When my oldest daughter was about 2, she really, really wanted to get on the “big kid” swing at the playground. I have a rule, however, for all my kids: you may play on anything you can get on yourself. If you can climb the tree, you’re allowed to be in it. If you can’t, I won’t put you there. This helps kids explore (and push!) their own boundaries, makes them overall safer and more capable, etc.

But my daughter was crying. “Please Daddy, please help me get on the swing!” I was in agony. I knew the right thing to do, but my resolve was breaking. Somehow, I found the strength to hold fast. I told her that I believed in her, but that if she wanted to get up there, she had to do it herself. I’d put her in the little kid swing and push her all day, but if she wanted to be in the big kid swing, that was for big kids that could get up there all by themselves.

She sobbed. She pleaded. But also, she kept trying. And after about the 30th attempt, she managed to get one little knee up into the saddle and pulled her other leg over, and then she was up there! And immediately – immediately – she turned to me and said:

“See Daddy? I told you I could do it.”

She got in and out of that swing in 2 seconds flat another hundred times that day.

Doing things for other people is a kindness, of course. Helping is virtuous. Small tasks to ease a burden or big tasks to ensure survival – these are good! But when you step in and accomplish someone else’s goals for them, you curse them. You tell them, in a voice that rings loud and clear: “I do not believe you can do this.”

Sometimes you may need to say that. Sometimes your two-year-old wants to climb into a swing, and sometimes she wants to drive the car. Sometimes a person really is about to fail, starve, hurt themselves – and you need to save them from their pride. But if you’re going to do that, be certain. Be certain it’s not your pride motivating the actions. Let someone try and fail. Let them even, perhaps, hurt themselves a little. Because they cannot succeed without trying, and they cannot try without obstacles.

If you remove a cocoon from a butterfly, instead of letting the butterfly struggle and shake it off on its own, the butterfly will never be able to fly – its wings will be stunted and weak, too fragile to take to the air. The butterfly will die.

All people have wings somewhere inside their cocoons. Cheer them, mentor them, but keep your hands off as much as you possibly can. Give them the blessing of raising your expectations of what they’re capable of. Watch them fly.

On a long enough timeline, everything is sand.

Let’s say you’ve got “it” all figured out, whatever “it” is. The process works. It gets the results you want. The ROI is great, the effort is minimal, and everything just clicks. You run the play over and over, and it puts points on the board every time.

Maybe not as many points as it used to, but still – points!

And okay, not every time anymore, but more often than not.

Well, maybe less often than not these days, but it’s still reliable and…

…and then it isn’t. What happened?!

Everything is always falling apart, that’s what happened. Problems don’t stay solved. Entropy increases and the world spins, and if you keep doing the same thing over and over the returns diminish.

Success is a platform to jump from, not an end state that lasts forever. Just as no failure is permanent, neither is any success – life keeps going, and you need to go with it. If you’ve been running a successful play for a while, it’s time to re-examine it, because it won’t work forever.

It’s all hills and valleys. For better or for worse, nothing is permanent – so keep going, my friend.

Often, the best way to lead is to do things that very much do not look like leadership. Here’s the scenario:

You want to do something; more accurately, you want something done, so you start doing it. The thing in question is valuable and important, and you work hard on it directly. Your work, for whatever reason, is visible – and so people start wanting in. Maybe they’re inspired by the mission itself, or maybe they just admire the dedication with which you’re pursuing it. Maybe they just think you’re going to succeed and they want in on the reward. It doesn’t matter – what matters is that those people start asking how they can help.

And this is the paradox – in order to maximize on that situation, you have to break your own flow state. You have to get out of “the zone” and start figuring out how other people can help. You didn’t set out to be a leader, you just wanted some end goal. And now, suddenly, you have a team.

You can ignore it, of course – but that’s a squandered resource. And many people do it badly, losing their forward momentum because they switch too hard in the other direction, trying to build enduring bureaucracy instead of just getting the minimum scaffolding set up to get the whole thing across the finish line. But if you get it right, not only does the thing get done, but you get to celebrate it with a whole squad.

That crucial first ingredient – just going for it yourself because you want it done – is missed by a lot of people who want to lead. They try to lead before they try to just do. But in the same way that you can’t write a love letter before you know who you love and you can’t get an application ready before you know what the job is, you can’t lead a team before you know why they’re assembling in the first place.

