It’s good to not get what you want right away. It’s good to have to search, and work, and hustle.

I know it doesn’t seem like it when you want something and don’t have it. But if you achieve everything instantly, you miss out on a tremendous amount of positive externalities. The act of having to search and work for what you want is exactly how you gain sufficient exposure to the world to have goals in the first place.

Imagine someone raised in a featureless room their entire life. Every whim is provided instantly – but without outside stimuli, what kinds of whims could such a person even have? Without awareness of a wider world to shape you, how can you even figure out what to strive for?

So it’s good to have to take a longer road towards what you want. Those roads feel inconvenient at the time, but they make up your whole life.

One of the unique challenges in life is keeping the growth of everything in your life at the pace you want relative to everything else.

Your life has many aspects, and they will change in size over the course of your time on this planet. You’ll make more or less money. Your family will grow or shrink. Your hobbies will take up more or less of your time.

With those things, other things must change. If your family grows in size, you may need a larger home. You’ll certainly need more food. When your children move out, you may want to downsize that home, too.

And with any positive growth can come similarly larger problems. Let’s say I accidentally back into my neighbor’s car when I leave my driveway. I don’t know for certain, but I have an approximate idea of how much such a mistake would cost me, based on the average value of the cars (and homes, etc.) around here.

But what if I suddenly were 10x as wealthy as I am now, and moved to a wealthier neighborhood as a result? It’s still possible that I could back into my neighbor’s car, but now that’s a much more expensive problem because the car I might be backing into is probably much pricier.

(Obviously not a perfect analogy given things like insurance, but you get the idea.)

You can’t always be chasing linear growth in every aspect of your life. The goal isn’t “grow forever” – always more money, more friends, more whatever. The goal is to fill the right amount of space, and then be content. Part of that journey is knowing what “the right amount of space” even is for any given thing.

If you like and want kids, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to just keep having kids forever. But why not? If you love kids, why isn’t “one more” always the right number? You can probably intuitively sense that it isn’t, but can you define why?

The costs, drawbacks, and problems that come with any good thing don’t always grow at the same rate as the good thing itself. Finding the balance – and it’s different for everyone – is key. Look for the space you want to fill, and don’t just chase “up” forever.

One year ago today, the coolest mother fucker on the planet rode off into the sunset for the last time. He cast one hell of a shadow and I was happy to stand in it. I miss him so much.

Nothing else today. Today is a bad day. But he would tell me tomorrow will be better, and I trust him.

Today, while driving in the rain, my middle child made this observation (recorded as close to verbatim as I could get down right away):

“I like rain because it’s beautiful when it hits the puddles. It looks like fireworks, because fireworks start out as a small thing and then explode into a big circle, and that’s what it looks like when rain hits the puddle. It’s a small thing and then it’s a big circle. So they’re both beautiful.”

Such wisdom! Beauty is not found solely in convenience or perfection. It can be found in the inconvenient and the imperfect, for the shapes are not so different. The patterns and experiences we find divine can happen in all manner of circumstances. Do not seek the beautiful – seek life. In all life there is beauty like fireworks, waiting to be observed.

We have a strong tendency to imagine things we want in their idealized form, and then be sorely disappointed if they’re not. But “not ideal” is a far cry from “bad.” Most things you want, you’d be fine having a little damp.

You want to go on that sightseeing tour of the Eiffel Tower? Guess what, they don’t take it down if it rains a little. We should think about the things we want in terms of that thing being damaged, incomplete, or otherwise bearing unwanted conditions. If you still want it, then go for it! If you don’t, then perhaps you don’t really want that thing as much as you want the sunny day.

So enjoy the sunny day all on its own! Bask in the sunshine, forget the rest. If they line up, great. But they don’t have to – and you can often only appreciate so much at a time anyway.

An umbrella is an accessory for the wise and happy, not the gloomy and pessimistic.

Here’s a mental trick to be aware of:

Let’s say someone says something really dumb, like “the Earth is flat.” Then, some well-known authority figure points out that it isn’t, and accompanies this insight with some jests about the stupidity of the first person. Apart from being a little mean maybe, nothing really wrong has happened yet.

But “the Earth is flat” is an easy target, and that’s where the trick comes in. You’d think, “why even bother pointing out that the Earth isn’t flat? Apart from a small handful of kooks, nobody thinks it is. What does the authority figure have to gain by wasting their breath?”

Here’s what they have to gain: the next time someone says something they want to disagree with, even if that thing isn’t foolish, they can pretend it is by making allusions to the prior easy target.

So now someone says something controversial or heterodox but not untrue. The authority figures can say something like, “woosh, where do people like you and the flat Earth people even COME from?!” See the trick?

Don’t get fooled. Being right about one thing doesn’t make you the arbiter of truth, especially if you were picking easy targets to begin with.

We have so many ceremonies around the firsts of things. We celebrate, we make promises, we create hope, we imagine the possibilities. We have far fewer around the lasts of things.

But the lasts are important. Putting a final bow on things lets us see them for what they were, in total. To measure our choices, and thus learn from them. To grow, and to say goodbye in a way that means something.

Pluck the good from your year, and tell stories. Look at your challenges both lost and overcome, and let yourself live in what you wrought. Don’t just count down the seconds until it’s all behind you. Cherish those seconds. Do one last thing – whatever it is. Whatever you resolved to do this year, get in one more rep. Paint one more stroke, write one more word, do one more push-up. Treat seconds as if they were years, because years are only seconds.

And there will be a last one. Don’t let it slip by so easily.

Sometimes I think people, if given the choice, would prefer that others be given the ability to read their minds than the other way around.

It’s such a common lament: people yearn to be understood. But they don’t want to put the effort into creating that understanding. Why can’t other people just know that I’m sincere, or that I’m competent, or whatever other quality I believe I am?

That’s like saying, “why can’t riches simply appear at my feet?” All things take work, and communication is no different.

Part of being happy is not making unreasonable demands of the universe. If you want wealth, work. If you want to be understood, communicate.

It’s possible for me to learn a lot about stuff without talking to other people directly. Tons of good information – more than I could ever consume – is just floating around out there in books and on websites and in podcasts and available to my own observation. If no other human ever talked to me again, I could still learn and learn and learn until the day I died.

But what fun would that be?

I occasionally see people get annoyed when they get asked a question. They say things like “I’m not Google,” or “it’s not my job to teach you this” or whatever. And that’s… technically true, sure. But I love it when people ask me stuff! Why wouldn’t I? If it’s something I know about, I get the joy of teaching it and also growing a relationship with another human. If it’s not something I know a lot about, then I get to discover some interesting new question and all the interesting new answers (and new questions!) that go along with it.

Of course, this might just be my personality. I even found a vocation where people pretty much ask me questions about stuff I know all day, and I really really like it. But I think it might be a general case that folks should be more eager to get asked questions. Sure, it can occasionally get tiresome and you need healthy boundaries. But most people are too reflexively, automatically dismissive when they shouldn’t be.

So, I promise you, if you ever want to know something from me – ask away!