It isn’t your job to put out every fire you ever see. But you shouldn’t feel like you can’t pull the fire alarm.

When you see a fire, your first instinct is probably to either ring a bell or put it out, depending on the kind of person you are. Even if you’re a natural problem-solver, some fires will simply be out of your ability range, and you’ll alert the experts. But what would you do if the experts yelled at you?

What if they told you to put it out yourself, and stop bothering them? What if they blamed you for starting the fire? Well, you’d rapidly learn to stop pulling the fire alarm. Unless it was your problem directly, you’d at least hesitate next time, wouldn’t you?

We want people to alert us to problems. We want people to act as our early warning systems, but they won’t do that if we punish them for it. So if someone brings a problem to your attention that truly is your problem, don’t get upset with the messenger. They did you a favor.

And if you’re on the other side of that, remember – there will always be people who will appreciate you pulling the fire alarm for them. Those are the relationships to cultivate. They’ll do the same for you.

Why do we get distracted? I’m not talking about a sudden loud noise that makes you look up from your book. I’m talking about the longer, more enduring distractions – those that plague our days or even years.

What mechanism in our brains causes it? I want to work on a particular project – so why do other parts of my brain compete for control of the whole vessel? What disagreement do they have?

Some part of that mechanism must be something that was once helpful. Certainly, losing yourself in some delicious berries in the savannah may have made me vulnerable to tiger attack, and so different parts of my brain would have kept pulling my attention to my surroundings. If that’s the case, then is distraction no different than fear – a voice to be recognized and thanked, but ultimately unheeded?

That might be a paradigm to help me focus. It helps to not be afraid if you consider that the source of your fear isn’t the object of your fear, but rather your own brain. Likewise with anger – outside things can’t make you angry, they can only give you something to be angry about, but the choice is yours.

So perhaps distraction is no different! It’s my brain asking me to look at something else, not the thing itself. I can politely say, “Hey, thanks for keeping me alert for tigers and stuff, but I’m good. I’m gonna work on this for now.”

Perhaps you can, too!

When you’re learning about a new topic or engaging in the “scavenger hunt” that leads to new knowledge, you will never complete the journey in one step. You will have to iterate multiple times, moving closer to your goal in an often zig-zagging series of incomplete steps.

Since people would often rather complete a goal in a single (even very difficult) step than many smaller ones – especially if those smaller ones are uncertain in their efficacy – people have a tendency to be bad at recognizing this process for what it is. They get frustrated. And this leads to the inability to follow leads effectively.

For instance, let’s say you’ve moved to a new city, and you’re trying to find a new job in your line of work as a chef. Your new roommate says: “my sister is a hostess at an upscale restaurant downtown, you can go talk to her.” This is a lead.

What most people do with this lead is waste it. They go to the restaurant, sure. They talk to the roommate’s sister, sure. And they try to solve the problem in one single step by asking: “are you hiring chefs?” The roommate’s sister says sorry, they’re not right now. They say “okay, thanks anyway,” and then they go home. They go back to where they started, as if they hit a dead end. They keep looking, but they look from square one, asking people they know or looking in the want ads, etc.

Here’s how to follow a lead in an effective way!

1. Recognize that all new information gives you a new starting point. Untether yourself from your starting position – the goal is always movement. There’s no such thing as a dead end, because all information is connected to more information.
2. Adopt two personality traits during your search: Radical Honesty and Pleasant Gratitude. Be extremely candid about why you’re asking, give enough information for others to spark creative ways to help you, and be extremely grateful for every second of someone else’s time. Even if you’re not terribly creative yourself, this will often drive you along the path of knowledge. When the hostess says they’re not hiring, say: “Oh, thanks so much for letting me know! I’m new in town and I was a chef back where I’m from, so I’m looking for work again now that I’m here. I don’t really know the local restaurant scene like I did back home and don’t have many connections out here yet. It’s great to meet you!”
3. Use your new starting point to find out anything you didn’t know before. You might think you’re looking for a specific piece of new information (like, “where is my next job”), but you don’t know enough yet to figure out which rock that information is under. So don’t be picky about rocks! And the best source of information is people. Ask who else to speak to, remembering the personality traits from #2. “Hey, before I go, do you think it would be okay to meet the chefs on your team? Like I said, I don’t know anyone at all out here and it would be great to have some connections.”
4. Follow the other threads (that aren’t people) later. If you meet those chefs, ask each one where they worked before this. Ask them where they like to eat. Ask them anything. Many of those potential sources of new information won’t be people, but all sources of information are connected to people in some way. The restaurant where one of the chefs used to work isn’t a person you can question, but it has people that work there.
5. Repeat & iterate. Go through it again. Look at all the new leads you’ve generated. There are no dead ends.

