Fair doesn’t mean “equal.”

The most equal trade in the world is this: I give you a dollar and in exchange, you give me a dollar. Perfectly equal, and equally pointless.

Lots of trades aren’t equal, but they’re better than fair – they’re win/win. I give you a dollar and you give me something that’s worth more than a dollar to me, but less than a dollar to you. Since “worth” is entirely subjective, this helps us both!

So what is a partnership? It’s not a permanent, equal exchange. I mean, it can be that, but that’s not super great. If two people can each afford $2k in rent each month, then splitting the rent on a $4k/month place might get them marginally better living conditions than two separate $2k/month places. Or maybe not – do you value more space or more privacy?

Here’s a better option – two people that can’t afford equal amounts of rent living together and finding ways to create win/win trades. Maybe the person who makes more money has no time to clean. Maybe the person with less money has more time to paint. And so on.

Look at business partnerships. When you see two people partner up to start a business, it’s not because they have identical skills and are splitting the work into two exactly even piles. It’s because they have complementary skills, and the division of labor creates a mutual benefit.

So don’t look for trades, partnerships, and situations where you get out exactly what you put in. You’ll be miserable. Look for situations where you get out exactly what you want – and you put in whatever it takes to get there.

Today I made a meal for my kids that I’ve made a thousand times. My chicken-and-rice casserole is a staple of the Roccia household, and all my kids love it. It’s easy to make, so I probably end up making it once a week or so.

Today, due to having some slightly different ingredients on hand, I made a very minor change to the recipe.

You’d think I landed a rocket on the moon and came back with Spider-man. My kids went nuts. They told me they actually loved me more because of how good it was!

So apart from the fact that I’m on cloud nine because of the heaping praise I got for my cooking tonight, there’s also an interesting lesson here. Just because you’ve done something a million times doesn’t mean it isn’t still worth experimenting with a little. Especially if the risk is low, mix it up! Worst case, you have one sub-par experience. Best case, you open up a whole new universe.

And get your kids to love you a little more, too!

The joy is in the doing, not in having done.

There are things we need to do in life. There are chores and tasks which we must have completed in order to function in a pleasant state where those things are finished. I don’t necessarily want to do laundry, but I do want clean clothes. It’s fine to operate that way when it comes to those things. Sure, if laundry really made you miserable you should outsource it, but it’s fine to just “get done” those kinds of tasks with neither misery nor mirth.

But as our lives become full of those things, sometimes we get overly ambitious about the things we want to do and we over-commit. When that happens, we can turn our hobbies, joys, and pastimes into a mirthless “to-do” list, too! Suddenly we’re not eagerly anticipating our next vacation, but we’re treating it as just one more thing to “have done” so we can live in the state afterward.

Avoid this trap! If you have a huge list of those things, joys you’re trying to mechanically power through, scrap it. Take your top two or three and enjoy them, instead of just “doing” all of them.

If something makes you happy, you don’t want to be done with it. So if you find yourself yearning for that state, stop and ask yourself if you really need to do it at all.

Catching a train when you’re running late might be a matter of luck. But there are important foundations you need in order to be lucky.

You can rush, scramble, and race – but if you arrive at the wrong location it doesn’t matter if you got there on time. Likewise, even if you make it you’re not getting on the train without a ticket.

In order to be lucky, you need to be where the train is, and you need to have what the train wants. Luck is just a little icing on top.

I took my eldest to a showing of the play Camelot. It’s a great story – it ought to be after a thousand years of telling it, in one way or another. This is an old story, is what I’m saying; the fall of Camelot and the final days of the dream of the Round Table isn’t recent news.

But during this show, when Lancelot kissed Guenevere, my daughter (and her friends also in attendance) went berserk.

They didn’t know! They had no idea; this wasn’t part of their foundational cultural knowledge (yet), so this was genuinely a shock to them. And I’ll tell you – watching them react was way more enjoyable than the first time I personally learned the treachery of the tale.

Sharing a first with someone is wonderful. You get to experience your own magic all over again, plus the joy of witnessing from the outside what someone else is going through. This is why we shouldn’t just discard experiences with a “been there, done that” attitude. If something is good, then share it! Bring that joy to others, and watch it multiply in yourself.

I like the word “proof.” Apart from just being a fun word to say and spell and look at, it has such an interesting spread of definitions.

“Proof” can mean evidence of something – usually people use it to mean solid, undeniable evidence. To “prove” something means to remove all doubt, generally.

It can also mean a test copy – a “proof run” is a sample you make, often of written or other creative work, to examine closely for errors or flaws before committing to a larger run.

It can mean “defended from.” If something is waterproof, we say that it can’t be harmed by water. If your watch is waterproof, you can safely swim with it.

A bit more obscurely, “proof” is a measurement of how much alcohol is in something. If something is “80 Proof,” then it’s 40% alcohol (proof goes 0 to 200, so you halve the number to get the percentage, at least in the US – it varies by country).

