The world is specialized. That means that there is a golden area of opportunity for you, as a unique individual. All you have to do is find the stuff that most people don’t like but you don’t mind, and get good at it.

You don’t even have to love it! You definitely shouldn’t hate it, but “comfortably pleased” is a great bar. I’ll be honest with you: most people who operate septic tank trucks probably don’t love it. But they don’t mind it, and they probably do love money, which other people are happy to pay them in order to not empty their own septic tanks. Driving the poop truck may sound gross to most people, but there’s a subset of the population that doesn’t mind it, and that trait is worth a lot.

Way back when I was in sales, I noticed that most salespeople really hated doing any sort of recruiting or training, but most training in sales is “hands-on” and done via shadowing. Salespeople often really hate that, because it’s effort that takes away from the main thing they want to be doing (selling to make money) with no immediate reward.

I actually liked training, even though in the short term it cost me a little money personally in the form of lost sales. And in realizing that I liked it but my coworkers hated it, I saw opportunity. I started volunteering to take everyone else’s training rotations. I went from middle-of-the-road salesperson… to #1 sales manager in the company. I had my pick of people because I’d trained them all. Everyone wanted to work with the person who put effort into them when they started. I built teams, and in the long run, earned way more than the meager amount I lost initially.

That’s an example of how the diagram can apply in a micro level as well as macro. It isn’t just about choosing whole industries that other people don’t like, it’s about choosing your specific path even within one. There are infinite nested layers of complexity and specialization, and you can find your micro-niche even within the macro-niche you’re in.

Do you have a sock drawer or other designated “sock spot?” Look in there now. How many different kinds of socks do you own? How many different pairs? If you put all your socks loose in a basket, how many would you have to pull out at random before you were guaranteed a matching pair?

For me, the answer is: two. All my socks are identical. Once a year, I throw away all my socks, and I buy a dozen identical pairs of new socks. This costs me all of twenty-five dollars, and I always have nice, new, matching socks.

People get so hung up on this idea that you shouldn’t throw things away that haven’t completely failed yet. So if your socks are all threadbare, mismatched, sagging – but still technically socks – then it’s wasteful to throw them away! Bah! Some things you should waste. All things are temporary, but some things are “good” for a year, and then “barely passable” for like ten years after that before they finally, actually break. You don’t need to be held hostage by your socks!

People have an internal frame of reference. They have a concept in the world that, whether it accurately maps onto the real world or not, is what they must operate in. We can try to improve the accuracy of our mental models of the world (and we should!) but they’ll never reach perfection, and they’ll never perfectly line up with another person’s.

One of the best things you can do for a person you love is to respect their mental model. Someone might tell you that something is very, very important. You might think it isn’t, but the point isn’t the disagreement: the point is that in their world, it is very important indeed. Their model may change – in the future, they may look back and think that thing wasn’t very important at all. But they will also remember whether or not you chose to believe them when they said it was, and wanted to share it.

Collaboration is bringing two or more mental models into better alignment. Love is just saying, “I believe yours.”

Today I bury the greatest man I have ever known.

I’m afraid I don’t have anything more to say today, so I would like to take a rare turn and share the poem that my father asked me to read at his funeral. I will honor his wish today. It’s a good poem.

What is Dying? by Charles Henry Brent

What is dying?
I am standing on the seashore.
A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.
She is an object and I stand watching her
Till at last she fades from the horizon,
And someone at my side says, “She is gone!” Gone where?
Gone from my sight, that is all;
She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her,
And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.
The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her;
And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone”,
There are others who are watching her coming,
And other voices take up a glad shout,
“There she comes” – and that is dying.

My father was one of the most talented people you’d ever meet. He could do a thousand things. If you expressed any wonder at all at his myriad talents, his response was the same: “anyone can do it.”

This wasn’t humility, false or otherwise. He truly believed anyone could do anything. Virtually all of his skills were self-taught; he had little in the way of formal education and I’m not sure he ever opened an instruction manual in his life. But he would listen to people, quite happily – especially if they were trying to teach something.

There was always someone trying to teach something, he would tell me. All you had to do was listen and try it. You could probably do it. He loved Bob Ross; many homes in our family are adorned with paintings my father did while following Ross’s directions.

Just pick it up, whatever it is. The paintbrush, the guitar, the hammer. Use your hands to find the tools, your eyes to watch what you’re doing, and your ears to listen for people trying to teach. You don’t need more than that, and you can do anything. And anyone can do it.

You can raise the floor without lowering the ceiling. When I was in high school, I remember gym class being a massive disappointment. I went to a tiny middle school (we didn’t even have a cafeteria; we ate at our desks in the classroom), and I was excited about going to the larger high school that served several towns (because our town was too small to have one). One of the things I was excited about was actual physical training.

In every movie I’d ever seen about high school, gym class was a grueling boot camp of rope-climbing, push-ups, stuff like that. Despite the negative picture this was meant to paint, I was amped for that stuff. I wanted the physical challenge!

Instead, we stood around and played the laziest games of frisbee imaginable. It was a joke; it was 45 minutes of “activity” that was only physical in the loosest possible sense. No one ever so much as broke a sweat. At one point I finally asked about it – why was our “phys ed” so lazy and poor?

The roundabout answer I received was that people complained about the more grueling stuff, so it was removed from the curriculum. At one point they did make the kids run laps, lift weights, climb ropes, and all that good stuff. But the kids who needed it most were also most likely to complain about it and eventually, the school caved. Now nothing more than gently tossing around a frisbee was ever asked of anyone.

