of bad things to pay attention to – but if you do pay attention to all of it, non-stop, you’ll start to really, really hate the world.

I do not think we should ignore injustice or turn a blind eye to suffering just because the world is mostly good. But I do absolutely believe that we do very little good – for ourselves or the world – by simply becoming inundated and overwhelmed with misery. Let me give you a 7-step detox program that will not only make you happier, but will also make you better at actually helping improve the world:

1. Figure out how much time per week you spend absorbing information about the world outside of your own neighborhood – how much time you spend watching the news, reading social media, etc. For this example, let’s say it comes to four hours a week.
2. For one week, stop. Don’t do it at all. No news, total unplug.
3. At the end of that week, spend those 4 hours all at once in a place where people are, just watching. A park, a train station, a mall. Just sit somewhere and observe people. Talk to them if the opportunity arises, but don’t force it. Important: if this seems arduous, miserable, even impossible, then you need it very very badly.
4. You will see an enormous amount of good. You will witness people being people, which almost always means people being good. You will hopefully come away with a greater understanding that bad things happen despite the generally good nature of humanity, not because of it. That bad things make the news precisely because they are an affront to the status quo, which is people helping each other. Keep that feeling, and renew it with this method as necessary.
5. Now, consider – there is still suffering and injustice in the world, certainly. And you, being a capable person, can lessen it! But in order to do that, you must focus your effort. You cannot simultaneously be upset about everything in the entire world and expect to make any kind of difference at all. So instead, in the calm of this moment, think: “What one problem would I like to make a dent in?”
6. Find the smallest, most local, and most immediate way to make a dent in that problem. Tweeting about the indignity of worldwide hunger is so much worse a thing to do than going and donating a few bucks or an hour at a local soup kitchen. Do the local, immediate thing first.
7. Rinse and repeat.

There. You’re happier, you’re making more of a difference, and you’re aware of both of those truths. It’s watering your lawn and appreciating it at the same time. A lot of the “rage machine” of society and media tries to build a wall between you and both happiness and effective altruism, but the grass really is greener on the other side.

I think a good measure of what’s going on in your life is this question: “If someone wanted to learn about you with a reasonable degree of accuracy, who would you prefer they speak to – besides yourself?”

That’s a question worth thinking about. Who knows you well enough that you’d trust that they would present you accurately to a stranger? Who possesses the combination of reasonably intimate knowledge and respect necessary for such a portrayal?

Your answer to this question likely shows a lot about your focus in life; where you’re putting the energy in your relationships. The person who knows you best – what role do they play in your life? Are they a parent, a spouse, a child? A trusted best friend? A mentor or coworker?

Your bartender? Your barber? Your therapist?

Give it some thought – and reflect on what changes you’d like to make to your relationships.

When my oldest daughter was about 2, she really, really wanted to get on the “big kid” swing at the playground. I have a rule, however, for all my kids: you may play on anything you can get on yourself. If you can climb the tree, you’re allowed to be in it. If you can’t, I won’t put you there. This helps kids explore (and push!) their own boundaries, makes them overall safer and more capable, etc.

But my daughter was crying. “Please Daddy, please help me get on the swing!” I was in agony. I knew the right thing to do, but my resolve was breaking. Somehow, I found the strength to hold fast. I told her that I believed in her, but that if she wanted to get up there, she had to do it herself. I’d put her in the little kid swing and push her all day, but if she wanted to be in the big kid swing, that was for big kids that could get up there all by themselves.

She sobbed. She pleaded. But also, she kept trying. And after about the 30th attempt, she managed to get one little knee up into the saddle and pulled her other leg over, and then she was up there! And immediately – immediately – she turned to me and said:

“See Daddy? I told you I could do it.”

She got in and out of that swing in 2 seconds flat another hundred times that day.

Doing things for other people is a kindness, of course. Helping is virtuous. Small tasks to ease a burden or big tasks to ensure survival – these are good! But when you step in and accomplish someone else’s goals for them, you curse them. You tell them, in a voice that rings loud and clear: “I do not believe you can do this.”

Sometimes you may need to say that. Sometimes your two-year-old wants to climb into a swing, and sometimes she wants to drive the car. Sometimes a person really is about to fail, starve, hurt themselves – and you need to save them from their pride. But if you’re going to do that, be certain. Be certain it’s not your pride motivating the actions. Let someone try and fail. Let them even, perhaps, hurt themselves a little. Because they cannot succeed without trying, and they cannot try without obstacles.

If you remove a cocoon from a butterfly, instead of letting the butterfly struggle and shake it off on its own, the butterfly will never be able to fly – its wings will be stunted and weak, too fragile to take to the air. The butterfly will die.

All people have wings somewhere inside their cocoons. Cheer them, mentor them, but keep your hands off as much as you possibly can. Give them the blessing of raising your expectations of what they’re capable of. Watch them fly.

