Very few tools are good or evil. (I say “very few” because there are outliers – the guillotine might be all evil and penicillin is pretty much all good.) You hold them. You need a compass.

…no, the other kind. The moral kind.

A tool can’t define whether you’re good or evil. Valor and virtue don’t come from using certain objects or not using other ones. Discretion and application guide the soul.

I am both a parent and a people manager. One of my favorite little quirks of this combination is how often the same techniques and strategies are correct for both spheres. If you’re either (or both) of these things, then often you have to give feedback on behaviors and actions that don’t align with the goals of the organization – whether that’s effectively supplying a product or service to your customer base or leading healthy, happy adolescent lives.

How you give feedback is important, as is what kind of feedback you give and why you give it. But incredibly underrated in importance is when you give the feedback. There are three broad categories of “feedback opportunity,” and if you’re not using a combination of all three, you’re weakening the effectiveness of your feedback overall.

Opportunity #1: Spot Feedback. This is the feedback you give in direct, immediate response to a particular behavior. If your child colors on the wall or your direct report violates an important safety protocol, you want to address it right away. There is a ton of information out there about the best ways to do this (and like anything, it should be tailored to your circumstances), but I’m just going to make two points relating to the “when” of this one. One: If you only do this kind of feedback, it’s never going to be as effective, because this feedback needs to reinforce lessons taught in less stressful circumstances. Spot feedback is great as a reminder, but bad as an initial lesson. Two: If your spot feedback is always negative, it’s going to erode trust. Make sure you’re using spot feedback for positive reinforcement as often as for constructive criticism.

Opportunity #2: Scheduled Feedback. This is the feedback you give at regular intervals, whether it’s family dinner or your 1:1s. Again, I won’t talk about what, how, or why here – but the when is so important. This needs to be frequent enough to be meaningful; if you’re only doing this once a year it’s not going to create any lasting trust or behavioral change. And it has to be predictable and reliable – not based on whim. Whoever you’re giving the feedback to should know when to expect these meetings, and know that they’re going to happen regardless of circumstance. In other words, they shouldn’t confuse these with spot feedback.

Opportunity #3: Requested Feedback. This is the feedback that the person you’re guiding comes to you and requests. Often underused, this might be the most important kind – and again, the when is so important. When someone needs your feedback, make it your top priority. Don’t push it off with a comment like “We’ll talk about it at our next scheduled meeting” unless you absolutely can’t avoid it. The trust you build when you give someone the time they request is invaluable, and remember – people will act how you train them to act with your responses. If requests for your time are always met with a “no,” then people will stop requesting your time as they learn that you value your own schedule far more than theirs. Actively soliciting feedback is exactly what you want the people you guide to do, so don’t punish it when it happens.

That’s the checklist. Take a look through your past few weeks and for each person you guide, ask yourself: Did I give them feedback on the spot, positive and constructive, in roughly equal measure? Did I schedule enough time with them to give them feedback divorced from specific incidents, and did I stick to the schedule we agreed to? And did I say “yes” to their requests for feedback, with a reasonable response time?

If the answers to all of those were “yes,” then even if your how, why, or what needs work – you’re nailing the “when,” and that gets you a lot of the way there.

The quality of any widely available good or service will only rise to the level that the median user demands.

Think of something that you think is “terrible these days.” Is television awful? Can’t get a good cup of coffee anymore? No one makes a good microwave now? Well, whatever it is, remember: that’s what the median user of those things thinks is just fine.

For plenty of things, you’re the median user. It will be hard to think of examples because by nature, you don’t think about them. If you just buy a frying pan when you need one and have never given it a second thought, just remember: somewhere out there is a person who thinks that frying pans are garbage these days. And you’re the cause because you’re okay with garbage frying pans.

Consider things from the view of the producer of any of these things. Your market demographic is a big bell curve: there is a small group of people who care a lot about the quality, a small group of people who care very little, and the majority cares somewhat. If I make an amazing television show, maybe fifty million people will watch it. But if I make an okay television show – for a tenth of the price! – forty-eight million people will still watch it because only a small percentage of the audience needs their television to be great. The rest are fine with it being okay.

So from the maker’s perspective, it often makes the most sense to make the okay product. If it costs ten times as much to reach 4% more people, that’s not a great trade-off. That’s why you often see such a huge jump in price for “luxury” or “prestige” brands or products with what might seem like only minimal improvements in quality. In order to justify spending the extra money to reach that slightly larger audience, you need to be able to recoup your costs. The only way to do that is to charge appropriately. And for the small percentage of people who care deeply about the quality of a given product or service, the extra cost is worth it because the quality improvements that seem minor to you are huge deals to them.

