You: “I think we should swim across the ocean.”

Me: “What?”

You: “Yeah, there’s lots of great stuff over there. We should swim over and get it.”

Me: “Um, I don’t think–“

You: “Do you not want the stuff?”

Me: “The stuff would be great, sure. It’s just–“

You: “I think you don’t want the stuff. Or maybe you just don’t want ME to have the stuff. Is that it? You don’t want me to be happy?”

Me: “What? Of course I want you to be happy. I just don’t think you attempting to swim across the ocean is the way to make that happen.”

You: “So you admit that you don’t want me to swim across the ocean.”

Me: “I didn’t say I don’t want it. I don’t think it will happen.”

You: “So you don’t support it.”

Me: “I think you’re being deliberately obtuse. Something being impossible is different from me not wanting it. I would love gold to spontaneously appear in my house, but that doesn’t mean I expect it.”

You: “Then why not voice your support for it, at least? It might not happen, but you send the right message.”

Me: “Well for one, I don’t necessarily think that loudly wishing for gold to appear in my house ‘sends the right message,’ whatever that means. But in your case, there are more than just empty platitudes at stake. You can’t swim across the ocean, and if you try, you’ll probably drown. I don’t want you to drown, and that’s a pretty big unintended consequence of ‘sending the right message,’ don’t you think?”

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

If you sell a man a fish, you feed both of you for a lifetime.

There is a time and place for all three. A man on the brink of starvation will not be helped by teaching him how to fish. Sometimes, you just help your fellow humans, and that’s okay. There are also some people who will always be incapable of fishing, no matter how much you try to teach them. That doesn’t mean they’re incapable of anything, though! They just might be lousy at fishing. But if they’re great at making shoes, and you aren’t – then sell that man a fish!

He gets fish, you get shoes, and both of you thrive.

Here’s a fun experiment, either as a learning exercise for your kids or as a team-builder for adults: have the participants write down the instructions for how to make a Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich (or as my kids call them, a “peeb sammy”). Then, perform those instructions exactly as written, interpreting them as literally as you can.

If the instructions say “put peanut butter on the bread,” then put the jar of peanut butter on top of the loaf of bread. After all, the instructions didn’t say to open the jar and use a knife to scoop a little bit out, right? Did the instructions say “open the package that contains the bread and remove two slices, placing them on the table, flat and side-by-side?” Or did they just say “get bread?”

Often your literal, exact performance of the instructions written will be hilarious (to kids) or maybe a little frustrating (to adults). But they’ll illustrate an important point: when we give instructions, we’re usually making a huge number of assumptions!

I often see directions or instructions that contain a half-dozen (or more) assumptions per step. Some of them are cultural assumptions about the shared definitions of terms. Some of them are assumptions about prior expertise or foundational knowledge. Some of them are even assumptions about modes of thinking.

In each case, the assumption will be invisible to you. The instructions will seem crystal-clear from your point of view. You marked the path you took to the solution and turned that path into instructions for others, but that only works for people who started from the same position as you did. Someone approaching the problem from somewhere else might be very confused!

For a more concrete example, write down the directions from your house to the nearest movie theater. Now give those directions to someone else who lives in a different part of town – if they followed those directions, they wouldn’t get to the theater, would they?

Always keep this in mind when you’re teaching others. You can know in advance where you want your audience to end up, but you can’t control where they start. So the further out from your solution you go, the more broadly applicable you have to be. You do have to assume some foundational knowledge! For instance, it would be absurd to write out directions for making a peeb sammy that included instructions on how to identify peanut butter or how to grow your own grapes for the jelly. (Carl Sagan once quipped, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” But if you want to tell someone how to make apple pie, you’re allowed to skip a few steps.) You’re allowed to make assumptions – you should just always be aware that you’re doing it, and make sure that you’re not assuming so much that the directions are only useful to your own clones.

Sometimes that means that the best way to go about it is just to clearly define the end goal, and leave the rest up to them. I showed my kids a peeb sammy and how I made it, and then said “do you think you can make one?” Sure enough, they did just fine.

