When I was younger, I loved catching lightning bugs (you might call them “fireflies,” but the common term ’round these parts is “lightning bugs”). Pretty much every kid does, if they live in an area where they emerge around dusk. They’re magical.

I was a fairly inquisitive kid, and one thing I knew about when I was around 8 or so was the relationship between a creature’s survival and the various ways that creature competed for that survival with the other creatures in its ecosystem. I knew that all living creatures had to have some evolutionary advantage in order to survive – it had to be fast, or strong, or poisonous, or armored, or camouflaged, or whatever.

So one day I asked my dad: “How are lightning bugs still around? They don’t sting or bite, they’re so slow that a human kid can catch them easily, and they actually advertise where they are. They seem like they’d be the easiest meal for any predator, ever. What keeps them alive?”

And my dad laughed. He said, “Go eat one.”

Apparently, the goo in their butts that makes them flash tastes absolutely horrible if you eat it. Our dog had eaten one when it was a puppy, and my dad had watched for the next 45 minutes as the dog hacked up the taste, chewed dirt, and even licked the sidewalk in an attempt to get the cloying, abominable taste out of its mouth.

So that was the lesson – some things are poisonous, or armored, or camouflaged, or speedy, or whatever as a way of defending what they have. So if you see a creature that has none of those things, then chances are good that the creature doesn’t have anything anyone wants.

That’s true in the world of humans, too. If you’ve ever looked at a deal on some product or service and thought “wow, that deal is so amazing, I can’t believe there’s even any in stock” – remember the lightning bugs.

If you’ve ever played a video game, you know that often there are “levels” to beat – and once you’ve done that, you’ve done it. Sure, you can play a favorite level again and again, but each time will be a little less exciting, a little less challenging. Thrill may eventually give way to nostalgia, but you’ll never get what you got the first time.

That’s not a knock against the design of the game! The level can have been wonderful, but once you’ve beaten it… you’ve beaten it. You’ve overcome the challenge, gotten the prize, gathered the story.

Keep that in mind in your life. Sometimes you feel like you want to move on from something, but this thought confuses you, because you can’t think of anything wrong with that thing. There doesn’t have to be. You simply might have gotten everything you’re going to get out of that level and it’s time to move onto the next.

People are far too dismissive of their own ambitions and desires.

Here is a truth: the best you are going to get is the best you can visualize. You won’t always get it! But you’ll never get better.

This means if you water down your own ideals, the best you can hope for is the watered-down version of your dream.

“Yeah, in a perfect world, I’d love to buy that cabin in the mountains, but…” Right there, in that statement, you killed that dream. Whatever comes after the “but” is what you’re going to get.

Dream of the perfect world! You won’t always get everything in it, but the dream is necessary to even attempt it. If you aren’t at least starting with your ideal visualization, no one else is going to come along and inflate it. Aim high – aim for the perfect world.

Sometimes there is value in making things very difficult for yourself.

There are two potential upsides to enduring a very difficult environment. If you manage to maximize both of those upsides, then the trade is usually worth it.

Upside #1: Personal development. If the difficulty of the environment is proportional to how much you’ll learn in that environment, that’s a powerful asset. For example, imagine you want to learn about the restaurant industry. You have two options for an entry-level role – one is a chill, somewhat slow mom-and-pop restaurant and the other is a high-intensity restaurant that’s part of an upscale chain. One job is harder than the other – perhaps gruelingly so. Both jobs will probably pay similar rates at entry level. But if you’ll genuinely learn 5x as much, 5x faster in the harder job, then that’s a major boon.

Upside #2: Reputation. If everyone knows that the environment you came from is extraordinarily difficult, then your successes there count for more than similar successes in an easier environment. If you finished in first place in the 100m dash, then it matters whether we’re talking about the Olympics or your local neighborhood fun-run day. Going back to the restaurant example, working for Gordon Ramsey comes with it the well-known reputation that it’s a crucible, so success in that environment improves your reputation. But if your boss or environment isn’t well-known, then you might just be enduring all that for no real extra benefit.

So, add those two together. Is the environment one where the intensity of learning matches the intensity of necessary effort, and does everybody know it? If so, then it’s very likely worth the effort to succeed there in the long run. If one or the other isn’t true, then it might not be. And if neither is true – if it’s harder but you don’t learn more, and nobody on the outside has any concept of how hard it was there relative to other options – then it definitely isn’t worth it over your other options.

Putting yourself in a hard situation deliberately can have huge upsides. But make sure it does before you do it!

In a boxing match, it’s bad to get hit. You’d rather not! Getting hit is painful and decreases your chances of winning the fight, not to mention potentially leaves you with lasting injuries. It would make sense to say “I’d like to minimize my chances of getting hit,” but if you actually choose actions that minimize your chances of getting hit every second of the match, you will definitely lose.

Why? Because throwing a punch of your own means taking at least some posture, energy and attention away from your own defense. Every time you open up your guard a little, you increase your odds of taking one on the chin. So in order to tuly minimize your chances of getting hit, you’d have to never throw a punch. But if you never throw a punch, you’ll obviously lose the fight.

There’s a term called “Pareto-optimal.” Named after economist Vilfredo Pareto, it refers to a situation where you’ve reached the best equilibrium between multiple conflicting options such that no change in any direction would reflect a better trade-off. In other words, while you might in a vacuum prefer to have both $100 and 100 cups of coffee, when forced to choose between the two there is some combination of dollars and cups where you would neither trade one more dollar for one more cup of coffee, nor would you prefer one fewer cup of coffee to get one dollar back. That point, whatever it is for you personlly, is your “Pareto-optimal” ratio of dollars/coffee.

