My son, who is recently five, just took his first solo trip to the park. Not with his big sisters or with me, just all by himself.

You will take tens of thousands of “first steps” in your life. You will walk places you’ve never walked before. You will walk in a new town, then a new state, then a new country. You might someday walk on a new planet. You will set foot on an airplane for the first time, or you will walk into your first job.

You will take your first steps down the aisle, perhaps. Or you will take your first steps toward the casket of a loved one.

You will march toward a battle for the first time, or you will take your first steps on a dance floor. Your life will be so full of first steps that you couldn’t count them all.

Each step takes you farther than you’ve ever gone before. Each step adds to the total number of steps you’ve taken, and no step detracts. The journey is always additive, the progress always forward.

When you are very lucky, you will be there for the first steps of someone else. Cherish those moments, and cheer for them. This is how we go. This is how we grow.

When I was an adolescent, I did a lot of theater, drama club, things like that. I loved the stage. For the most part, the stage loved me, too – it was easy to be there. I didn’t realize until later what a huge inherent advantage I had as a boy in that space.

If you look at any group of 13-year-old budding thespians, you’re looking at probably 90% girls or more. A handful of boys, tops. This meant, among other things, that it was really easy to audition and get great parts. I’m not a phenomenal actor and can’t sing at all, but I was a rare commodity.

I didn’t realize this was a viable, repeatable tactic at the time, but the lesson is clear now. Go where you’re the rare commodity.

No matter what you want to do, there is some space where that thing is in short supply. And if there isn’t, you can learn what is. Look around for weaknesses, gaps, shortages – and become the thing they need.

There are lots of unemployed people in the US, but there are also lots of open jobs. Why is that? Because some people will always try to sell into a crowded market. It’s human nature. You learned to make gadgets but everyone needs gizmos, but you like making gadgets. Your choice is to either learn to love making gizmos instead, or to keep making gadgets and complaining about the tough gadget market.

Survival is about shifting with the tide. The world is rarely shaped around your specific needs and wants, but you can learn to love lots of things. And few things feel as good as being needed.

Just because something is subjective doesn’t mean that you can’t be wrong about it.

Many things – even important things! – are subjective and hard to define within tight edges. Sometimes people exploit this fact in order to pull some rhetorical trickery. If you can’t define something too exactly, that leaves an opening for people to define it however they want, even to an absurd degree.

Let’s take an example – bullying. Bullying is bad, but what bullying is can be hard to exactly pin down. One of the reasons bullying can be hard to deal with in places like school is because sensitivity varies across individuals, intent is hard to directly observe, and many instances of it can devolve into “he said/she said” arguments with no clear objective result.

So if all that is true, doesn’t that mean that bullying is always whatever the victim says it is?

No, of course not.

Yes, bullying is subjective, but some things are clearly not bullying. If one student claims “She’s bullying me because she did her book report on a book I hate just so I’d have to listen to it,” then that student is over-defining bullying so loosely that it loses any influence as a term. That doesn’t mean bullying isn’t real, and it doesn’t even necessarily mean the student in question isn’t being bullied. But some things fall outside the range of reasonable subjective opinions.

So be wary about people pulling this trick. It’s an easy crack to slip through. Taking any negative but subjective topic and re-defining it so that it always conveniently wraps around the person speaking is an easy way to create a false moral high ground. Don’t fall for it – don’t be bullied.

It’s approaching. The wild is calling again. The desire to get hurt, lost, exhausted. The desire to climb the wrong mountain. To break things and suffer. And then, to conquer it all.

I’m not a “summer” person. I view the hot months as something largely to endure on my way to something I enjoy more. Summer is a fun time for the kiddos, which works out great for me; there are no conflicts between what they want to do during the summer months and what I want to do, because I want to do nothing. So we do whatever they want and have a great time of it, and then it’s back to school for them.

And back to the forest for me.

All this is to say that it’s coming. I already think about the woods at least once a day, because it’s been a long stretch of months now where I haven’t been. But the heat in the air is giving its one last dog-day hurrah before dying, and the brisk change means it’s time to get the kit in order and prepare for adventure.

I cannot wait.

Survival by strength only works until it doesn’t; one day, something is stronger. Survival by adaptation lasts as long as you can adapt. Things that can bend won’t break as often as things too strong to bend.

You can’t avoid disaster. It will always find the one edge or corner you didn’t anticipate and creep in – or it will simply blast through your strongest wall and laugh. But you can survive through cleverness and adaptability; you can be resilient through finesse if not strength.

Of all the false dichotomies out there, this one tends to get my goat the most; it’s time for another edition of “Johnny dispels folksy truisms!”

Yes, obviously we all want “good” stuff – good events, good objects, good people. But more often than you realize, quantity is the measure of quality!

