Scale and context are incredibly important, and humans are spectacularly bad at estimating them.

You hear of some particular evil. It’s purely bad in all forms, and so you want to rail against it. Should you?

Maybe! But maybe this thing, no matter how purely bad it is, represents such a minor ill in the grand scheme of things that your response is disproportionate.

You only have so much anger and effort to go around. Even if something is deserving of it in a vacuum, we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a world of connected, interdependent features and some of them might be “less bad” but affect far greater swaths of that world. Keep that in mind when you want to be mad.

The default, normal state of your existence is that you do nothing. Everything you do is an exception – and exceptional. By default, you aren’t flying to the moon and back every day, so if you actually did that it would be really amazing. The corollary is that it makes no sense to apologize for not doing that since not doing that is the normal state of affairs.

And yet, we do that all the time. We build enormous amounts of guilt around not doing things, to the point where we feel we have to offer endless explanations for inaction. We send out “no apologies” – that is, apologies for saying “no” – as if we were doing something wrong by doing nothing at all.

Here is the truth, as difficult as it may be to hear: you don’t owe anyone an explanation for your “no.” You certainly don’t owe anyone an apology. We live in a finite world. Even if you have infinite love in our hearts, the world does not provide us with infinite opportunities to express that love. Our minutes, our dollars, our attention spans, the very breaths of our lives are all limited, and that isn’t your fault.

I can hear your protest. “But Johnny, this isn’t the same as building boundaries in business. These are my friends and family, my loved ones. I have to do what they ask, because that’s how it works. How can I say no when these are people I care about?”

First off, I totally get you. This is a hard challenge, with a lot of emotional weight. How can we build and strengthen relationships when I’m pushing them away?

You aren’t.

That’s not what a “no” is. A “no” is a building block, part of what shapes the pathway of the “yes.” The strongest rivers flow in specific spots, while water that spreads out everywhere spreads shallow and weak. The “no” is part of the channel, which helps create the space for a deep and meaningful “yes.”

If you want to be able to give a strong and healthy no that actually builds rapport instead of eroding your own self-worth, try this:

1. Do not apologize. Strike the language of “sorry” from your vocabulary. You have nothing to apologize for, and carrying guilt in your heart turns into resentment, which makes you want to push the other person away. It also plants the seed in the other person that you have done something wrong, even if they didn’t think that to begin with! Far from making your relationships stronger, needless apologies make them weaker.
2. Offer no explanations. It’s hard, but we immediately default to giving excuses – even if they’re true, we feel like we owe this expansive description of our circumstances in order to justify the no. But that’s not only untrue, but it’s basically inviting the other person to try to “solve” this for you as if you were giving them a puzzle with your “yes” locked inside.
3. Instead, if you truly care about this person and you want to build rapport, offer an alternative.

Here’s an example: your cousin, who you love but barely see, invites you to an expensive destination wedding. It’s way outside of your budget and also lands smack in the center of your busiest time with your children’s activities. Here’s an unhealthy way to say no, but it’s what most people would do:

“Oh, I’m so so sorry! I feel terrible, I really want to be able to go, but I just can’t. We just had to fix the downstairs bathroom and the kids have a huge run of rehearsals and ugh I’m so sorry.”

You think you’re “making up” for the no (which you don’t have to do!), but you’re not even doing that. You’re saying, “here’s a list of all the things I think are more important than you.” That’s what they hear, anyway. Instead, try this:

“That sounds fun! I won’t be able to make it, but when you land back in the country, let’s go out and have a big celebration dinner! My treat, and you can tell me all about it and show me the pictures. Love you cuz, have fun and can’t wait!“

See what happened? You celebrated, you encouraged, you invited – all with a “no!” No apologies or explanations were given because none were needed.

You only have so much life to hand out. Don’t waste it on needless apologies; spend it on joy.

Everyone has a little fight in them. Everyone can pull up some righteous rage when they want to. But it helps immensely if you’re on the right side of the conflict. It doesn’t always seem that way, but right really does make might.

