When something is hard to do, and you do it, admit that it was hard. Don’t force out a statement like “it was nothing” or undersell what you did.

For one, you deserve the rewards of your work. But even beyond that – don’t trap yourself.

Let’s say you sweat and grind and claw your way to success on something and it takes everything you had. Other people see the end result but not the effort, so you downplay the effort. But now they “want to see what you can really do when you put your whole back into it!”

Uh oh.

Look, if something was hard then you don’t get extra credit by pretending it wasn’t. The opposite is true, too – don’t make it seem harder than it was. But be honest with others – and with yourself – about exactly how hard it truly was.

It’ll be a little easier next time, after all.

When power over you is exercised with the same trappings for a long time, you start to fear and obey the trappings, wherever they appear.

If I put on a police uniform and start bossing you around, you’ll instinctively obey, even though I’m not a police officer. Statistically, it’ll be way more likely that I can get you to do all sorts of stuff you don’t want to do in that uniform. But I don’t even have to go that far – if I just dress and look like an off-duty cop, speak in an authoritative tone, that will work, too.

If someone’s job title is higher than yours, you’ll defer to them even if you don’t work for the same company. Even to your own detriment.

This behavior is natural. It’s understandable. We live in social hierarchies and we learn to size them up, and then we defer to them. It’s natural that you should be more instinctively deferential to someone who reminds you of your strict teacher, your strict parents, your strict boss.

It’s natural, and you must fight it.

Like many instincts, the purpose of this one is to keep you safe. But your instincts know that the safest route is the most cowardly, the most supplicant. The safest way to live is in deference to authority. So many of your instincts are tuned to that because a huge portion of your brain is just dedicated to pushing you in the direction of staying alive until tomorrow.

Staying alive is no way to live.

Fight the instincts that keep you safe.

It’s fine to not know something. But once you know, you need to act on it. You can’t ignore truth.

If you always feel sick, you aren’t at fault for not realizing that you’re lactose intolerant and that dairy products are making you ill. But once you do know, it’s on you. If you still drown your corn flakes in whole milk, you have no one to blame but yourself.

We seek information to make better decisions. What’s the point of information that you don’t use to inform better choices – to live a better life?

Not next month. Not next week. Now. You know the right thing – so do it.

I have now been a father of three children for exactly five years.

My youngest kid turned 5 today, and he’s more than just a great kid. He represents more than just one of three wonderful children; he also represents a family that is greater than the sum of its parts. He adores his sisters, and they adore him in return; they get into legitimate adventures together. They’re a trio of courageous, fun characters who support and love each other, and raising them as a group has been much more joyous than simply adding together the joy I feel about them individually would indicate.

I’m very proud of my son. Not just on his birthday, but every day – he strives hard to be a good man. He cares about duty and kindness, he looks out for those smaller than he is (and often bigger, too), and he is a friend to all. He is as creative as he is ravenous. He is affectionate and he is brave and I love him so.

Keep up the good work, boy-o. Daddy thinks the world of you.

The world is eternally changing, and it’s always a possibility that your best value-add to the world will have a limited shelf life. You may discover that you have some bright, brilliant thing you can do – for a limited time.

Athletes, musicians, actors, celebrities of all stripes, inventors of specific devices, a certain type of entrepreneur: all of these kinds of people might find their candle burning ten times as brightly – and burning out ten times as quickly. A very, very small percentage of these people end up as Mick Jagger or something, with a 50+ year career in their highly specific niche. The remaining majority do not. And then it can go one of two ways.

Some percentage of the people who were really good at their narrow thing realized that the window for it was just as narrow. So while they were rich and famous, they hedged. They started other projects, made other bets. Look at Shaquille O’Neal. A 19-year career playing basketball (and 19 years is a long time to play basketball), but now he’s also a serial entrepreneur with a ton of successful business ventures outside of the ability to dunk a ball. He’ll never step professionally on the court again, but he parlayed that career while it was hot and now he’s set.

Everyone else ends up “washed up.”

The central lesson is this: things being good now doesn’t mean they’ll be good tomorrow, and things being amazing now almost certainly means they won’t be amazing tomorrow. Regression to the mean is a real thing. When you’re on top, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking it’ll always be like that – but there are far more washed-up players than Shaqs. And it’s not just athletes – for every Mick Jagger or Gary Oldman there are a thousand actors and musicians who were flash-in-the-pan, for every Warren Buffet or Elon Musk there’s an investor or inventor that couldn’t keep the Blackberry or Nokia on top.

When things are good, use those resources to hedge against future storms! When you have a lot of resources, that means you can do a lot of hedging, even without affecting your current lifestyle much. You just have to put aside the ego.

Somewhat topical post today: the subject is AI Art. Specifically, one complaint/controversy which seems to hang over it. Apparently one of the complaints about AI art as a concept is that the AI was “trained” using a huge amount of art created by human artists, and those artists weren’t compensated or even consulted before this happened.

If you’re not sure what I mean, think of it like this: if you Google “paintings of flowers” you’ll get a bunch of, well, paintings of flowers. AI art-bots are trained using that data to know what a “painting of a flower” looks like in the aggregate and then is able to produce a painting of a flower that draws on those elements even though it isn’t an actual copy of any of those paintings.