Now, I actually don’t care about that. I don’t care at all about what other people do – I have zero opinion on what schools make kids do, and I didn’t then, either. What I cared about was that in the process of lowering the standards of physical education for everyone, they also lowered the ceiling of what was possible. It wasn’t important to me that the class wasn’t forced to lift weights and climb ropes. What was important to me was that I wasn’t allowed to. I had to stand around and throw the frisbee with everyone else. We had some of that stuff – a weight room at least, even if the rope was long gone – but you couldn’t use it unsupervised, which in practical application meant it never got used. So instead of using my allotted 45 minutes per day on things that would actually have improved my physical health (not to mention enjoyment!), I had to spend 45 minutes of pure horrified boredom.

There may come a time when you, as an individual, have to decide on the standards for a group. You may have some incentive to lower them, and I won’t judge you for it. But make sure that when you have people who actually want to go above the bare minimum for those standards, you let them. Institutional boredom is a thing – but let people escape from it.

Both hope and despair have weight. They are both difficult to carry. They are anchors that attach you to something, either way. I think that’s why apathy gets attractive to some people – for better or ill, it weighs less than the other two options.

The more weight you give to hope or despair, the more easily it can tip over into the other. Balance is difficult when you’re trying to put everything on one side.

Maybe “apathy” is the wrong framing. There can be healthy ways of detaching yourself from expectations, good or bad. A noble stoicism can be freeing. But putting down weight is sometimes as hard as carrying it.

Your professional reputation is the source of many, if not most of your professional opportunities. What people know about you and expect from you can be a huge boon to your career advancement. Few would argue that point, but fewer still really understand how professional reputation works or how to improve it.

Your professional reputation comes in three levels. Your “Level One” reputation is your reputation among the people you work with directly every day. Your immediate team of co-workers and peers, plus any managers and/or direct reports. In other words, the people that interact with you very regularly, and have first-hand knowledge of your performance.

Your “Level Two” reputation is your reputation among your entire company. For a very small company, levels one and two may have 100% overlap, but most of the time they don’t. Most of the time, there are plenty of people in your organization that have never met you. Some might not even have heard of you.

Your “Level Three” reputation is your reputation among your entire industry, or even ecosystem of related industries. People outside your organization, whether they work for competitors, vendors, clients, etc.

Most people think that in order to have a good professional reputation, they need to do good work and not be a jerk. That’s true only of Level One. Your Level One reputation is easy to manage – do a good job and be nice, and your immediate peers will probably like you. But that circle is also the circle that’s the least helpful to you in terms of your career advancement. That circle won’t contain very many new opportunities for you, and if you do switch roles, exactly zero of that reputation will be relevant. The new Level One group won’t know you, and you’ve started over.

Your real “career security” comes from Levels Two & Three, but those take work! You still have to do a good job and be nice, but you also have to advertise. You have to talk to people, broadcast what you’re doing. This doesn’t have to be some slick marketing campaign. Essentially, you have to just extend the visibility and awareness of you “doing a good job and being nice” to a larger circle.

The easiest way to do that is to just… do it. Be nice to a larger group of people, and do good work that can benefit a larger group as well. Did you design a new system that helps your team save some time on their job? Awesome – share it a little wider. Give it to people you don’t work with. You don’t have to “sell” it. You don’t have to convince anyone it’s great. But just offering it is a wonderful way to improve your reputations in Levels Two & Three.

I do this all the time. Probably half or more of these blog entries came from conversations I had in my own “Level One.” Upon realizing that the conversation was helpful, I opt to share it a little wider. It’s not slavering self-aggrandizement. It’s just me taking the same niceness and diligence I used with one person and spreading it around to benefit others.

You can do it too – and you should.

Woke up today. Gold star.

Worked. Breathed. One step in front of the other. Gold star.

Moved something. Talked some. Gold star.

The mountain never gets taller. It’s as tall as it’s ever been, or will ever be. Only you can change. You can climb a lot or you can climb a little, but you still climbed.

Gold star.

Virtually no one has a single, unifying desire. Single-mindedness is rare in humans even in short bursts; it’s practically fictional as a permanent state of being. At any given time, you probably have a half-dozen conflicting desires, some louder than others. A few may be very fleeting, but a good number may be pretty permanent features of your psyche.

The thing is, most of your desires would be disastrous if you achieved them 100% to the exclusion of all your others. For instance, one of your desires (unless you are very strange, biologically speaking) is to Stay Safe From Harm. This is a deep desire for most people, fundamental to our existence. That desire, if achieved fully, would ruin your life.

Another desire you may have is Bury All Your Rivals. Sure, but you probably wouldn’t have a good life for very long if you actually did that directly. Those two desires counteract each other – one desire says “killing my rivals and taking their resources would benefit me!” Another says “if we do that, we will be much less safe, for our society will punish us.”

Think of yourself as the leader of a nation, and each strong desire as a general in your military. You have to listen to them. You need their input. They provide wisdom and motivation. But you have to constantly play them against one another, maintaining the balance so no single one of them takes over.

Very rarely can you win against one directly. Sadly, they are often stronger than pure reason. So if General Stay-Safe-From-Harm tells you not to do something, you probably won’t be able to convince him to let you on your own. You’ll have to employ General Desire-For-Resources, who is equally influential. You can tip the scales, break the tie.

And that’s what you have to do, day after day. Don’t lament the existence of these generals. They try to push and pull you, but only because they believe that their way is the best way for you to thrive. If you can keep them in check, they’re a formidable force. If you let them rule you, your empire will fall to ruin.