If you really want to be a leader, go out and start with your team of one, doing something worth following.

In a formal context, every conversation buys the next one.

(I’m not talking about friendship, here – hopefully those conversations flow organically and are enjoyed by all for what they are!)

Whenever you’re working with someone, imagine there’s a little gas gauge on the relationship. Every conversation, every interaction, uses up a little of that gas. When it hits “E,” that person won’t want to work with you anymore.

In sales, that means you lost the deal. In an interview process, that means you didn’t get the job. In a working relationship, that means losing the rapport of a great teammate. All things you want to avoid!

So your job is to make sure you’re putting in more gas than you’re taking out. Every conversation has to buy the next one, by making sure the other person is getting something valuable out of every interaction. It can’t just be all focused on a big end goal – people need milestones.

In a sales process, for example, you might know that closing an eventual deal will be very beneficial for the other person, helping them solve a problem in a big way. But along the way, you also have to put gas in the tank, or you won’t have enough to make it across the finish line. Make sure that the demo you’re showing them isn’t just helping you, but also giving them something actionable or helpful to do right now. That’s putting gas in the tank; that’s buying the next conversation with this one.

In a professional context, think of every conversation as an interview for the next one, and go into it with intention and purpose. If you do, you’ll never run out of gas.

Imagine you are a scientist, testing whether a particular process will yield the result you anticipate. You do the first experiment, and the process does not, in fact, yield that result. Which of the following is an appropriate internal reaction to have?

A. “Time to record this information and move on to the next experiment.”
B. “I should adjust my experiments so that I’m more likely to get that result next time.”
C. “This process is bad and I should abandon it entirely.”
D. “I’m a bad scientist, and I definitely don’t belong here.”

That’s right, the correct answer is “A.” You know this. Yet many, many times people will take actions that align with the other three internal reactions, all the way to “D!”

I’ve seen it. Someone applies for one job in a new field. They get a rejection letter. Their reaction? “I guess I don’t belong in that field.”

A good scientist knows the true wisdom: “Data” is plural. You can’t make huge decisions from one result. You can’t take one failure and make it core to your identity. You need to make your failures atomic: small, isolated from the rest of your behaviors, and used for data collection.

You will fail. A bunch of times! If you let every one of them affect you in profound ways, your life will become warped beyond recognition.

Some resilience is always necessary to be a scientist. But the method works.

You can’t charge tolls on burnt bridges. Don’t destroy capital assets. If it’s caused you a loss, that’s not relevant; what’s relevant is whether or not it will be a net gain or loss in the future.

I believe that the secret to a happy life is to embrace unfairness.

Here are the things that, in my experience, cause people to be deeply unhappy:

1. A lack of self-worth; a sense that your life is a net negative for the world. The stain on the soul that comes from selfishness.
2. Expecting something that doesn’t happen.

That’s it. Those two categories encompass pretty much everything that makes people deeply unhappy. You can be miserable because you’re not doing the right things to keep your soul in shape, and you can be unhappy because you’ve projected the solutions to your unhappiness out into the world and the world failed to live up to that impossible ideal.

What does this have to do with unfairness?

Well, that means that in order to be happy, you have to embrace a contradiction. According to premise #1, in order to be happy you need to do things for others – you need to make the world better and treat people with kindness, honesty, and generosity. And according to premise #2, you need to do that without ever expecting that anyone else will do the same in return.

That’s pretty unfair!

But if you do it, here’s the thing: you will be happy.

All of my moments of unhappiness have come from straying from one of those two premises. I’ve been unhappy when I’ve treated others more poorly than I should have, and I’ve been unhappy when I’ve expected others to treat me better than they did. But both of those things are under my control.

The dark sickness of the spirit comes from the terrible trick your mind tries to play on you. Your mind says that because you are kind to the world, you should expect the world to be kind to you. And then the world says because the world wasn’t kind to you, you no longer have to be kind to the world.

And if you listen to those words and embrace them, you will be unhappy for the rest of your life. Perfect fairness is being a miserable bastard to the world forever, and getting miserable bastardry in return. That’s perfectly fair, and no way to live.

