You can do anything you want. That isn’t the same as saying that your actions have no consequences. You own those consequences, but you own the actions, too. Don’t ever forget it.

The more versatile you keep your life, the more situations you can encounter with immediate adaptation. You can add and extract value more easily. Keep yourself modular.

Your goal isn’t to never make mistakes. If anything, you should probably make more than you make now; more people are too risk-averse than the reverse. No, your goal should be to keep the average cost of your mistakes low.

Especially relative to the average learning you get from a mistake, the cost of mistakes is more relevant than the frequency. If you can maintain an excellent cost:learning ratio for your mistakes, then the math alone explains why you should make more!

Consider: how much do you gain from learning something new? How much is more wisdom worth to you in the medium and long term? Whatever that number is, just make sure your mistakes cost less than that. Make your mistakes in an environment that makes them easy to recover from. Pad the edges and put on your helmet, and then go bonkers.

The version of you that exists three years from now will be far better off with this strategy than simply one of “make as few mistakes as possible.” Making this mistake would be very costly, so don’t.

Happy New Month!

August is always the most surprising month for me. Personally, I’m not much of a “summer” person. I love autumn and winter, so my whole life has been spent basically “enduring” summer and its deathly heat until better seasons came along. Even when I was in school and summer meant a break from it, I preferred the rest of the year.

Now, of course, I have kids – and they haven’t inherited my dislike of the season. Or maybe they’re still just young enough that the “vacation” part is so primary. But in either case, I vow this month to live it up. To embrace the summertime, do some fun hot-weather stuff with my kiddos, and maximize their fun before the new school cycle begins.

It’s good to get out of your own comfort zone, especially with people you love. May your own August be just as fun!

No amount of stress, pain, worry, or uncertainty can darken the world even a tiny bit while the laughter of my niece rings. I can say “Who’s your favorite uncle” a hundred times, and every time she’ll throw her little hands up and yell “Uncle Johnny!”

These fonts of pure joy, they are everywhere you look. Mostly we run from them because some part of us wants our pain. We don’t want it to evaporate in the face of a child’s giggle because somehow that will lessen our struggle, make it seem like we were upset over nothing.

It will lessen your struggle, because you were upset over nothing.

Look, problems are real. You’ve got to solve them. But you don’t need to feel anything you don’t want to feel. So go feed some ducks, watch a sunset, or tickle your niece until you’re both laughing so hard you can’t breathe. Then come back and solve the problems with a smile on your face.

Our view of history is so strange. So much of what we know about the past is based on which objects or writings randomly survived. When it comes to knowledge of things that happened thousands of years ago, it’s never based on deliberate messages preserved for that purpose. It’s always something like some random receipt for bad copper or the rules of a weird game of chance that happened to survive, and then we have to extrapolate based on that.

That’s true of distant history, but it’s true of yesterday, too. We don’t appreciate how random so much of our lives really are – how many things that we know, we only know because one of a million possible combinations of moments occurred at exactly the right time.

To make good decisions, you need to understand that you can’t really control this. You’re not so much planting and picking crops as you are catching meteorites. Good things are happening all the time, but you have a very small field of control – it’s basically just you and your reactions.

It’s an adventure! It’s fun, and it’s joyous, but it isn’t secure. It can’t really be planned or controlled. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

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.