Consider a mugging. Someone tries to grab a woman’s purse off her shoulder and she puts up more fight than he expects. In the ensuing conflict, she has more power than she first realizes. You see, that fight is part of a larger world, a larger context. The mugger would love to believe that she’s alone, but she isn’t. If even one person sees this happening, that person is on her side. The witness might not be able to intervene, but they’re undoubtedly on her side.

If the woman loses the purse, falls, gets hurt – everyone will rally to her. If the mugger slips while running away and cracks his head, very few people will have much sympathy.

And all of these things are part of the greater conflict. Which means they’re all giving power to the person on the right side of it.

Have you ever heard the expression “don’t poke the bear?” That’s good advice, but you don’t need it if you are the bear.

If you stay in the right, that doesn’t mean you’ll never have conflict. Some people are bad, and will start conflicts because they think they can benefit from them, right or wrong. But as long as you stay in the right, you will be stronger. You will be harder to defeat. You will be the bear.

Imagine you polled a thousand people on the street and asked “where do you get your groceries?” Looking at the results, the vast majority, over 90%, say “Acme.” Wow! So Acme is the preferred grocery store of 90% of Americans?

Wait just a minute, you say. Is that a representative sample?

You check the data and discover, shockingly, it is. Somehow the pollsters have collected a thousand responses that exactly mirror the same demographic proportions of the country at large. Race, religion, gender, socio-economic status, it all perfectly reflects the broader social fabric of the country. So surely the polling is accurate!

And then you discover that the pollsters set up their station right outside of an Acme.

Back when a lot of polling was done by telephone, a lot of data was skewed or misinterpreted because people didn’t understand the way “patterns of interacting with the telephone” would impact data that seemingly had nothing to do with the phone itself. A classic example from the era before cell phones: if you conduct all your phone polling during the day, only retired people are home to pick up, so the results are going to skew enormously towards the general views of the elderly.

Nowadays, polls are often conducted via online responses. But oh boy is that going to skew things, even if it’s still overall the best collection method.

But it gets even worse when you try to measure things that directly relate to being online.

“90% of Americans spend 10+ hours a day on their phone!” …say the results of a poll that you could only access if you were online enough to see it. People on nature hikes don’t answer the poll in the negative – they don’t answer at all.

When you use your little magic box to look out of your tiny bubble, you think you’re looking out at the world. But you’re actually just looking at a very slightly larger bubble. Keep it in mind.

As much as you will hate it, it is extremely good for you to not always get what you want.

My daughter just got the news that she didn’t get the part. She practiced, she rehearsed, and she auditioned her heart out – but it went to someone else. It went to someone else totally reasonably, too: the other girl has been with the theater company longer, is a bit older, has more experience overall, and had a stronger audition. There’s nothing wrong with the decision, except that my darling and precious daughter didn’t get what she wanted and therefore I am a burning ball of rage and despair.

But I’m holding it back.

Because this is good. It’s probably breaking my heart a thousand times more than it breaks hers, honestly. The hardest thing for me right now is to avoid trying to fix – to immediately leap in with ham-fisted attempts to give her actionable advice that she won’t take and doesn’t need. Instead, I told her I loved her, that she’s going to crush the performance in the chorus, and that undeniably I will be there no matter what.

She’s ten. When you’re ten, you need ten-year-old disappointments. It builds your tolerance. The worst thing that can happen to you as a kid is if nothing bad happens to you as a kid. Because then you’re going to have a really, really rough time as an adult.

She’s resilient. She’s incredible. She will grow and thrive – and sometimes she won’t get the part. But that’s what will make her whole.

You might know a lot of stuff. You might be very smart. But the operating system that stores all that knowledge is very emotional.

Your brain is a boiling soup of chemicals held, usually, in a precarious balance. If something upsets the pot, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to add new knowledge to your database or to access what’s already there. In a real way, the software might be logical, but the hardware is as irrational as it gets.