I am, as the existence of this blog should tell you, an examiner. I like to understand why I think the way I do. At its core, that’s what this blog is about. Thinking about thinking.

I have a deep tendency to pull on threads, especially when I can sense that my intuition pulls me in two (or more!) directions. I don’t think we should blindly trust tradition, but I also don’t think we should ignore the wisdom of those that have walked ahead of us. I don’t think we should obey every rule, but I don’t think we should disregard rules by default. And so on.

So, I look for threads to pull. Ways to understand apparent contradictions and find sense in the things that seem simultaneously true and at odds with truth. For the most part, I’m happy with what I discover here.

Sometimes, though, there’s not a deeper truth – and that’s okay, too. If you like cherry pie, there doesn’t have to be a reason. You don’t have to go deep into your subconscious memories of your upbringing to find the moment when you ate cherry pie on your birthday when you got your first bike or something like that. You’re allowed to just like it because it’s good.

My point is that sometimes we over-examine. We pull on threads until they unravel the thing we’re exploring entirely. I have no intention nor expectation that I’ll stop being an analytical sort of person, but I just want to make it clear that in a lot of cases, it’s really and totally fine that just like what we like.

When I was a little kid, I would occasionally catch performances of symphonies on TV. I liked classical music a lot as a kid, and I was always really impressed with the performances of big symphonies. What always threw me off was that, at the end of the performance, the applause and credit were clearly being primarily directed at the conductor. The conductor! Why? That dude didn’t do anything! He just stood there waving a wand around, he didn’t even play anything.

As a kid, I didn’t get it. When I was in my school’s 4th-grade band, one kid, usually the one with the least amount of musical talent (so in this case, very much me), got the unenviable job of thumping on the big bass drum. I had one job, which was to thump on that drum at regular intervals. I had to do this (it was explained to me) so that everyone could keep time together. Okay, so I got that – but I certainly didn’t get credit for it. At the end of a performance, nobody was shouting “Wow, that would have been impossible without the boring-but-reliable bass drum kid back there!”

So in my head, the conductor was the equivalent of the water boy – a supporting character, not the main thing. Only as I grew up did I realize that the conductor wasn’t just important, he was essential. Even if he never played a note.

The more complex the interplay, the more essential a conductor is. When you get eighty people together, all of whom are doing individually complex things and those incredibly complex things have to come together into a beautiful whole without flaw, it would be utterly impossible without someone directing. No matter how talented each individual member is, tiny mistakes are both inevitable and like dominoes. They will cascade into disaster without someone whose skill is exactly in anticipating and correcting those mistakes, coordinating that beautiful effort.

Many adults think the way I thought as a kid – that managers don’t work. And I’m sure some managers don’t. But coordinating things is a beautiful and necessary skill on its own. Don’t forget how vital it truly is.

A fellow is hitchhiking along a lonely stretch of road in Missouri. He’s trudging along the westbound side, keeping his thumb out even though a car hasn’t passed in hours. As the afternoon stretches on, a car pulls up in a cloud of dust. The friendly driver rolls down his window and says, “I’m headed to Los Angeles, friend! Want a ride?”

The hitchhiker looks disappointed. “No thanks, I’m actually headed for San Diego. Guess I’ll keep looking.”

Don’t do this! If you’re in Missouri and trying to get to San Diego, then for all practical purposes someone headed for Los Angeles is doing exactly the same thing you’re doing. 90% of the journey is probably the same. The possibilities are all good ones. Maybe you’ll get out when the road gets close enough for different routes to the final destination to be meaningful. Maybe you’ll fall asleep in the car and ride all the way to Los Angeles by mistake, and you’ll still be closer to San Diego than you were. Or maybe along the way you’ll talk and realize you’d actually rather end up in Los Angeles! And maybe along the way, if nothing else, you’ll make a friend.

I see people make this mistake all the time. They think they can only join forces with people who are doing exactly the same thing as them. And of course, that means they never join forces with anyone because no one is doing exactly the same thing as you, ever. But very few roads go to only a single destination, so you can effectively carpool with many different folks doing many different things.