If you treat every question that doesn’t give you your ultimate answer as a failure, then you’ll forever be asking only the first question, over and over. You have to let your search develop down the path. Do that, and you’ll never run out of ideas.

In your mind are truths. There are also many falsehoods and uncertainties, and you’ve got to sift out the truths in order to communicate them. This is an imperfect process.

Then, you have to convert those truths which you’ve found into words, written or spoken. Those words must carry the truth of your mind, but you won’t always know the right words or exactly how to put them together, nor be able to do so flawlessly. So this too is an imperfect process.

Then other people need to perceive those words. People’s perceptions are notoriously biased, applying filters to all information based on mood, heuristics, or even simple error. So the process of another person’s interpreting your words which carry your truths is (you guessed it) imperfect.

Then that person’s brain has to take that perception and find a place for it within their own mental model of the universe. Along the way, it may be bent or reshaped in any number of ways in order to fit in with the other truths (not to mention falsehoods and uncertainties) in their own mind. So converting your truth from their perception to their memory is of course very imperfect.

Lastly, in order for your attempt at communication to have been truly considered successful, the person receiving your truth must convert this new information into action – they must walk differently in the world based on what they’ve learned. The action they choose will be based on so many factors that your initial intent probably accounts for less than a percent of what they actually do; thus, this is as imperfect a process as you can imagine.

And yet, people get frustrated when they say something and the other person doesn’t immediately react perfectly.

Look at the journey your ideas must take! And when the other person doesn’t dance instantly like a puppet on the string of what we believe to be truth, we blame them. As if their actions had only one true purpose: to annoy us.

Look, you can’t build a bridge across a river by throwing bricks at the other side. It’s a process, and it’s a very difficult one. Respect it enough to improve it. Work diligently, work with a plan, and do not ever expect perfection – only improvement.

This is the truth of my mind. I wonder what it looks like by the time it reaches yours?

The Doppler effect for time: when years are in front of you, they seem to stretch out forever. When they’re behind you, they seem like eyeblinks.

Happy birthday, my son. May those years in front of you turn out to contain all the joy that you see in them now, and more.

My oldest daughter has had an exciting week! She was in a community theater production of Cats and then had a new belt test in karate. She absolutely nailed both, of course. She’s incredible.

A particular piece of wisdom came my way while watching her belt test. Her instructor was having them do push-ups and was (as all good instructors do) pushing them well outside of the number they were comfortable with. And as she was pushing them and counting their reps, she told them:

“Keep going until you can’t go anymore and you need a break. But remember: when you need a break, take your break in the ‘up’ position. Don’t collapse on the floor. That’s the kind of break you don’t come back from.”

Breaks are important. We’re not machines and we can’t work constantly at our highest pace. But oh what a difference there is between a break and quitting for the day (or forever)! And this is a powerful piece of advice about separating the two.

If I’m writing and I need a break, there’s a world of difference between a walk around the block and sitting on the couch and grabbing the remote. One is a break that keeps me in the ‘up position’ – thinking, active, brain still firing. The other isn’t a break at all; it’s me throwing in the towel for the day.

And when you need to throw in the towel – do it! That’s okay. But don’t lie to yourself. If you really only want a break and truly want to get back to it after a brief pause, just remember. Stay in the up position.

Under all of your actions, all of your words, all of the ways you interact with your environment and society and self, there is…

…nothing.

There is no “real you” that’s somehow different from all the stuff you say and think and do. We are the sum of our deeds. If you think “if only people knew the real me, they’d treat me differently than they do,” then perhaps you should reflect on why people treat you that way in the first place.

