Some of the absolute best time you can spend building a relationship with someone is time spent on a shared chore or project. In almost all cases it vastly outperforms time simply spent on relationship-building directly.

There’s just something about shared work that simultaneously greases the wheels of conversation and togetherness while also filling in all those gaps and uncertainties. It provides a shared goal, and the goal in turn reveals all sorts of things about the people involved that might be obscured in time spent solely trying to impress each other.

In fact, this works so well I’m shocked we haven’t converted some of the most elemental “get to know you” conversations into institutional versions of this. Job interviews are absolutely terrible – a far better version of them would be to just say, “hey, come do an hour’s worth of job-related activities with key members of the team.” You’ll get far more than an interview; that’s true of both sides.

For a first date, just build a piece of furniture together. You’d learn so much more, have much more fun, and you’d have a chair or whatever no matter how it ended up going.

Forget campaign speeches and pulpits. Someone wants to run for office? They should have to renovate an old house, top to bottom, with a bunch of people, while being filmed. I’ll find out everything I need to know.

The point is – when you want to really build a relationship with people, whether it’s a teammate, a child, a partner, a friend – do some work with them. Help them clean their garage. Ask them to help you fix your sink. Go volunteer together. But the core of human experience is joyful labor with our clan, so don’t avoid it. Embrace it.

When my oldest daughter was about eighteen months old, we experimented with organized sports for her a little. In retrospect, she was way too young – not too young to enjoy herself, but too young to be getting anything out of the “organized” part. At some point, she was climbing on the gym mats and licking the windows while the other parents were forcing kids that they were certain would become international soccer stars to adhere to the rules. I yelled to my daughter “Have fun kid! There’s no wrong way to play!”

I got some decidedly unkind looks. I elected not to return.

It’s important to note what you’re trying to get out of an experience. Some things can be fun while also serving a different end, and it’s fine to adhere to rules that are more conducive to achieving that end. But some things are play. Play is vital – you learn more from play than from just about anything else. It stretches you in amazing directions. People say that swimming is one of the best forms of physical exercise because it uses so many different muscle groups in so many ways. Play is like that, for your mind. You use so many parts of it!

But here’s the thing – the more structure, the worse play becomes at doing exactly that. The more external rules, the less the play itself can shape the player. Rules are fine, but they need to come from within the play itself. The players need to be deciding them, evolving them, dictating them to themselves and each other.

My two youngest children each got legos for Christmas. They love them. My son uses them purely as an input to his vast imagination machine, building and breaking constantly and just putting them together as he needs them to represent whatever elements of his story he needs. My daughter focused like a surgeon, carefully building exactly the structure depicted on the cover. They both chose their respective methods with no direction from me. They both loved it. And they both sharpened their minds in some way.

And my oldest daughter? Her self-discipline is amazing; she’s on her way to black belt and she’s ten years old. Instead of forcing her to do something counter to the way she wanted to play, I just let her play. And when it’s time to do something else, she’s all in – because play isn’t scarce to her. It isn’t something she needs to hoard. Play is the ocean she swims in.

There’s no wrong way to do it, except any way that’s not what you want. Other people want you to swim better, so they try to hold you underwater or keep you in the shallows, but both are wrong. You can’t push them in or keep them out – kids or adults! You don’t even have to show them the water. They know. All you have to do is stay out of the way and nearby to help if you’re asked – and cheer at every splash.

Even though I’m not artistically inclined, particularly, I’ve always been fascinated by color theory. The way there can be rules and methods to something as seemingly subjective as “which colors are pretty together,” and the way that ties into everything from math to biology just has this spark of the divine order, for me.

(Want to have a fun twenty-minute distraction that will blow your mind? Here you go: https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU)

As my mind wandered a bit while thinking about this, I started thinking about colors as information. Any sort of sensory perception is information transfer. And whenever you have a deliberate, repeated form of information transfer, the human mind will have preferred ways of experiencing that information.

We can find one picture prettier than another, even if both are pictures of a house we want to study. We find mnemonic devices enhance our memory – rhyming information is easier to retain, and often more pleasant. We find compelling narratives easier to comprehend than dry facts. We like symbols over words for many concepts.

You can make any information easier to transfer if you also pay attention to the aesthetics. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, after all.

Of course, therein lies the danger. A spoonful of sugar makes the poison go down, too. The fact that beautiful information is easier to comprehend also makes it easier to believe, because we all want to live in a universe where truth is beauty and beauty truth.

And thus my strange paradox: when I write, I want the words to be prose. I want it easier for you to read. But when I read, I want cold iron, because I do not want to be tricked or lured.

I want to give to the world truth as I comprehend it. No matter the color.

I have always adored Christmas. As a father, very few things compare. And last year, I made a discovery that increased my joy tenfold. So here, having renewed my tradition and found it just as amazing, I’ll share it with you.

If you want joy, you don’t have to do anything to create joy. You have to aggressively and relentlessly eliminate bullshit. I can almost guarantee that your holiday traditions, if you have them, have at least several hours of stressful work that you don’t want to do. Everyone loves different things and hates different things, but we all feel compelled to do all of it. We feel compelled – by tradition, by social influence, by our families, whatever – to go through every last motion, no matter what it is.

If you love Christmas music but hate wrapping presents, don’t wrap presents. If you love wrapping presents but hate cooking the big feast, don’t cook the big feast. If you love cooking the big feast but hate running around to ten different houses… you get it.

We’ve gradually added so many bells and whistles to this holiday that we get caught up in thinking that the magic only exists if we carefully adhere to this combination of rituals. It isn’t so! The magic is far more durable than that.