And the subtler, deeper problem I often see is that when people are so single-minded about a particular goal, it’s often a goal that they have no real way of knowing is the right one. In the analogy above, the hitchhiker has never even been to San Diego before; he just wants to go to a beautiful, sunny California town that’s different than the life he’s known.

So maybe you really want to be a folk singer, all your life. You’ve never sung professionally, but you’ve got a lot of talent. One day, a famous rock band hears you singing in a karaoke place and they ask you to tour with them. Don’t say no just because they’re a rock band and not a folk band! Clearly, singing with a rock band for a while gets you closer to your end goal than refusing. Whether you use the rock band to get famous and then launch your folk career or whether you just decide it’s really fun to sing with a rock band and stick with it, you’re better off.

Don’t ask, “Is this my exact goal?” Ask “Is this closer to my goal than whatever I’m doing now?” And then ride along with whoever is headed that way.

Rockets are cool. All sorts of awesome technology, a bunch of fire and noise, all the promise of what they’re after – what’s not to like?

If you get a bunch of space enthusiasts together and ask them to tell you all their favorite things about rockets, those are the kinds of answers you’ll likely hear. The different kinds of engines. The physics behind calculating the launches. All that stuff. Very few people would probably say that their favorite thing about rockets was the big concrete slab that they take off from.

But the launchpad is vital. The secure foundation, the level surface, the stability to hold everything in place while you get ready. These are critical components of a successful launch.

A launchpad isn’t flashy or fun. It doesn’t even look like it has anything to do with space when you’re first starting to build it. But you need it. Perhaps more importantly, you can build it once and launch a hundred rockets from it if you built it right.

If you only consider a very narrow frame of reference, then at any given time half of a moving wheel looks like it’s moving in the wrong direction. A single dot. painted on the side of the wheel and viewed alone, would appear to be moving against the direction of the vehicle.

In order to not be alarmed and view this as a problem, you need some context. You need to know the direction of the wheel as well as how every part contributes.

Don’t forget that when you’re the hub. You might know all the things that are happening and why, but other people might not. If they’re confused, they can’t help. They might even feel demoralized, like they’re failing. But at this moment, they’re just on the other half of the wheel.

I’m a big fan of conversational gimmicks. Tricks of the tongue. Catchphrases!

My last name is hard to pronounce. For most people, especially non-Italians, it isn’t pronounced anything like it appears in print. It actually rhymes most closely with the way people say “gotcha!” For a long time, when introducing myself to someone new, I’d have to go through this whole dance of saying my last name multiple times while the other person repeated it, mispronouncing it differently each time, until finally when they got it they would smirk like I was hearing this for the first time and go, “Ahhhh, ‘gotcha,’ Roccia!”

Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

But after a while I realized… hey, that’s pretty good. It’s catchy, it’s memorable, and it does what I want it to do – teaches people how to actually pronounce my name. So I started using it myself. When I introduce myself now, my gimmick is to say “Hi there, I’m Johnny Roccia, rhymes with ‘gotcha‘!” And I do a little finger-gun thing because it’s cheesy but cheesy is also pretty on-brand for me.

Big win. I don’t have to hear other people spitting that back at me, and I make my name easier, and I make the introduction more memorable. All positive stuff!

But in addition to making things easy and memorable, there’s a benefit to a certain level of consistency in your words – especially written ones. You don’t want to become so predictable that you’re boring, of course. But you do want to be a little predictable because then you’re also referenceable. Don’t wear out your thesaurus looking for a new word each time. It’s fine to coin words and phrases because then it’s easy to both create shared communication tools and create shorthand for big concepts. If you write a lot (like I do!), you can’t possibly hold everything you’ve written in your own active memory. It’s nice to be able to search, and searching for past work on a topic is much easier if you’re pretty consistent overall in the terms you use for things.