There’s nothing you can do about that, but you can plan for it. You can make sure you’re aware of it and not try to deny it away.

I often tell my clients that the best thing they can do before a big interview isn’t to cram – it’s to meditate. Or swim, or eat, or listen to their favorite music. The point is, a final few scraps of data won’t do anything to change the outcome, but your stress level has a big impact. Getting yourself emotionally ready is the way to make great mental strides.

If I could have taught myself one lesson early in my life that I instead had to learn the hard way later, it would be that one. The various features of your total character aren’t separate. Usable intelligence relies on emotional stability, which relies on physical health, which relies on usable intelligence. You don’t have separate stats like a video game character. You can’t neglect entire facets of your being and hope that the others will be maximized.

You are a soul, and you have tools to navigate the life that soul will live. You cannot maintain only some of them.

Tonight, my middle child complained of a headache around dinner time, and it persisted until bedtime. I gave her medicine, to no effect. An ice pack did nothing. Cool water, rubbing the nape of her neck, a variety of other home remedies – nada. Nothing dried her tears to let her sleep. Out of ideas, I just curled up with her and snuggled.

And within ten seconds, she was out like a light, sleeping peacefully.

It was a good reminder of one of my biggest flaws.

Whenever there is an obstacle in your path, you have many choices. You can try to destroy the obstacle. You can choose another path. Or you can build a bridge over it.

I almost always do the first one. If pressed, I do the second. But bridges – things you build together – are harder to see when they aren’t there yet.

Sometimes though, you just have two people on opposite sides of an obstacle and all they need is to get together. Building the bridge is the very thing that makes the obstacle disappear.

Not everything has to be solved. Some things just need to be snuggled.

Today, I played a bunch of retro video games from my own youth with my three children. In an age where the media they have access to is absolutely incredible and stunningly advanced, they were nonetheless totally enraptured by these 8-bit gems.

Was it just the infectious fun of doing something with your dad, everyone laughing and sharing energy? Or are some of these things, tested by time and found enduring, really that cool?

Who cares?

It’s one thing to let the chips fall where they may. It’s quite another to hand your chips over to someone who has every reason to use them poorly.

The more agency you give someone else over your life, the less you retain. The further that person is from you, the less important you are to them. Therefore, giving someone very far away from you a lot of power over your life is an abysmal choice. You’re volunteering to be a pawn; to be treated as expendable and used for someone else’s gain.

Most of the time, when people fall for the falsehood that is someone else claiming to “want what’s best for you,” it’s because it isn’t a lie. That person might genuinely think they want that – but they have no idea what’s best for you. Only you can know that. They have their own world, and their own agenda, and of course everyone would be better off if they just fit into it. From generals to CEOs, from cult leaders to bossy members of your friend group, everyone thinks they have a Grand Plan that will work out for everyone.

Those people aren’t out to run your life poorly, necessarily. But they will run it poorly, if you let them run it at all.

If you’re working on something, it can be a surprisingly good idea to work on it twice.

Let’s say you’re trying to write a book. You’re not sure if you should do a lot of research, planning, storyboarding, collecting data, and outlining before beginning or if you should just “shoot from the hip” and do that stuff in the editing process later.

Here’s a thought: write two books. Start two distinct projects on the same topic. Use one method on one project and one method on the other. Devote time to them separately – split your original writing time in half.

Maybe you’ll find one method just works better than the other for you, and you’ll be able to know that firsthand. Maybe the combination will yield results greater than the sum of the individual efforts. Maybe you’ll just write two books!

But most importantly, the work on one will reinforce the learning from the other. Instead of wondering if you’re being too meticulous in your planning, you can just look at the other project. Instead of wondering if your writing would benefit from more planning, you look back at the first.

You can’t always build two houses – but a surprising amount of the time, if you stop to look, you can work on a duplicate without losing anything in the way of efficiency. And potentially gaining much more.