You must demand better from yourself than you expect from the world. If you do that – and never fall into the trap that they are in any way connected – then you will be happy. It isn’t fair, but it is good. It is good that your own happiness is so directly connected to things you can control. Do unto others not as you would have them do unto you, but do unto them far, far better than you would ever expect in return.

And be happy.

If you want to improve your life dramatically, learn to be right about things without other people needing to be wrong about them.

There are many things I believe I’m right about. While I’m never 100% certain, I’m certain enough to act upon them – to let these beliefs influence my life. Sometimes, I see people publicly stating the opposite of the thing I believe to be true. Do you know what I do about it?

Nothing.

Why would I? Me being right doesn’t depend on them being wrong. I don’t need to correct them, convince them, or prove anything to them. I just keep living my life. Most of those people have zero power over me, so I gain nothing by going out of my way to interact with them.

In other words, I can be independently right. I don’t need to win my right-hood from anyone else. Often I see people falling over themselves to make sure other people know how wrong they are about this or that, and the world just keeps right on spinning. You waste a few breaths, you get frustrated, and along the way, you get a little more close-minded, too. Just the experience of being frustrated about someone else’s refusal to see “the truth” makes you dig in a little harder on your position.

Be right, be independent, be free.

Sometimes, the point is to fail. In fact, the point is sometimes to maximize failure.

When you roll that car frame down the rail towards the brick wall with the checkered mannequins inside, you’re not hoping they survive! You’re trying very hard to make that crash as spectacular as possible. If the test car doesn’t hit the wall hard enough to destroy the dummies inside, the engineers don’t go “Hooray, safe on the first try!”

If that happened, they’d know they failed at failing.

This is different from just the acceptance that some failure is inevitable on the path to success, so you try your best to win but you mentally prepare yourself to be okay with losing a bit first. No, this goes beyond that. This is saying, “Failure is inevitable on the path to success, and you learn the most from failure, so I should maximize the disasters in order to maximize the learning.”

If you want to learn about something, often the best way is through disaster. The brilliance of the crash test isn’t in trying to avoid failure, it’s in harvesting it. Going from “hunter/gatherers” of failure to failure agriculture. No more free-range failures! This is about manufacturing them, so that you can maximize your learning.

Those crash tests aren’t just throwing cars at walls. Besides the obvious features keeping all humans safe, there are about a thousand cameras, sensors, and other features designed to scale up the learning process. No humans are harmed, and we gather incredible volumes of data. That’s what you’re after. Safe, high-information catastrophes.

People often tell me that I’m very good at interviews; I hope so, because I train people how to interview well. Some of what I know I learned from formal training in HR & recruiting, and some I learned from intense reading on the topic. But you want to know how I learned most of what I know?

I purposely would apply to roles that I either wasn’t that interested in or thought were real long shots, and I’d be weird on purpose. I’d try very unusual approaches to my conversations or my prep. I’d pull the kinds of stunts that you only see in comedy sketches. One time I actually responded to the “How would you describe yourself” question with “employed here.”

Those were my crash tests. They were “safe” environments because nothing was on the line – but I learned an incredible amount about what kinds of stunts were “too much” and which ones actually landed. I learned about conversational flow, rapport, and negotiation. And I even got offered a few surprising roles along the way.

Finding a safe way to break something is an incredible way to learn about it. Go beyond just the acceptance of a little failure, and create some more on purpose. You will be amazed at how quickly you learn when you crash.

A large gathering of my family happened this weekend. Parts of my extended family from thousands of miles away were in town, and the plan had been to get everyone into the pool.

It was pouring rain today. But other than that, it was perfect. Perfect temperature, no lightning or anything, just a marvelous day – except for all the water falling out of the sky.

But… so what? That pool was filled with people anyway. Everyone just decided they didn’t care, and why should they? You’re getting wet either way! The younger kids all wanted to stay in that pool all day, and they had a great time. In fact, in several ways, it was even better – no bugs, no sunburn, no hot concrete to walk across.

There’s a broader lesson here; isn’t there always? We so often mentally associate two or more things together, like “swimming” and “sunny day,” that we fail to see the opportunities to enjoy things we love even without the bundle. Sure, a sunny day might be a great day to go swimming. But that doesn’t mean you can only swim on sunny days.

You can do 99% of the stuff you like in less-than-ideal conditions and still have an absolute blast. You don’t need the perfect moment. Swimming in the rain is just as fun.