And that little bit of consistency, that dash of predictability, makes you easier to interact with. It lowers the barrier for other people to get to know you, absorb your ideas. You don’t win extra points for fancy words and creativity if it makes it harder to understand what you’re talking about!

Until tomorrow, everyone – this is Johnny Roccia, rhymes with ‘gotcha!’

Let’s talk about the stuff you do.

Stuff you do basically has three “levels,” and the understanding of that task at each level gives you different insights into what you can improve, what you can do better – or stop doing. Not everyone understands what they do at each of these levels, and especially when communicating about it with others, it’s valuable to do so.

“What” – This is the task. The physical components. If you’re mowing your lawn, the “what” is that you fill the lawnmower with gas, start it up, and push it around over the grass in straight lines so the blades cut the grass and blow the clippings into a bag, which you then empty into a trash can. “What” is detail-oriented. Talking about the “what” with other people will generally only be valuable if the other people also do this exact task and can transfer knowledge on this level. If someone else also mows lawns, you and they might get a lot out of discussing fuel types, blade brands, or what to do about hard-to-cut edges. You won’t get much out of trying to discuss the task at this level with the owner of the golf course who’s hired you to landscape it – and perhaps more importantly, that person won’t get much out of it, either. They won’t be impressed, because they generally won’t “get it.” So when you think about the “what,” think about solving problems or smoothing out issues and keep your chats to those who can help you do that.

“How” – This is the methodology. You physically mow the lawn as described under “what,” but the “how” is more strategic. It’s things like “I use a riding mower for the large open spaces, then I switch to the push mower for the more visible but smaller front spaces so there are no unsightly tire tracks, and then I do the edging with a hand-held weed wacker.” It’s also things like “I always mow early on a Saturday when I’m doing corporate landscaping because it doesn’t disturb anyone working and by the time anyone sees it again on Monday any uneven spots have had time to grow back in a little and the color will have returned some.” A lot of this is about context, fitting your “what” into a larger plan, a larger world. People who don’t know anything about mower brands will still be able to understand a fair bit of “how,” and therefore it’s a good communication tool for other people that don’t do the task themselves. The owner of the golf course doesn’t care what brand of weed wacker you use, but he appreciates that you’re smart enough to not schedule a mow on the day of the tournament.

“Why” – This is the level that many people don’t ever bother with at all, and that’s a shame. Because this is the level that can change your life. This is the level that can totally redefine your “how” and even your “what,” because it’s so fundamental. Why do you mow the lawn? And don’t say “because it needs to be cut.” I’m asking why you mow the lawn. Is it because you enjoy it, both the work and the end satisfaction, in a way that can’t be found anywhere else? Is it because you’re very good at it, and therefore it’s a valuable skill that allows you to earn a living on terms you enjoy? Or… is it because you mowed lawns last year and you didn’t really give any thought to whether or not you’d want to do it this year? I have a landscape guy who’s incredible. (Even though I actually really enjoy mowing the lawn, it isn’t worth it to me for a lot of reasons to do it myself.) He likes mowing lawns well enough. But his “why” was always “because this is a viable enterprise that people need and therefore is lucrative.” He’s in it as an entrepreneur, in other words. And once you land on that “why,” you realize that mowing the lawn yourself isn’t actually the best use of your time. It’s training others, securing business, and expanding the operation. And that’s just what he’s done. He no longer mows my lawn; one of his many well-trained employees does. I’m glad of it.

My original landscape guy used to talk to me about “how,” but never “what.” I didn’t really care “what,” and he knew I wouldn’t get most of it anyway, but we connected on “how” very well, which was more important to me as his customer. But he was also a great guy, so we connected on “why” – and I’m glad he talked to me about it. Now he talks about “how” with his employees so they’re better at their roles, but doesn’t talk too much about “what” because that level of micromanagement isn’t conducive to effective time management. They talk to each other about “what” to get better, too – because it’s good to have “shop talk” between experts on a task. And he thinks about “why” all the time, because that’s how he’ll grow.

Lawns are an easy analogy, but this is all about you, too. Go give it some thought.