And this is my objection to the objection. When my daughter was learning how to paint flowers, she also Googled a bunch of paintings of flowers, and that’s how she learned to do the exact same thing – make paintings of flowers that weren’t copies of any specific piece, but that contained many of their elements.

She didn’t email those artists to ask their permission. She didn’t pay them. She just looked at their art.

That’s how everyone learns everything.

I learned how to write by reading. I didn’t pay those authors for teaching me. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and all art is partially inspired by art that comes before.

I suspect that people who object to AI art aren’t really objecting to that facet – that’s just a convenient proxy for their greater complaint, which is the age-old complaint of technology taking away our jobs that has pervaded throughout all time. People said this stuff about Photoshop… and about cameras, for that matter. But just like with all those things (and all the ones that came before and will come hence), the complaint is without merit. Technology advances, and it certainly changes art – but there will always be artists. Some will use those tools and some won’t, and that choice is also part of art. Some people play a guitar and some people use an entire sound studio full of effects and auto-tune and synthesized sounds, but the end result of both methods is still music.

And that music, however you make it, trains the next generation of musicians. And they don’t ask your permission.

In some types of work, your successes and accomplishments are very visible. In others, they’re almost totally invisible. Knowing which is which changes the ideal strategy when it comes to benefitting from those wins.

What do the professions of sales and landscaping have in common? Being good at them is highly visible. When a sales professional is good at their job, everyone sees it – from “ringing the bell” to leaderboards to just the fact that a bunch of money is coming in the door. When a landscaper is good at their job, people stop and stare, ask for cards, and admire the whole area. In both cases, being good at your job alone is a source of advertisement for your skill.

Not every profession is like that! Take IT, for example. Most people who aren’t in IT have zero idea what the IT people do. To everyone else, their successes just look like “everything is as it should be.” Nothing is broken. And of course, if there’s so much as one small problem, it’s because of “those incompetents down in the IT department,” isn’t it?

That’s a problem in human nature, but you can’t solve that. What you can do is be aware of it and plan for it. And that means if you work in a field where the successes don’t advertise themselves, it’s on YOU to advertise them. If you’re in one of those fields, just “being good at your job” isn’t enough. You need to do three things:

1. Explain what your “being good at your job” looks like, and how you can prove it to an outsider.
2. Explain how that proof provides value to another person, especially someone who doesn’t work in the same profession.
3. Capture that proof consistently and share it with your broader network.

This isn’t easy! But it’s definitely possible. Creating your own “visible success” is a matter of consistent documentation and understanding what other people are looking for. Often you have to look at what would happen if you weren’t good at your job in order to figure out how being good at it is valuable to a broader team or organization. But once you understand how other people perceive the value of what you do, you can consistently track and communicate that value.

Being able to manage a project well isn’t the same thing as caring about the outcome, being skilled at the principle technique, or knowing how to communicate about it.

If you’re a fantastic plumber, that doesn’t mean you know how to run a plumbing business. That’s a separate skill entirely. Doing the taxes effectively on that business is different than marketing well. Hiring more plumbers or choosing good suppliers – these are all separate.

The upshot: if you are incredibly passionate about feeding the homeless, that doesn’t mean you’re good at it.

It takes all kinds of people to make the world go ’round. Don’t make caring about the exact same stuff as you a prerequisite for an alliance. In fact, it’s dangerous – if you only ally with people exactly like you, then you risk having a company where everyone knows how to fix a leaky sink and no one knows how to take out an ad.

Someone says to you: “Oysters make me throw up.” You ask if they’re allergic or something, and they don’t know; it turns out, they threw up the first time they had oysters, so they made that association and stuck with it. They’ve never had an oyster since.

We do this all the time, and often with things far more important than just our preference for a particular food. We had our first job in finance and it burned us out and we had a terrible shark of a manager, so we decided “Finance is stressful and full of jerks,” and then we cut it off forever. And hey, maybe it is! But we don’t know; n=1.

Some people do that sort of dangerous association in an even more extreme manner: “I had my first job anywhere and it burned me out and I had a terrible shark of a manager, so jobs are stressful and full of jerks.”

You see how jumping to that conclusion might end up worsening that person’s overall life?

Some things are inherently a little stressful and a little hard to get right the first time. Working, dating, building something of value. That means you’re going to have initial struggles and setbacks – and if you let those things define the entire category, you’re going to miss many opportunities to achieve something meaningful.

Building social capital when you’re young is an incredibly underrated endeavor. Few things will pay off the same kinds of dividends as having plenty of people willing to do small favors for you.

Here are some simple ways to do it:

1. Ask questions, and respect the answers. If you ask someone how to do something, and then they answer you, try what they suggest. If they see you ignoring the advice you asked for, it will leave a sour taste in their mouth that will make them less likely to help you again.
2. Offer small favors, especially if they’re things you want to get known for doing. Other people asking you to work for free is often a bad sign, but offering to do the kind of work you love as a small favor lets you retain control while both promoting your skill set and endearing you to others. Win/win/win.
3. Work when it’s hopeless. If you quit working on a problem when you think it’s unsolvable, you will be quitting too early 95% of the time. More experienced people know the problem can still be solved, so they see you throwing in the towel early. Counteract this by developing a bias towards sticking it out just a few iterations longer. Very few people get joy out of doing something for you, but many people get joy out of doing something with you.

Master those habits in your early work, and you’ll build up a large “favor fund.” That will pay off dividends in your future!