Values need to become actions. If you want to think of yourself as brave, then you need to ask “What are the actions of a brave person?” And then you need to do those things. That is all you will ever have.

So the uncomfortable truth is that there is no “real you.” But the good news is that nothing is therefore holding you back from being anything you want to be. All the actions are there for the taking.

Things that are poisonous don’t always look that way. Viruses hide. Parasites must, by their nature, hide that nature in order to get close to you.

In other words, not everything that can kill you is obvious about it. The social versions operate the same way.

Some creatures can only survive by feeding on you. Some creatures can only survive by destroying you. And some creatures bear you no ill will at all, but their nature is so different from yours that they’re toxic to you. And all of these people will look like they aren’t those things. They’ll tell you they aren’t those things, and they might even believe that they aren’t those things.

It is up to you to measure them. To hold your own values and your own life in high enough regard to be worth protecting even when the poison comes in an alluring package. We all want friends, relationships, social groups, peers that esteem us. We want those things, so when people come in those guises we are more likely to accept them – to bend ourselves to fit what they want us to be.

And then you have a tapeworm.

Shed the parasites. Give them nothing to feed on, and no room to thrive. Have only noble relationships to the best of your ability, and limit your exposure to the ones you must have that fall short of that ideal. Give your resources fully to those that deserve it (including yourself!) so that you leave no room at the table for the tapeworms.

What is best for you will not always be constant. Even if your values and goals remain largely consistent, the changing of your circumstances over time will necessitate you to approach the pursuit of those things with different techniques.

If you’re 18, and you decide, “I want financial success,” then what’s best for you is often to hustle your brains out. Work a lot, use that work to learn new skills and meet new people, produce more than you consume, build good habits, etc. But at a certain point “working yourself senseless” stops being a good way to approach financial success. Once you have a decent savings pool, network, and skill set it becomes about working smarter, investing better, leveraging your opportunities, and the like.

Same goal, but different things were best for you.

That’s why framing even your long-term goals as short-term ones can be very helpful. My biggest goal and most important value is “raise my children to be happy, competent superheroes.” But if I make the time horizon for that goal “my entire life as a parent,” then I’m likely to get stuck in ruts regarding how I approach it. The tools and techniques to empower toddlers are not the same ones that will empower teenagers, so I need to grow with my children.

So instead, I set the goal: “I will do everything in my power to make my 5-year-old reach age six with all the courage and wisdom I can help her gain, and then re-evaluate.” At her sixth birthday, I’ll be able to have some pride in what we’ve done together, but I’ll also have given myself the intellectual freedom to evaluate my methods.

Do the same with all your goals, even the ones you think you’ll pursue your whole life. May you always find the best that you can.

Sometimes I try to be kind to myself in advance. I’ll think, “music always makes me feel great, so since I know next Friday is a busy workday, I’m going to pre-schedule a little music break in the middle and give myself a little boost. You’re welcome, Future Me!”

Then next Friday rolls around, the day is busy, and I’ll come to that event on my calendar. And I’ll scowl, and I’ll say “Past Me was an idiot, I’m too busy for this,” and I’ll skip it to work more.

I’m a mean old man sometimes.

I hasten to point out: only to myself. I consider “Kindness to Others” not only a moral imperative but also one of the sincerest expressions of strength and confidence there is. Only weak cowards are mean to others unjustly. And opportunities to be “justly” mean are few and far between. If someone is deserving of your contempt, then the correct course of action is almost always to simply remove your association, not to actually act contemptuously.

But I can’t remove my association with myself, so when I think of myself as deserving of it, I’m downright mean to myself. Because in those moments, I am weak and cowardly.

I’ve allowed the busyness of my day to weaken me. I’ve allowed the doubt about the successful completion of the day’s endeavors to turn into fear. And then I allowed both of those things to come together to create a mean reaction to the very person who was trying their best to help Present & Future Me: Past Me.

Self-kindness isn’t just about your immediate feelings. It’s about protecting what those feelings support, which is a psychologically sound foundation for all your works. Guess what? That Friday sucked. I did a bad job, overall. I should have taken the music break. Either it would have helped me do a better job because I’d have felt better, or I’d have done just as badly but gotten to listen to music. Either would have been better.