Here’s a too-obvious example, but I’ll use it to make a larger point: Would you rather have a crisp, perfect one-dollar bill, or ten ratty old ones? For some things – like money – the measure of quantity is the only measure. All else equal, more money is usually better than less money, so quantity and quality are directly correlated.

Okay, now let’s look at some less obvious examples. Would you rather have a wonderful steak dinner or twenty peanut butter sandwiches? Most people might instinctively say they’d rather have the fancy dinner, but we might be measuring different things. The “quality” of deliciousness and satisfaction might be better on the steak, but what about the “quality” of not starving to death? If you’re on a strict food budget, having more food for the price is definitely the better option. That doesn’t mean you’re sacrificing “quality” – it means you’re making a better choice.

And therein lies the falsehood of the truism. Things have costs – in time, money, effort, juice. But things also serve more than one purpose, so you can’t always draw a direct line of comparison and say “This thing is higher quality than that thing.” I’d rather have ten mid-range pickup trucks than one sports car, given the same price. I can use the pickup trucks to make money! But maybe it’s more fun to drive the sports car – so what aspect am I going for? Fun or utility? The two options are each “higher quality” for a given quality.

There is no such thing as universal “quality.” There are qualities, aspects of things, and they line up with your wants and needs. The choices that best match your own desires are the best choices, regardless of some arbitrary measure like “few & expensive” versus “many & cheap.”

Decide what feature or aspect you want to maximize as it relates to your life, and then pick the option that does that. That’s the quality choice.

Those last few inches, those last few seconds! Oh how they burn!

Toiling for months is more enjoyable than waiting for the scant few minutes at the end when there’s nothing left to do. Agony!

Oh give me a hundred square miles of yard to tend rather than a foot of grass to watch grow.

I’m working on it. Like all things, it takes time.

Agonizing time.

Music helps.

This is an autumn of many changes. My family is shifting; my children are hitting meaningful aging milestones. My career is adding additional elements.

These are good changes, but all change comes with friction. There’s the stress of modifying schedules and expectations and the emotional burden of bittersweet transitions. But all things have their season, and that steadies my hand.

The end of one thing is always the beginning of another. We are wiser and stronger, and our adventures are better for it.

Understanding the motivations of others is a sure way to achieve your own ends. The world is full of potential win/win situations, but in order to discover them you need to be pretty good at finding out what other people are after.

The good news: people dramatically overcomplicate this process. It’s actually pretty simple. All you need to do is push the conversational slider all the way to the left.

Imagine that there’s a slider that controls your “conversational settings.” On the left side is “100% Absorption.” On the right-hand side is “100% Advocation.”

Most people keep that slider somewhere in the middle third of the range. In other words, most people tend to have some balance between paying attention to what information other people are trying to transmit and transmitting their own information. You want to hear their story, sure – but you really want to tell your story. And you want the other person or people to know how witty, charming, intelligent, or cool you are.

Most of us, in other words, use every second of conversation at least partially as a status-improving exercise, and this dramatically lowers our ability to learn anything.

So if you want to learn a lot about someone in a very short amount of time, simply set your conversational slider all the way to the left. Abandon entirely the idea of gaining any status yourself as part of this conversation – for ten minutes, just absorb. The other person will react almost immediately by setting their conversational slider all the way to the right, because they don’t have to jockey for it. You’re giving them the opening, and 99% of humans will take it every time.

And then what happens? Other people just talk and talk, and you get to learn.

You can find out all sorts of fascinating information this way. You can learn all sorts of facts and knowledge, but you’ll also get a keen understanding of the motivations and opinions of the speaker in extremely short order.

The other person might not walk away thinking you’re witty, charming, or cool – though they probably will think you’re kind and a good conversationalist – but you’ll walk away much, much smarter than you were.

Think about the people you spend a lot of time with – colleagues, clients, etc. What do they want? What motivates them? Most people can’t answer because they’ve never taken the ten minutes to do this, but doesn’t that seem silly? Isn’t this obviously beneficial information to have?

Give it a shot. Abandon status games for one conversation, say nothing about yourself, and do nothing but ask open-ended and general questions. Watch the information pour out.

No matter how well you’re doing, no matter how good things seem, don’t give up.

Seems like odd advice, but I think it’s more important than its more obvious counterpart. When you’re doing poorly, people might say “Don’t quit, no matter how badly you’re doing!” But I think that advice is less useful.

First, consider: some things you should quit. The sunk cost fallacy is real, and some things aren’t worth an additional helping of your finite time on this Earth. But second: when it’s really important, you don’t have the option to quit anyway.

The bigger danger for most people is giving up when they’re doing well. They get within sight of the finish line and they coast. They decide that they’ve got it on lock, or they decide that “close to the finish line” is good enough. In either case, they quit pushing – and then they lose.

It’s not a lock until you’re holding the money. Don’t quit, no matter how well you’re doing.