If you pick your foot up, you’ll have to put it back down. Lean forward just a little bit, and that becomes a step.

Sometimes you have to put a task in your own way, just so you have to get it done in order to move. Sometimes that’s what you do to keep the quicksand from getting you.

Don’t even try to take the step. Just pick your foot up, and the step has no choice but to happen. Then cheer – grab the momentum it gives. Pick your other foot up.

I believe in you.

Do you lay out your clothes for the next day before you go to bed?

We think of time as very linear, but I think that holds us back a bit when we’re trying to be proactive. We can skip around a little! Time can be more like location in space.

There’s this thing called the “Traveling Salesman” problem, which is a math problem where you use certain variables to calculate the most efficient route between many different stops, with potentially different travel times on different roads and different times spent at each location, etc. Actual salespeople do this all the time; in fact, there are even apps and such where you plug in all your stops and it drives you all around. It may often seem like a tangled route, but if everything is done correctly it actually saves you time.

So, you have a task you have to do. But maybe it’s somehow “time-locked,” in that you can’t actually work directly on the task yet. Perhaps you’re waiting for an email from someone, maybe you had to order a replacement part and it won’t arrive for a week, maybe it requires access to a workspace that’s currently closed. So even though the task might be important and you have lots of time right now, you don’t do anything.

Maybe you can’t work directly on the task. But we can almost always work indirectly on tasks in ways that will reduce our total time on the main event.

Like laying out your clothes for work the next day before you go to bed. Your work might be closed, so you can’t get a jump-start on actually getting there. But you can “advance the cause” in preparation now. Builds a buffer against future impediments.

So you don’t have the email yet. Small tasks: you can open up the draft of your response and type in everything that you can before you have the final info. Replacement part isn’t here, but you can take out the bad part, prep the tools. You can’t get to the workspace you need, but you can print out the instructions so you don’t have to do it there, wasting time.

See, we can jump around a little back and forth in time, if it helps us do things. Helps us take action. Reduces future cost.

Every single obstacle you face when trying to accomplish something comes, automatically, with a really awesome benefit. No matter what the obstacle is, this benefit is included – and in fact, the tougher the obstacle, the more of this benefit you get.

The Benefit: The story of your accomplishment and what it says about you is improved by a like amount.

Training for and completing a marathon? That’s pretty awesome! But if halfway through your training you suffer an injury, then despite that injury you finish your training and complete the marathon? Wow, way more impressive!

There is no hurdle to jump where this isn’t true. No matter what the difficulty is, it adds to the completed task. And that is, in fact, so beneficial that it’s almost a shame when it doesn’t happen. Why? Because the benefits of the accomplishment – whether they be personal satisfaction, improved skill, demonstration of competence to others, whatever – are enduring. The hurdle was temporary. Trading very short-term struggle for more long-term gain is very often a great deal.

So when your goal suddenly gets more difficult to achieve – rejoice! You are delayed but for a moment, for you can overcome – this hurdle will not defeat you. And when you reach that brass ring despite all else, it will shine all the brighter for it.

When presented with evidence that they’ve been doing the wrong thing, a shocking number of people keep doing the wrong thing, but harder. As if the problem weren’t direction, but intensity!

One of the biggest reasons for this is that they can’t bring themselves to believe that the wrong thing was the wrong thing, because they have some sort of preconceived, often societally-imposed bias towards it being the right thing.

I knew someone who got an undergraduate degree in a subject that neither tremendously interested her, nor was tremendously marketable. Surprise surprise, she did not find a fulfilling, lucrative job with it. So what did she do? Went back for her Master’s in that subject. When that also didn’t work, she was in the process of applying to grad school before she saw the light!

The wrong thing, but harder.

Here’s why this happens – there is no “wrong thing.” There’s just the right thing to get you goals that you don’t actually have. Getting an undergraduate or higher degree in that subject wasn’t “wrong” in some universal sense. But it didn’t lead her to the goal she actually had, which was a fulfilling and lucrative job doing something she actually liked.

This is what happens when we take “the right things” off the generic shelf of society. Those are tools for specific tasks, not miracle elixirs that will improve every single life they touch.