In a fight, you’re not really trying to minimize your chances of getting hit, but you’re also not trying to maximize your chances of hitting the other guy, either. You’re trying to find the Pareto-optimal balance between the two, such that no decrease in your chances of getting hit nor increase in your chances of hitting the other guy will make it more likely that you win the fight overall. What that optimal balance is can shift from fight to fight and even moment to moment within a fight, but that’s the line you’re trying to toe. That’s what will win.

Think of every major challenge in your life like that – like a fight against an opponent. There is always a “safest” course of action, relatively speaking. Rarely is that the course of action that is most likely to overcome the challenge. Moment to moment you may feel safer, but you’re losing the fight with every second that passes while you’re up against the ropes.

You can’t adopt a fully defensive posture. You must acknowledge that you’re opening yourself up to a few blows to the head in order to increase your odds of winning overall. You must acknowledge that this means, over time, you will get punched. Hits will land, and they will hurt. You will suffer losses and setbacks.

There is no road to victory that maximizes safety.

Regardless of our abilities or our proclivities, we need other people. No matter how much we’d love to live in a cave somewhere, we cannot survive in isolation. Even beyond our physical needs, it is through other people that we find meaning and connection. Love and family and friendship and generosity and all the things that make life a worthwhile endeavor.

That doesn’t mean people can’t scare us, or hurt us, or make our lives a little worse for a time. And it can be hard to say who’s who before you know them – hence why we sometimes want to just live in a cave.

But you need to leave yourself something even when you hibernate. A tin can tied to a string, a line of bread crumbs, a periscope, something. There needs to be an escape route. Because there’s only one truly isolated perfect little cave that you’ll ever truly inhabit in your life, and that’s your grave. Don’t be in too much of a rush to get there.

In your personal life and in the spheres over which you have influence, you have to decide how you’re going to punish those who violate your standards of behavior.

You aren’t the arbiter of other people, but you are the arbiter of your life, and so a perfectly just “punishment” is to exclude people from the parts of your life that they disrespect. If you are the manager of employees, you must decide the just and correct ways of reacting to transgressions. If you help oversee a club or organization, likewise. And always, you must keep your personal circle upright.

In considering this, I notice that many people make what I believe to be a tactical error. They often punish the violation of norms with nothing more than a return to the status quo.

Let me paint a hypothetical for you: imagine that in the legal system, the only penalty for stealing something was having to give it back. That’s all. If you rob a bank for a million dollars and you’re caught, the punishment is giving back the million. No jail time, no other punitive measures, just a return to the status quo. What would that likely do to the rate of robberies?

Of course, it would skyrocket. Maybe you’d avoid robbing heavily-armed places where you might get shot, but most places would be prime, easy targets. Apart from personal scruples (which many people lack), there’d be no reason not to at least try, since there would be some chance you’d get away with it and if you didn’t, you’d be no worse off.

Transgression against the code of behavior for any given sphere must be punished by a worse fate than the previous status quo in order for that code to be meaningful.

What does that mean in your personal life? If your friend slanders you behind your back, spreading false, potentially hurtful rumors about you, we might be tempted to accept an apology and “setting the record straight” as an acceptable solution. But that’s a return to the status quo and does nothing to curb future incidences of this behavior. A more appropriate punishment might be removing that person from your circle of friends.

You teach people how to treat you by your responses to their behaviors. Never forget that you have a responsibility to the maintenance of your own life, and that requires discipline – in every sense.

Sometimes people will do something that seems phenomenally brave to outsiders as a way of avoiding what would appear to those same outsiders as an incredibly minor fear.

We all fear things differently. What seems brave to you might be because of your level of anxiety about that topic. If you’re afraid of heights, it might seem very brave to you that I climb onto my roof to fix something. But if I’m not afraid of heights, then it’s pretty routine.

So maybe someone is base-jumping, but maybe they’re also base-jumping as a way of avoiding a difficult conversation with a loved one – the thing they really fear.

Go where you’re powerful, sure. But don’t hang bravery over your fear like a portrait covering a hole in the wall. Some things need to be fixed directly.

You have many titles, and you’ll have many more throughout your life. Your title generally denotes your role within a given organization – my job has one title for me, but my kids have another, and the club I belong to has another, etc.

The more important you consider the title, the more value you place on that organization within your life.

Consider carefully which titles you’re most proud of. Which ones you want to define you. Which ones you want people to carry with them in their minds when they remember you.

Consider carefully.

I wonder how many other people are like me in this sense: when it’s time to clean and reorganize the closet, the first thing that has to happen is every single item has to get pulled out of the closet and thrown onto the floor.

Individual boxes are emptied. Drawers pulled out. It all goes into the One Great Heap. No rhyme, no reason. The closet becomes barren, and the floor becomes a maelstrom.

Then, patterns emerge. I can see the volume and shape of things. I can see from my mountaintop what deserves to return, and in what order it will do so. I can hold the whole of it in my mind, and it falls back into place so much easier than if I tried to simply move things around and re-organize from within.

This is true of everything, not just closets.

To restore order to a broken system, you must destroy that system. The realities of life sometimes necessitate that you don’t do this – but more rarely than you think! Quite frequently, depending on what you define as the borders of the system in question, you can rip it all up to see the true shape of it, unhindered by the detritus it’s gathered along the way.

It’s clarifying. Regenerative. It’s like conquering a new land, homesteading your own life. Don’t dismiss the power of it.