So the next time you lament that no one makes a decent car anymore, just remember that it’s the fault of people who buy cars, not people who make them. And you’re ruining something for them, too. When you want to be in the high-quality audience for something, you can be – but you’ll pay for the privilege, one way or another. So choose wisely.

Any time you have a bad day, think back to the last time you had a good day. Was that day better than this one is bad? Good, then you’re still winning on average.

You’re always going to have a few rough patches. Sometimes your good days borrow resources from the future – juice – that you’ll have to pay back on a day when you have a deficit. And sometimes the bad days give you exactly the motivation or the experience you need to make a better one tomorrow.

So take the long view. The averages smooth out very nicely toward the horizon.

There is an enormous amount of wonderful information that exists in written form – books and articles in libraries around the world. A true wealth of incredible information; more than you’ll ever need. The solution to nearly any problem you may ever have can be found in a book somewhere. And so it stands to reason that one of the most fundamental skills you need in life is basic literacy. Once you can read, you’re off to the races.

Then again, there’s a second, deeply vital skill that you need to layer on top, as quickly as you can: reading critically. Just as there’s a tremendous amount of truth and knowledge on written pages out there, there’s also a tremendous amount of bullshit. And then there’s perhaps the most dangerous category: information that is true and helpful for someone, but not you.

The same principle applies to advice. No matter what situation you’re in, it’s almost certain that someone has gone through it before. Lots of those people like to give advice, and they’re probably giving it out whether you’re asking for it or not. There’s as much free advice out there as there are books, and the thing is this: Some of it is helpful to you.

So the most vital skill you need to develop is how to listen critically to that advice.
It’s not helpful to dismiss it all as bunk – that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater and you’re giving up incredible resources. But it’s also pointless to try to take all the advice you hear; there’s not only more than you could ever act on, but much of it is contradictory!

So let’s talk about how to parse the advice and separate what’s helpful to you from what’s not. I’ll use the example of a topic that seems to have a never-ending stream of advice about it (including from yours truly, which is why I’m choosing this topic): job hunting.

Job hunting is fairly universal as a modern human experience, and lots of people have either been very successful at it themselves or have actually worked directly in this field, be it as a recruiter, hiring manager, career counselor, etc., and have some extra level of expertise as a result. Some (read: many) of these people try to pass on what they know to a broader audience.

And here we have the first problem. There’s no such thing as a truly universal experience unless we’re defining things so broadly that they’re not helpful. Someone who has been a corporate recruiter for a Fortune 50 financial institution for the last two decades and a tech founder who dropped out of college in their freshman year and then went on to create and sell three successful startups over the last five years are both going to have a lot of advice about how to succeed on the job hunt. Their respective methods will be completely opposite of one another, and both will be right.

This isn’t hypothetical – I witnessed an argument between those two people on LinkedIn. Both of them had valid points, lots of examples, etc. Because both were right. But both of them were making the same elemental mistake: They viewed their bubble as the entire world. They generalized from the self and took their lessons to be universal wisdom, and they viewed the other person as giving bad advice because it would be bad advice to the people who were in their own respective worlds.

So here’s the first lesson in critically evaluating advice: look to the speaker not only to evaluate their general expertise but also to evaluate how relevant it is to your specific situation. Because the speaker, especially if you’re looking at advice in the public square, has no idea what the specifics of your situation are. Are you trying to get a job in a top-rated financial institution or are you trying to get a job at a tech startup? Are you trying to impress a person like that recruiter or like that founder?

There’s a running joke these days about “boomer advice,” and how non-relevant it is to the current generation of jobseekers. The joke is usually along the lines of an older dad or granddad telling a younger person “Just walk in, give ’em a good handshake, and tell ’em what a hard worker you are and you’ll get the job!” And then the younger person rolls their eyes because sure, that worked when you were my age, but the world is different now.

But here’s the thing – the world was always different depending on where you looked. Imagine you apply for a job and get called in for a first interview, only to discover that the manager interviewing you reminds you a lot of your granddad. Well, maybe the “firm handshake and bold request” method isn’t so silly now, because no advice is universally good or bad. You have to know what tool to use for what job.

You want dating advice from people who either A.) are very similar to you and generally successful at dating in specifically the ways you want to be successful, or B.) are the kind of people you want to date and who generally date people like you. Anyone else is going to give you advice that might be perfectly good, but not for you. You want financial advice from people who either are or recently were in similar financial situations to yours, but managed that situation successfully – or professionals with a track record of successfully helping people in that niche. And so on, you get it.

