The odds of a flipped coin coming up heads five times in a row is 1 in 32. If you’ve flipped a coin four times and it’s come up heads all four times, the chance of the fifth flip coming up heads is 1 in 2.

A lot of people struggle with that, conceptually. That’s the heart of the Gambler’s Fallacy: the belief that past events can influence raw in-the-moment probability. After all (some people think), if there’s only a 1 in 32 chance of getting five heads in a row, then surely this fifth flip coming up heads must be very unlikely!

Of course, you’re not evaluating the difference between getting five heads in a row versus the probability of getting one tails. You’re evaluating the probability of getting five heads in a row versus the probability of getting exactly four heads and one tails, in that order. And the chances of those two outcomes are equal – 50/50. So if you want the past four flips to “count,” then you have to count them both ways.

This all doesn’t really matter to the current flip, though. The thing that makes “five heads in a row” unlikely has already happened, so you’re only really asking “out of every time four heads get flipped in a row, how many times is the next flip also heads?” Which is again, 50/50.

Here’s what I notice about people.

If someone has 8 hours to complete a task, and they get distracted for 6 of them, they’ll stress. They’ll think the job can’t be done in 2 hours, that they’re a failure, that they’ve already lost. But if you just gave them 2 hours, they wouldn’t feel that way.

The past flips already happened; they don’t affect the present chances of success. They are what they are, good or bad. Call it.

My father used to be a smoker. He quit when I was a teenager and this certainly added years to his life. But when I was a little kid and he smoked regularly, there was a trick he used to do for the kids involving bubbles.

Most kids are familiar with bubbles – little wands, puddles of soapy goo, whimsical floating orbs of scintillating colors. But if you have lungs full of smoke when you use the little wand to blow the bubble, it looks rad as heck. You end up with a bubble filled with smoke, contained and isolated. The air around it is clear as the smoke dissipates almost instantly, but it continues to swirl within.

I was thinking about this today because I heard someone talking about a problem that’s “everywhere.” But it’s a problem I’ve never encountered once, and nor has anyone else I know expressed exposure to this problem. Since the person in question lives a very different life than I do, my conclusion is that the problem isn’t really “everywhere” at all. It’s just in their bubble.

It might be pervasive within their bubble, but that’s not the same thing. The smoke you think is “everywhere” might just be in a few square inches of space; it just happens that you’re in that space, too.

But all bubbles pop. All worlds eventually mix with the worlds around them. The smoke will dissipate and you’ll see that what you thought was so horrible was actually just an artifact of one tiny corner of space and time.

You can hasten this realization, by getting out of your own bubble a little. There’s nothing wrong with making your own little beautiful corner of the world and living in it. But if you start to think there’s something wrong with the world, make sure it’s not just something wrong with your corner – because that’s a much easier fix.

Pop.

Sometimes you think there are no good ideas left in a particular sphere, but that’s time-based. It’s a pendulum. When people push too far into “originality for originality’s sake,” then people want “classic” stuff. They yearn for nostalgia. And then when the homages get too tired, people want something fresh. This is all okay – tastes are meant to be mercurial. They’re a way to use emotion to mark time, a way to season your seasons uniquely.

You don’t have to be an immovable pillar in what you enjoy. You’re allowed to like things you didn’t before and to abandon things that no longer suit your palate. Swing along with the pendulum, enjoy the ride.

There’s something you need to get if you want to succeed. Absolutely essential. If you don’t get it, you will never achieve anything. I guarantee it. If you do get it, you won’t automatically be victorious in all your endeavors, but you’ll definitely be well on your way. And again, if you don’t get it, you are completely doomed.

What do you need to get?

Started.

In your life, you’re going to do a lot of things that you won’t directly see the results of. Most of these things will be small, some will be large, but there will be many.

You’re going to be on the road one day, and you’re going to stop in a little diner. You will never be here again; you will never see any of these people again. Your actions here are performed without a future agenda, and you will not see their results.

In that scenario, some people say – why bother to tip well, or even at all? I’ll never see these people again, so it’s not like I’ll get bad service in the future. My reputation in my own communities will not suffer.

That kind of person sucks.

Leave cool things in your wake. Kindness and mystery. Fun and cheer. Magic and knowledge. In that scenario, take out a $20 bill, write a cool fact on it, and leave it behind. Draw a mysterious picture on the other side, with coordinates that you make up. Create a mystery, a kindness, and knowledge, all at once.

Because that’s cool. And leaving cool in your wake is its own reward.

Do you know what the “No True Scotsman” fallacy is? That’s when you say something like “No Scotsman eats pudding,” and then someone else says “here is a Scotsman, and he is eating pudding.” So you respond: “Well, no true Scotsman eats pudding.”

What you’re doing is redefining the category so that your claim about that category is always true and can’t be falsified. It’s a way of changing the parameters of the argument so you can’t lose. “All reasonable people agree with me,” you might say. Someone else, by all accounts reasonable, says “I don’t agree with you.” You then redefine them: “Well, then you’re not reasonable.”

The No True Scotsman fallacy is about using rhetorical tricks to force someone out of a definitional category. But I’ve noticed a weird inverse version, where people use rhetorical tricks to force themselves into a definitional category.

It goes like this – pick a category of people that is hard to strictly define but everyone tends to love, have sympathy for, or defend. A decent example is “people just trying to help.” Now, you claim that category while doing something decidedly unhelpful, as a shield against criticism.

“How dare you yell at me for shoving that kid into the mud! I’m just trying to help this woman park.” But here’s the thing – your own declared category isn’t real. Category is a result of actions.

