Aim the arrow, fire the arrow, forget the arrow.

There are three steps to firing an arrow. All are vital, none can be skipped.

First, you must aim the arrow. If you don’t do this, the arrow will not strike what you want it to. You can get so good at aiming that it takes very little time or effort, but you must still do it. And if you do it for too long, your arms will grow weak and your mind will wander, and so too will you fail.

Second, you must fire the arrow. The moment of decision, the commitment to the act.

Third, you must forget about the arrow. From the moment it is loosed from your bow, there’s nothing more to be done. It will strike or it won’t, but if you’ve aimed carefully and fired with conviction, that’s all you can do to affect the arrow’s flight. Now is the time to look not to the target, but to the quiver. Before the arrow has struck or missed, you should be drawing your next.

Do not forget any part of the arrow’s journey – nor yours.

Sensory pleasures are easily fooled. This isn’t a bad thing, if you’re aware of it.

Is that really a wonderful steak you’re eating, or does it just have a good blend of spices on it? Who cares? There’s no deeper meaning behind indulgences like these. It’s just something for you to enjoy – so enjoy it, regardless of why.

In movies, you can often “trick” people into thinking a particular plotline was deep and meaningful by resolving it in slow motion with emotional music playing over it. But there’s no trick – the whole point was just to tug on your heartstrings a little, and if it did that, then mission accomplished.

The point is, you can dress up your life’s experiences however you want, and your enjoyment is your own, independent of anyone else’s evaluations. There is no “real” anything in this sphere. You just smile, or you don’t. So drown that steak in ketchup if you like it – even if I don’t. After all, who’s eating it?

My general demeanor is pretty minimalist as far as physical objects go. I don’t like to own a bunch of stuff. When I do own something, I like very much for it to be organized well, which leads me to often build little “kits” for things.

I’ll pick a container and a space, and then try to make as complete of a set of useful things as I can within that tiny space. I prize efficiency. I want to just be able to grab my “fix it kit” and know I’ve got most of the bases covered, for example. When I go camping, I have my “camping kit” and don’t want to own more.

To that end, even within my minimalism, I can be something of a completionist. I don’t want to own more than I have to, so I want the things I do own to be versatile, efficient, and high-quality. I don’t want to have to get some new object for some ultra-specific purpose that will only appear in my life a handful of times.

The lure of “collect more of this thing because this thing exists to be collected” is there, but I try to avoid it. So should you, my friend.

The smaller the scope, the more good you can do.

Big problems exist, at least in part, because of operational hurdles, coordination problems, and even certain parties being invested in the problem remaining. But no one is stopping you from picking up the trash at your local park or buying a meal for a person in need in your neighborhood.

Sometimes big, systemic overhauls are needed, and good people need to work together on them. But that’s often a lot of effort that could have just made a thousand smaller changes with almost no resistance, and those add up to a better life.

Don’t ignore the small stuff. If you want big changes to environmental policy but you won’t pick up a piece of litter and throw it out while you’re walking across a parking lot, then your values are aligned to the wrong scale. Good is good, no matter how small.

If you start pouring concrete before you’ve built a wooden frame to shape it, you’re going to end up with a big blob. Once the concrete starts pouring, it’s pretty much impossible to build the scaffolding; the concrete comes too fast and is too heavy.

Any new project or endeavor works like that, too. Let’s say, for example, that you have a baby. Imagine coming home from the hospital with the baby as the first step – and only then deciding to look into things like a crib, diapers, baby-proofing, etc. You can see what a disaster that would be! The baby is the pouring concrete; in order for it to pour into the shape you want (in this case, a happy home with a thriving and healthy child), you have to build the wooden frame first. You needed to already have a crib, diapers, formula, an accommodating schedule, family support, etc.

Whether it’s having a baby, taking on a new job, or anything at all that uses your resources, remember – by default, it will not only fill every inch of available space in your life, but it will do so with disastrous results. You prevent that by deciding in advance what shape you want that thing to take in your life, and then building a box for it in that shape.

So before you take on any new responsibility, take a little time and write out what shape you want it to be. Where are its clearly-defined borders? What does it look like inside those borders? Then do a little shopping and a little communicating, and build that frame. Because the concrete pours from day one, so anything past that is too late.

If you were to describe someone as “in shape” or “athletic,” you could be describing a number of different qualities. Maybe that person is very fast. Maybe they have great hand-eye coordination. Maybe they’re super strong, or an awesome jumper, or win a lot of wrestling matches. You wouldn’t necessarily assume they were all of those things, though.

Maybe because so much of that is assessable visually, we don’t tend to think that, by default, a very strong weight lifter is necessarily going to be a very fast runner or be able to accurately throw a ball. We recognize those as different skills, even if they fall under a broader category of “athleticism.”

We definitely don’t do that with intelligence, though. When it comes to brainpower, we tend to assume that if someone is “smart” then they’re smart on all possible metrics. If there is a quality that we associate with being smart, then we assume all smart people have that quality.

But “smart” can mean a lot of things, too! It can mean you have a good memory, or it can mean you’re good at puzzles, or it can mean you’re good at visualization, or it can mean you’re quick to understand concepts, etc. It absolutely doesn’t automatically mean all of those things.

In the scientific sense, there’s a lot about the brain we don’t know. But even in the everyday social sense, there’s a lot about how we treat intelligence that we get wrong. The important takeaway is this: if you observe someone with an unusual mental trait, don’t assume any others. That just wouldn’t be smart.

If you talk to enough people about the choices they’ve made in their lives, you’ll start to notice that there are two very different definitions of “easy” out there.

Some people use the word “easy” to mean “did not require much effort.”

And other people use the word “easy” to mean “did not require many choices.”

I’ve talked to people who took incredibly laborious, gruelingly difficult paths through life because – in their own words – it was “just easier” to take that path than to choose a different one.

Neither definition is wrong, of course. Labor is hard, but making a ton of decisions and plans can also be taxing. But you shouldn’t kid yourself that you’re doing these things because they’re easy – rather, you’re choosing one form of difficulty over another. Once you realize that, you may also realize that there’s an optimal balance between the two kinds that would work better than minimizing one value to maximize the other.

You must plan, and you must labor. How much of each is up to you. Find what works, not just what feels “easy” – because believe me, “Easy Street” is a long hard road indeed.

People constantly generate self-fulfilling prophecies. You do it whether you want to or not, so you might as well harness this for good.

If you meet someone that says “People, as a rule, are selfish jerks,” then that person will be proven right again and again. But they’re creating the conditions for this; their belief affects their demeanor, their demeanor affects their choices, and their choices affect how people interact with them – and even which people are around to do so. In other words, they’re callous and mean, so the people around them become that way, too.

If you say “People, as a rule, are kind and thoughtful,” then you’ll act accordingly. You’ll make it easy for people to be nice to you, and you’ll generally end up surrounding yourself with kind and thoughtful folks.

The world is full of people of all stripes, so no statement about them can be universal. But it can be true of your world if you make it so.

So, decide for yourself what you want to be true, and then act as if it was. Even if it only nudges the world in that direction, that’s better than the reverse.

When you’re truly done with a project or experience, are you satisfied or forlorn? Contented or hungry for more?

There is health in both. Balance is hard.

“I don’t know what they’ll write on my tombstone. But I’m glad you’re here.”