Which brings me back to why I picked “job hunting” as a topic for example in the first place. I’m in that space! I give that kind of advice! And if you listen to me, I want you to do this exact same thing. Consider who I am. Consider my circles, consider my bubble. Consider that I’m a stranger to the world of academia, for example. If you’re trying to get tenure, I have no idea how to help you. Some of my advice might turn out to be helpful, but it would be accidental.

I’m aware of my bubble – maybe not fully aware, but probably more than most. Even if I can help 1% of people, that’s millions; so I’m content. But as you go out gathering advice, remember: The objective measure isn’t how many people the advice is right for. The objective measure is whether you’re one of them.

Stuff steals time.

Remember always that “stuff” is a means to an end. We want many things – happiness, status, respect, freedom, legacy. We almost never want “stuff,” we just want stuff to represent those things, to be a vessel for those things in our lives.

Sometimes they are! Even though I’m generally a minimalist, I acknowledge that sometimes a physical thing can actually carry those aspects through your life for you. Like Jack Sparrow says, “What a ship is… is freedom.” My car, despite the demands it makes of me in terms of time and money for maintenance, makes me more free on net than I would be without it. A well-deserved trophy for a noble victory might focus some status on you, which isn’t necessarily bad. And so on.

But more often than people realize, stuff actually drains those things out of you, primarily by draining the time out of your life, time you would spend pursuing those things more directly.

Every day, people lament that they can’t seem to ever get their laundry all the way done and it drains both their free time and their contentment to constantly have that battle, never once considering that they should just throw away 90% of their clothes. All stuff has a maintenance cost, and it’s really a maintenance opportunity cost because whatever juice you’re spending keeping your stuff in a useful shape is juice that could be spent on anything else.

A car might be freedom, and a castle might be status, but a castle certainly isn’t freedom – and the best cars for freedom aren’t the best cars for status. And an extra pair of shoes might not be any of those things. In the same way that people don’t really want money, but rather the things money can buy, people don’t really want stuff either – they want the way stuff makes them feel.

Consider how you want to feel. Then, consider your stuff. Is it helping? Or, like the laundry you can never quite finish, is it actually getting in the way?

Sometimes, not knowing something is itself a clue to what you don’t know.

Consider: your significant other is mad at you, and you have no idea why. Sure, forthright communication would be best – but remember, you have to meet halfway there. The fact that you don’t know why they’re upset might be why they’re upset.

Confusing and frustrating? Sure. But not less true.

Consider leading a team in business. All of your people are constantly about to quit, because people outgrow jobs. Do you know why they’re going to quit, specifically? Do you know if they’re frustrated by the work, getting better offers, or have a problem with a colleague?

If you don’t know, then that’s the reason. It’s important that you know, and not knowing is a sign that you aren’t holding up your end of the relationship. That’s the tie that binds, and you need to be aware of it.

Many, many things have a tendency to fill the available space provided for them. The way gas will always expand to fill all the available space, many conceptual things do the same. It’s a constant struggle for many that their expenditures constantly expand to fill all the available money they have – no matter how much they make, they always seem to spend it all and have none left over. Tasks often take as long as we allot them; if you give yourself 2 hours to clean your house it will take 2 hours, but if you give yourself 8 hours the same task will mysteriously take all that time.

Another feature that seems to always remain constant regardless of the space for it is “overthinking.”

If you take a group of five smart people and give them three days to work on a very important problem, you’ll see a certain level of activity. Good brainstorming, engineering of solutions, detail-oriented thinking mixed with big-picture focus. It will feel like a good approach to the relevance of the issue.

But if you take those same five smart people and give them the same three days, but give them a tiny, inconsequential matter to work on and you will see all the exact level of energy, work, and effort.

What you won’t see is those five people saying “This thing really doesn’t matter much, because we’re deciding what color to paint the back door of the post office, so let’s all just phone it in.” That almost never occurs to people. That’s the task at hand, so its “importance” will expand to fill the space their minds and schedules have provided it.

The lesson here: it’s easy to fall into the trap of letting other people set your scope for you, and for you to believe it. Be careful. The macro view is valuable, even if it means you have to look beyond what you’re actually working on. Keep the effort where it will do the most good.

I once heard: “Only a fool troubles his sleep with his worries. In the morning his worries are still there, but now he’s tired.”

This is good advice. I rarely worry in general, but especially not when I’m about to sleep. I have enough trouble sleeping without adding worry to the mix.

Do what you can the evening before, and do what you can in the morning hours. But the night is yours, always. Keep it and treasure it. Don’t give it to demons like worry.