You don’t become saintly by declaring yourself a saint. You become a saint by being saintly. Rhetorical tricks or not, you are the sum of your actions.

Imagine a staircase. It has ten stairs, each painted green. Whenever you step on a green stair, you get ten dollars. Woo hoo! You get $100 for climbing the staircase, and you’re also rewarded for each individual step. Fun!

Now imagine another staircase, with ten stairs – but 3 are red, spaced out every third stair. When you step on a green stair, you get twenty dollars, but when you step on a red one, you lose ten. Climbing all ten stairs still nets you $110, which is awesome! You could feel bummed when you step on a red stair, but you’d have to be really short-sighted to feel that way.

This is literally everything in your life. There is some mix of advances and setbacks, but the point is that they’re all connected. They’re all part of the same process, one leading to another. Avoiding activities that have a chance of setbacks is just avoiding the staircase altogether.

I’ve been designing systems to automate myself for years. Despite this, I sometimes stumble when facing a problem, and the reason is almost always the same. I falter when I don’t trust the systems I’ve built.

I have specific spots where I put all physical objects that I own, as a way of automating the process of “remembering where I put stuff.” When I can’t find an object, it’s rarely because I didn’t put it in the right spot; rather, it’s usually because despite this I look somewhere else first. It’s silly, and it’s usually only a second before I slap my forehead and say “duh.”

The deepest system is this chronicle. When I write down advice or lessons, it’s almost always because I encountered a particular problem and I wrote down my solution. And yet sometimes, when I encounter a problem, I forget to look here first. I forget my own advice.

Which is the point, of course. I can’t possibly keep in my active memory everything I’ve written here. That’s why I write it. But that means I don’t always know that there’s a particular piece of advice I need – but often there is, and I can use it to solve my current problem.

And if there isn’t, then I solve the problem from scratch. And I write it down. Trust your systems.

I’m coining a new (to my knowledge) phrase here today: Inactivism.

That’s when you do a bunch of “activism” that has zero chance of making any real impact, and the only reason you do it is some combination of outgroup rage and ingroup status-seeking.

Sam is my example. Sam professes to care deeply about the plight of the homeless. Sam yells a lot, both online and off, about this deep concern. Sam directs ire and rage at anyone associated with the “wrong” side of this issue, always within sight or earshot of plenty of people on the “right” side. Sam has never ever donated a dollar to a cause that actually helps the homeless or volunteered in any way to make an actual dent in the problem.

Sam is an “inactivist.”

Now, I’m being slightly uncharitable to the likes of Sam. I’m accusing all inactivists of being motivated entirely by status-seeking, but I think there truly is another angle at play. I think that the way our particularly skewed view of information presents these issues to us has led many of us into an “all or nothing” trap.

You see, all the information you receive about any particular plight is centered around the idea of that plight being dire. When things improve, even a little, it isn’t newsworthy. This can lead you to believe that problems never get better by increments – we either solve them all at once, or we don’t solve them (and it’s always the latter, and it’s always somebody’s fault).

But that’s not true at all! Imagine that you felt really bad about people being rained on. You think it’s terrible! So every time the clouds gather, you spend all day screaming at the sky to stop raining. It never works. Someone suggests that maybe you could just buy a few umbrellas and give them to people, and then at least those people wouldn’t get rained on? And you scream back: “But that doesn’t stop it from raining!”

Yeah… nothing will stop it from raining. That’s the reality you refuse to admit.

That’s the reality with pretty much any problem. You, personally, cannot make a dent in the problem as a whole. But you can absolutely do wonderful, powerful things locally and in small numbers.

The next time you want to be an “activist” about something, look around instead. What is a small – but actual – thing you can do about that problem in your own town? Go do that instead, and then get on with your life. The only real justice is the justice you can touch.

Rage clouds the mind.

The more incoherent and undirected your sense of frustration and anger is, the more it will act as poison for your mind.

Consider a person, in front of you, doing something that makes you angry. This situation has many fine resolutions, many ways for you to conduct yourself admirably and control your life. You can discuss, you can forgive. You can dismiss and exit. These are not only honorable, but they’re satisfying – satisfying because some part of you knows that you could have given in to baser instincts and lashed out, either verbally or even physically, but you didn’t. You get to be proud of yourself, discharge your anger safely, and live a good life.

Because of this, personal encounters that may make you angry aren’t necessarily something to be avoided! Each one is a chance to grow, learn, and improve your conflict resolution skills.

Now consider a different situation. Something makes you angry, yes. But it’s neither a singular entity nor directly in front of you. It’s a distant “other,” an outgroup, a news item. You can look away, but you can’t discharge your anger. There’s nowhere for it to go. You can’t be proud of your choice not to lash out, because you can’t lash out even if you wanted to – a news item can’t be screamed at, can’t be struck. So you’re left with poison in your heart all day, maybe longer.

In an attempt to expel this rage, some people do lash out or scream. But since, again, the source of the anger itself is something distributed and not wholly real, the only targets for their umbrage are people. These people may be good or evil, distant or close, but they’re never the right targets for this kind of outburst. You poison yourself more fully and you poison them, too.

You can’t even apologize when you’re done. A barfight is better than a Facebook rant. At least when a barfight is over and you realize that you’ve let yourself make a bad choice, there’s a person to make amends to. A way to move on.

Move away from the very sources of this incoherent anger. Don’t even let them in. Read books and talk to people instead. The rest clouds your mind.