On a long enough timeline, everything is sand.

Let’s say you’ve got “it” all figured out, whatever “it” is. The process works. It gets the results you want. The ROI is great, the effort is minimal, and everything just clicks. You run the play over and over, and it puts points on the board every time.

Maybe not as many points as it used to, but still – points!

And okay, not every time anymore, but more often than not.

Well, maybe less often than not these days, but it’s still reliable and…

…and then it isn’t. What happened?!

Everything is always falling apart, that’s what happened. Problems don’t stay solved. Entropy increases and the world spins, and if you keep doing the same thing over and over the returns diminish.

Success is a platform to jump from, not an end state that lasts forever. Just as no failure is permanent, neither is any success – life keeps going, and you need to go with it. If you’ve been running a successful play for a while, it’s time to re-examine it, because it won’t work forever.

It’s all hills and valleys. For better or for worse, nothing is permanent – so keep going, my friend.

Often, the best way to lead is to do things that very much do not look like leadership. Here’s the scenario:

You want to do something; more accurately, you want something done, so you start doing it. The thing in question is valuable and important, and you work hard on it directly. Your work, for whatever reason, is visible – and so people start wanting in. Maybe they’re inspired by the mission itself, or maybe they just admire the dedication with which you’re pursuing it. Maybe they just think you’re going to succeed and they want in on the reward. It doesn’t matter – what matters is that those people start asking how they can help.

And this is the paradox – in order to maximize on that situation, you have to break your own flow state. You have to get out of “the zone” and start figuring out how other people can help. You didn’t set out to be a leader, you just wanted some end goal. And now, suddenly, you have a team.

You can ignore it, of course – but that’s a squandered resource. And many people do it badly, losing their forward momentum because they switch too hard in the other direction, trying to build enduring bureaucracy instead of just getting the minimum scaffolding set up to get the whole thing across the finish line. But if you get it right, not only does the thing get done, but you get to celebrate it with a whole squad.

That crucial first ingredient – just going for it yourself because you want it done – is missed by a lot of people who want to lead. They try to lead before they try to just do. But in the same way that you can’t write a love letter before you know who you love and you can’t get an application ready before you know what the job is, you can’t lead a team before you know why they’re assembling in the first place.

If you really want to be a leader, go out and start with your team of one, doing something worth following.

In a formal context, every conversation buys the next one.

(I’m not talking about friendship, here – hopefully those conversations flow organically and are enjoyed by all for what they are!)

Whenever you’re working with someone, imagine there’s a little gas gauge on the relationship. Every conversation, every interaction, uses up a little of that gas. When it hits “E,” that person won’t want to work with you anymore.

In sales, that means you lost the deal. In an interview process, that means you didn’t get the job. In a working relationship, that means losing the rapport of a great teammate. All things you want to avoid!

So your job is to make sure you’re putting in more gas than you’re taking out. Every conversation has to buy the next one, by making sure the other person is getting something valuable out of every interaction. It can’t just be all focused on a big end goal – people need milestones.

In a sales process, for example, you might know that closing an eventual deal will be very beneficial for the other person, helping them solve a problem in a big way. But along the way, you also have to put gas in the tank, or you won’t have enough to make it across the finish line. Make sure that the demo you’re showing them isn’t just helping you, but also giving them something actionable or helpful to do right now. That’s putting gas in the tank; that’s buying the next conversation with this one.

In a professional context, think of every conversation as an interview for the next one, and go into it with intention and purpose. If you do, you’ll never run out of gas.

Imagine you are a scientist, testing whether a particular process will yield the result you anticipate. You do the first experiment, and the process does not, in fact, yield that result. Which of the following is an appropriate internal reaction to have?

A. “Time to record this information and move on to the next experiment.”
B. “I should adjust my experiments so that I’m more likely to get that result next time.”
C. “This process is bad and I should abandon it entirely.”
D. “I’m a bad scientist, and I definitely don’t belong here.”

That’s right, the correct answer is “A.” You know this. Yet many, many times people will take actions that align with the other three internal reactions, all the way to “D!”

I’ve seen it. Someone applies for one job in a new field. They get a rejection letter. Their reaction? “I guess I don’t belong in that field.”

A good scientist knows the true wisdom: “Data” is plural. You can’t make huge decisions from one result. You can’t take one failure and make it core to your identity. You need to make your failures atomic: small, isolated from the rest of your behaviors, and used for data collection.

You will fail. A bunch of times! If you let every one of them affect you in profound ways, your life will become warped beyond recognition.

Some resilience is always necessary to be a scientist. But the method works.

You can’t charge tolls on burnt bridges. Don’t destroy capital assets. If it’s caused you a loss, that’s not relevant; what’s relevant is whether or not it will be a net gain or loss in the future.