Okay, so why am I using this nominally development-oriented blog to define a word? Well for one, because it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want. But more than that, I think this is a wonderful example of the beauty of the hodge-podge. People like to complain that the English language, constructed as it is from the stolen pieces of hundreds of others, makes no sense. That there’s no formal structure to definitions or even the sounds letters make. That the “rules” of grammar are obscure and arbitrary. That it’s impossible to figure out from some set of first principles.

This is all true! And that’s why English is amazing. English is a champion of new words, of stunning wordplay, of humor and poetry. We can break the formal rules and get our meaning across in how we break them. We can create clever allusions and analogies and never run out of configurations.

English is wonderful because it’s always changing – every sentence is a test run for the next one. There’s no final form, no matter how formal. It’s immune to becoming outdated because it’s so adaptable. The slang alone is evidence of it, undeniably. It’s pure, 100%, 200-proof chaos in the very best way.

There’s a lot of wisdom in being able to delay gratification. The inability to do so is such a common problem that we attribute ills of all manner to it. Rightly or wrongly, it’s undoubtedly true that some folks can’t seem to do it.

But other folks can’t seem to go the other way.

Sometimes it’s time for gratification. Time to let yourself be rewarded, to claim what you worked for. And just as some people can’t delay when the should, others (albeit more rarely) can’t seem to stop.

Memento mori. You’re going to die someday, and you need to be able to outlast your own effort.

People are complicated. They’re a mix of a lot of things. No person on Earth exists solely to be a problem for you specifically, I promise you.

You know that too, but it’s hard to remember when you have “a problem with someone.”

So don’t have a problem with someone. Solve a problem with someone.

Problems exist independently of the people involved. Sure, some problems are severe enough that the right answer is to remove that person from your life entirely, but that’s rarely the case – and it’s rarely feasible as a first option.

Ask yourself this: “If the person I have a problem with was my only ally, and I started with the assumption that they also want this problem solved, what might I say to them then?”

Envision the problem as a separate entity. Mr. Problem is sitting on one side of the table, and you and everyone else involved are sitting on the other. You and your co-conspirators are negotiating against this entity, not each other.

Other people might not see that at first. But you do, so it’s your job to bring them along. And if you do, you’ll solve a lot of problems.

I used to have a significantly larger ego than I do now. It’s still probably too big, but I can confidently say it’s smaller than it used to be. I was always terrible at humility, but I’ve learned a lot.

Part of that, I’m sure, is parenting. It’s a humbling experience; you rarely in life will get thrown into an environment where you’re expected to do so much with so little knowledge. Every day is a new thing you don’t know and have to figure out the best you can. Some of my lessons have come from other humbling experiences: maybe I was just unnaturally lucky for my first thirty years, but my 30s had more trials than the first three decades combined.

…or maybe it just seems that way to me now?

That’s the real thing that’s given me more humility. Examination. It’s hard to stay cocky if you’re always questioning, exploring, and committing to introspection. It’s hard to have a sense of awe and wonder at the mysteries of the world and a sense of excitement about growth and still think “I’m already perfect.”

But while that stuff makes you less cocky, it seems (at least to me), that it’s given me more confidence. In the same way a scientist gets more sure of the truth of their hypothesis with each experiment that confirms it, I get more strength in my values with each new experience I can examine. I long ago stopped assuming, by default, that I was good at anything. That I knew anything.

Instead, I look for ways to test and explore with purpose and intent. Ways to form and test hypotheses. Whether or not I’m right about the last ten years of my life being harder, I’m much more confident that I’ve learned more in that time.

Maybe those are the same thing.

You can be dumb in a smart way, and you can be smart in a dumb way. I’ve seen both. The former, as you might imagine, is way better for you.

Here’s how to be dumb in a smart way (and of course, I’m flippantly using “dumb” to mean “temporarily ignorant about something,” not casting aspersions on someone’s mental faculties): don’t try to pretend you’re not. Don’t try to fake knowledge or impress everyone. But don’t stay quiet, either! Own your ignorance, and you’ll own the path away from it. Ask a lot of questions! Be cheerful! Tell people what you don’t know and what you’re trying to learn. Experiment with new questions. Ask anything and everything of anyone and everyone. You’ll start out dumb, sure. But not only will you get smart fast – you’ll make a lot of friends. And none of them will ever think of you as “dumb” – they’ll think of you as curious, friendly, and excited, which are all hallmarks of intelligence.

Here’s how to be smart in a dumb way: use what you know as a cudgel. Don’t try to enlighten people or (heaven forbid) learn more than you already know. Instead, show off what you already know in a way that demonstrates that you don’t need to learn anything from any of the people listening. Put down information you’re unfamiliar with as unimportant. You’ll become dumb fast, because you won’t be learning while the world keeps making new information. And no matter how smart you are to begin with, people will view you as irritable, egocentric, and stubborn. None of which are things people tend to associate with a high IQ.

Don’t worry about what you know. Just focus on what you can learn.