Once you become attuned to the little conversational traps people lay for each other, it becomes hard not to see them everywhere. A lot of what I think about is how to avoid them because avoiding them makes me much happier. Learning to avoid them will make you happier, too.

Arguments are traps. They’re virtually never worth it – especially when you’ve already won them! This is a (slightly modified) version of a scenario I recently witnessed:

Customer: “I’d like to use this coupon to get a discount on this item I’m buying.”

Cashier: “This coupon is expired. I’ll go ahead and ring in the discount anyway, but next time make sure to double-check the expiration date on the coupon.”

Customer: “I don’t see why coupons even have expiration dates, and I don’t think I should have to check them, you should just always honor coupons even when blah blah blah blah blah…”

The cashier and the customer both made a mistake here. The cashier, perhaps unintentionally, laid a trap. The customer fell into it.

If everyone knew how to be maximally happy, here’s how this conversation would have gone:

Customer: “I’d like to use this coupon to get a discount on this item I’m buying.”

Cashier: “Okay! You’re all set, have a great day.”

Done.

Why didn’t it happen that way? Because people often make the mistake of opening their mounts before checking the words they’re about to say against the all-important metric. Have you ever heard “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything?” Yeah, let me modify that one for you and give you a rule that will radically transform your happiness if you follow it:

“If what you’re about to say won’t get you anything you want, don’t say it.”

If that cashier had thought for three extra seconds, she’d have realized: “I’m going to give this discount anyway, I’m not responsible for this customer’s future behavior, she won’t listen to me regardless, and therefore there’s no reason for me to say anything about the expiration dates.” And even though the cashier said what she did, the customer should have realized: “I’m getting what I want anyway, and this cashier has no power to affect coupon policy as a whole, and arguing with her is worse than pointless, it’s actually wasteful.”

I suspect that humans are wired for this because once upon a time, we interacted with the same hundred people exclusively our entire lives. So there was some benefit to jockeying for status and position even in mundane interactions. But that’s not the case anymore – most people you try to score a few points off will never enter your life again. So if, in the one brief interaction you’ll ever have with a particular person, you got what you wanted? Smile and nod, and enjoy your life.

Have you ever heard the phrase “Get back on the horse?”

It means to resume a productive activity after a setback or long absence. If you’ve flagged in your workout regimen, then you need to “get back on the horse.” If you lose a competition, you need to “get back on the horse” and try again.

I like the phrase. I like the imagery, but I like something else about it even more. I love the hidden extra insight.

“The Horse” is whatever system of skills and motivations you’ve conjured to be able to perform a specific task. Like a horse, there will be times that you need it more than others; it’s possible to go a long time without needing to be on your horse. But whether you ride the horse daily or not, you need to feed it daily. A horse isn’t something you can put away in a garage for a few years and then pull out when you need it. A horse will die if not cared for.

Sometimes you need to take the horse out for a ride not because you need to go somewhere, but because the horse needs the exercise so that it’s healthy and ready for you when you do need it. Often people stray from an important task for a long time and discover when urgency strikes and it’s time to “get back on the horse,” that the horse is dead.

“Don’t reinvent the wheel” is very good advice. You have already done most of the things you’ll ever want to do, just in a different combination.

Everything you do is a specific ordering of certain core components: the things you write, the way you interact with people, the sweat of your brow and the chime of your heart. You may only have thirty or forty “core components” like this – but that comes together into tens of thousands of different recipes you can make.

The upshot of this is: you don’t have to figure out how to do anything. You just have to figure out how you did it. Because you already have. Don’t reinvent the wheel – just scrap the last car you built and put the parts together different ways.

If you take a piece of Velcro and try to stick it to something like glass, it won’t work. It’s hard to climb a perfectly smooth surface; much easier to climb something that’s a little rough. The rougher the better, in fact.

You want a smooth surface when you’re going for speed. A smooth road is easier to pass over quickly than a rough one. There are fewer things to get caught on.

Now, consider your personality: are you trying to make it easy to pass over you quickly, or easy to interact with and get stuck on?

People often work very hard to be “unobjectionable.” The thing is, you can be very agreeable, pleasant, and kind while being unusual, weird, and even “objectionable.” You can voice strange opinions with kindness. You can step out of line without punching. You can even object while offering solutions.

And you should! While I’ll happily be the first person who will tell you that you shouldn’t be afraid of making a few people upset, that isn’t even really the core concept here. The core concept is that even if you care very deeply about what other people think, this is the best approach. Because if you’re so smooth you don’t have any handholds at all, then what other people will think of you is nothing.

If you want to add a fabulous new “life hack” to your repertoire, here it is: how you identify what you want doesn’t have to be how you seek what you want.

Here’s a classic example, and you may even have done this – you go to some sort of home goods store. You browse all the items, examining them with your many senses. You do more than look; you touch. You feel the heft of them, you look at their real size, etc. Then, after you’ve decided what you want, you go home and order that item on Amazon for a third of the price.

(By the way, if you’ve never done that, it’s a decent way to shop. You save money and avoid impulse buying by giving yourself a cool-down.)

In the store, you were identifying your target. You were figuring out what you wanted. But you weren’t using that same method to obtain what you wanted.

Here’s another example, one that it’s less likely that you’ve done but that is incredibly powerful – you go onto a job board to scout out potential open roles. You find some roles that look relevant at companies you find interesting. Then, you do not apply there. Instead, you find some other (less crowded, more human) way to approach the people at that company, and you get a job.