Starting last year, I didn’t do any of it. I didn’t wrap presents. I didn’t hang lights. My kids decorated the tree because they wanted to, and I enjoyed it. But here’s the thing that makes it all essential: whatever time you save by skipping all that bullshit?

In that time, you must let joy flourish.

I skipped all that stuff, and here’s what I did instead: I piled my kids into the car, put on all my favorite Christmas songs (and their favorites, too!), and drove around looking at all the pretty lights. I drank hot cocoa and sang with my kids. I made merry.

You can do that too, and you can do it without needing to take some sort of stand against whatever it is you don’t do. Other people wrapped presents, and I love it! Other people put up lights, and I drove around looking at them! Other people made their merry in whatever way they wanted. I don’t at all think they shouldn’t have – unless, of course, they didn’t want to.

This is a celebration. Joy should abound. If it isn’t – what, exactly, are you doing? Who do you think cares about your toil?

God rest ye. And rest well – never tire of your joy.

Merry Christmas!

My children are happy. They live lives that are full of joy. Heartache isn’t unknown, but it’s a distant and rare event. Pain is a very minor worry. They aren’t sheltered, but they are safe. They see endless wonder in the world.

What more could I ask for? I am blessed beyond measure.

One of the reasons to keep yourself healthy is because it keeps you adventurous. You can’t have many adventures if you’re sick. And without adventures, how will you grow?

Drink some water and go forth, my friend!

Your ability to change the universe is extremely limited. You can’t effect more than the most miniscule changes, especially in other people. You can’t keep it from raining.

The secret power that you have is that you can move the whole universe around you. When it strikes, you can move. You can’t block, but you can dodge. You can adjust your position.

An enormous amount of pain in people’s lives comes from the sense that they wish to own a particular position in the universe, even if that position is hurting them. Someone buys a house on a flood plain. Shocker, it floods. So they try to build in water traps, levees, pumps. It still floods. They try to waterproof things, still floods. Dude, just move.

That applies in so many circumstances. People are frustrated or unhappy in their current situation, so they try so hard to make the situation different, instead of finding a different situation. The second is so much easier, and more fulfilling. Don’t let the universe strangle you. Flip it. Move like water. Find your space. Be happy.

Maximizing on any one metric is almost always a bad strategy.

The further you try to push into one domain, the greater the sacrifices. Consider the sacrifices you’d have to make in order to go for a jog this week. Probably not very extreme, right? Now consider the sacrifices necessary in order to compete in the hundred-meter dash at the next Summer Olympics. Significantly greater!

Not only greater, but exponentially greater. That means that if we roughly organized “running” as having 10 distinct levels of seriousness, with Level 1 representing “going for a jog” and Level 10 being “winning a running-related Olympic event,” then the sacrifices necessary to go from level 1 to level 2 do NOT equal the sacrifices necessary to go from level 9 to level 10. Level 10 isn’t, in other words, ten times the effort of level 1. It’s more like 10,000 times.

That means that, overall, you’re probably better off as a whole person by aiming for level 4-5 in most things that are important to you, level 6 or 7 in maybe a few really vital things, and then level 1-3 in a bunch of fun stuff.

You can cook dinner for your family, enjoy a game of golf with your buds, and change your own oil while being at level 1 in “cooking,” “golf,” and “car maintenance,” respectively. You might have to sacrifice all of that and more just to move from Level 4 to Level 5 in “having a job,” though.

Just be careful – the only “level” that really matters is “happiness in life.” Pick the point spread that maximizes that one.

Big things can be daunting. So a common piece of advice you’ll hear is “take the smallest possible step towards the big goal.” The idea is to break it down into more manageable pieces so you can make (and observe) real progress.

That’s good advice! But I also see people get stuck, even on that. I’ve got an idea why. Breaking a big goal down into small chunks still requires you to think about the big goal. For a lot of reasons, that can be really daunting. Maybe you’re truly afraid of the big thing. Maybe you don’t even know what the big thing is yet, you just know you have a big thing-shaped hole in your life and something has to go there. So maybe there’s still a reason you aren’t ready yet.

So, let me modify the advice some: “Take the smallest possible step towards anything.”

You don’t have to figure out your life today. But if you do:

1. Nothing, or
2. The same things you do every day

Then you won’t ever get closer. So, do something different. Did you bake a pie yesterday? No? Then bake one today. Give it to someone. Better yet, share it with someone. Someone you don’t normally see.

Do that every day (something new every day, that is – not just a new pie-related rut) until either you’re ready to tacke the Big Questions or until you die. Either way, that’s a pretty good life. And it’s not hard to do.

At least, you’d better hope it is!

When you order a burger and it comes with fries, you rejoice. When you want guacamole on your burrito and you receive a warning about the upcharge, you scowl. But the burger joint is ripping you off, and the burrito place isn’t.

Look, fries aren’t free. They aren’t free for the restaurant to buy, and it’s not free for them to heat the oil or pay people to work the frier and to carry the plate to your table. So if they don’t charge you more for those fries, that’s because they already charged you for them. They built that cost into the price of the burger, whether you get the fries or not.

“So what,” you say. “I’ll just always get the fries. Then I’m not getting ripped off.” What about the pickle? Did you want no tomato? No cheese? You paid for it all anyway. If I get my burger with cheese, mushrooms, onions, lettuce, tomato, mayo, and a side of fries? Hey, thanks for picking up the tab, stranger.

The more things are charged to you piece by piece, the more you get exactly what you want. “Free fries” are an illusion. Don’t you forget it.