Why does this work? Because the tools we use to identify things, the aggregators and the superstores, then get crowded by people on all sides of the transaction who use that crowd to increase the transaction costs in all directions, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Job boards have more filters just as big box superstores have higher prices. If you want to avoid those transaction costs, figure out what you want, but then go find the back door.

“Buckle your seat belt even if you’re going for a short drive. Most accidents happen within 5 miles of the home.”

I remember hearing that often as a teenager in those early driving years. And it popped into my head: “That’s a dumb statistic. Of course most accidents happen near your home; that’s where most people do the most driving.”

I still wore my seat belt, but I always thought that was a dumb reason to do it. And I’ve always really disliked weak arguments for things I favored.

(Example: I’m in favor of marijuana legalization, but I once saw an ad supporting it that said “72% of Americans favor marijuana legalization, so it must be a good idea,” and every hackle I have stood up. Like… no. 72% of Americans favor a lot of dumb shit. Legalization is a good idea, but that’s not why.)

So it isn’t that being close to home is particularly dangerous (how could it be, since everywhere is “close to home” for someone), it’s just that wherever you do the most driving, you’ll have the most accidents. Duh.

But then came the second (and much more important) epiphany: yeah, so wear your seat belt.

If you ignore your seat belt when close to home because you dismiss the weakness of the argument, you’ve missed the point. It doesn’t matter why accidents are more common close to home, because the mechanism applies both ways. If you don’t wear your seat belt when driving close to home, then you won’t be wearing your seat belt most of the time.

Sometimes, the mechanism behind the “why” can seem a little suspect, but that doesn’t mean it’s an inaccurate model of the situation. And sometimes good ideas have bad arguments. Be careful what you dismiss.

I love haiku. For more than twenty years, I’ve had a meditative practice that has always been able to calm and center me amid incredible emotional stress or turmoil. I will close my eyes, and I will describe the current situation in the form of a haiku.

That’s it. That’s all it takes.

Just the momentary clarity surrounding the mental exercise of taking everything currently happening and reducing it to seventeen syllables has a marvelous effect on me. It creates serenity. It makes problems seem small and contained. It reminds me that I can create order out of anything.

There’s a similar practice that I’ve always enjoyed, which is creating acronyms as mnemonic devices. I’ve always thought of acronyms as clever, and I enjoy finding good ones. If I can take a process and embed it in one, I will once again feel firmly in charge of my destiny.

I hope that you give this technique a try, and I hope – quite sincerely – that it does for you some of what it does for me. That’s why I write, after all: to share the little things that have helped me along the way. It is regenerative to me in the extreme to think that I may be releasing into the world something that will truly help others as well.

Healing Activity Is Kindness Unleased.

Happy New Month!

April is always a cherished month here at The Opportunity Machine because this month will mark the blog’s anniversary. In honor of this, I’m setting myself two resolutions this month instead of one.

The first – I will seek out and become more of an active force of good in the world. Recently a parenting moment with my eldest led to a discussion of what it means to be an active force for good, instead of just an “inactive force for evil.” You can’t just avoid the worst acts and expect to improve the world. You must seek out the best ones.

The second resolution is to do more to challenge my own biases about who might be a positive force in my life. One of my flaws is that I can sometimes quickly decide that someone isn’t, and close that door. While I still believe you must evaluate people based on their actions, it may be true that I’m too quick to infer motivations from actions I haven’t put into proper context. I’m going to work on that.

May all your resolutions end in celebrations!

When you’re young, you can often get the feeling that everyone around you is just randomly unreasonable. That they make their decisions seemingly as the wind changes and the minds of others are filled with chaos. If you don’t pay much attention, this feeling can persist for the rest of your life.

If you do pay attention though, you learn that people definitely aren’t randomly unreasonable. They’re predictably unreasonable. Sure, they’ll make a lot of bad choices. But those choices can make perfect sense once you understand the context of the things that influence their brain.

The most important thing you can learn about other people’s quirks is that – for the most part – they’re consistent across every aspect of their life. If someone is always in a better mood after they’ve eaten, then that will be true at a party, during a fight, when stressed about work, etc. If this person is mad at you, don’t try to assuage them; feed them.

Far too often we take our own mental patterns and project them onto others. “When I’m mad, I want people to apologize profusely to me. So if someone else is mad at me, I’ll apologize profusely to them.” That’s a trap – other people aren’t you.

Know the people around you. If someone is a big part of your life, know their quirks and habits. Predict them. If you don’t – then it’s you who’s unreasonable.

If you really care about some aspect of your existence, some feature of your life that you feel is core to your comfort, then you should care about getting the best version of that thing, whatever it is. And if you care about getting the best version, then go without it for a while.

People are so terrified to go without their basic comforts for even ten minutes that they will often suffer the very worst version of that thing because to switch means disruption.

You’ve met these people; maybe you’re one of them. People who can’t stand to be single for a week so they’re constantly in terrible relationships. People who poorly engineer their lives so they can’t survive a month of unemployment and so they’re endlessly in terrible jobs. People who buy money-pit car after money-pit car because Heaven forbid they walk and take the bus for a few weeks.

Going without for a while will show you what it really means to you. It will let you map the true aches of its absence and so you’ll know which aspects are really important and which ones are shiny advertising. It will make you less susceptible to the dire, desperate need of that thing, and so you’ll be in a position of strength in negotiating for the return of its superior version.

If you even return it at all! The best part of a deliberate period of abstinence is that sometimes you realize you didn’t need the thing at all.