You can never really fail, you can just move in a direction you don’t really want to go. Whenever you think you’ve hit a failure, something that makes you upset or dissatisfied, reframe it and ask yourself: “This accomplished something. What was it? Is that something I want more of?” Maybe it is – maybe the “failure” is just that you didn’t get enough of what you wanted, which then is a problem of intensity. But if the result of your actions was to get you something you didn’t want at all, then doing more of that thing isn’t the answer.

I speak often about how one of my driving values is that I want others to be happy and successful. That’s still true, but I’m starting to think that I’ve left that value incomplete.

Happiness (however you define it) and success (in achieving your definition) are very good. But I want more. I want sustainable happiness and success. Not just “sustainable” meaning “long-lasting for myself,” but in the sense of being self-sustaining, repeating and continuing far after I’ve put it in motion, and far after I can no longer put direct effort into it.

I want to do more than help create happy and successful people. I want to create happy and successful heroes, those who can then do the same for others.

My children’s happiness, joy, fulfillment, success, and love mean the world to me. I would sacrifice anything for it, and I work very hard towards it. But if all I do is create an engine where I can input my own effort for the output of their happiness, I’ve failed. Because that engine will one day grind to a halt, ideally many, many years before the end of their lives.

They need to be not only self-sustaining, but they need the ability to do that for the people they care about, in turn.

Along the way, I would love to take those lessons, those skills, and apply them to anyone who’s interested. My children are the motivation and in many ways the proving ground for everything I do, but there are tons of positive externalities to my efforts to become a better parent. Many of which I hope will benefit you, my reader, my friend.

To that end, let me impart what I believe to be the foundational lesson of this endeavor: Creating happiness in others creates happiness in yourself. If you help others find true, deep fulfillment – even if your contribution is minor – you will increase such things in yourself. It’s almost impossible not to. So if I encourage you to make others happy, that will make you happy, and thus I will be happy because I helped make you so.

That’s the sustainable hero cycle. Let’s do that, just as much as we absolutely can.

Something very positive that this blog does for me is make me focus on my own growth, every day. To look for lessons, to care about how I’m developing as a person, and to observe my surroundings.

Life doesn’t move around you. You are a part of that movement. You’re not a rock in a river – you are the river.

We so easily fall into patterns where we’re giving something of ourselves to someone else, only to take what we get in exchange and give that to someone else, in exchange for something we give to someone else, and so on ad nauseum. We forget to bring some of that in. We make ourselves the centers of hurricanes but somehow separate from our own lives.

Move with your life. If you don’t like the direction, change it. But always move.

There’s nothing wrong with finding more efficient ways of doing things. If a step can be skipped without damaging the end result, skip it! We’re often obsessed with the traditional pathways to specific accomplishments, but there’s another word for “traditional pathway” – rut.

You will not win every competition, whether against your past self or against present others. You will not always succeed. You will not always run the fastest, jump the highest, punch the hardest.

But you can scream the loudest. You can lose, honorably, for a million reasons. You can only lose dishonorably for one: you did not try with every ounce of you.

Let them point to my failures, and my head will stay high. Let my works crumble, and I will build new ones. Let them point to a broken man at the end of his days, with nothing – and I will still breathe until my last noble breath. But let them never say, “there goes a man who gave up before the very last.”

You can break everything but my spirit, and it will not matter. Spirit is the seed; all else is merely fruit.

I want to help.

I want to help you, specifically. The person reading these words right now. If you reached out to me and asked me to help you solve a problem, I very likely would. (That’s different from asking me for advice, by the way, which I’m generally more reluctant to do.)

But direct help? A clear ask, with something I can contribute? I live for that, generally. I love helping.

But I really, really need to do it less. And so do you.

“Doing” is very rarely “teaching.” As a parent, as a manager, as anything – we fall into this trap where we think “I’ll do it for them this time, but during that I’ll show them how so that they can do it for themselves next time.” But that is almost never what happens. Instead, what you’ve taught is that you are the solution to this particular problem, and that’s the solution they’ll lean on next time.

If you want to both “help” and “teach” at the same time, here’s how: become a robot. Create no input, just obey orders and be a second set of hands. Let the other person provide all direction. Only answer direct questions, don’t offer more. Be there to catch.

They have to figure it out. You’re just a combination forklift and search engine. They’re the brains of the operation.

Do that once, and they probably won’t need you again.

In the interest of opening up a little… that last part is probably why so few people, including myself, do things this way. To teach well is to lessen others’ reliance on you. To make yourself a little less needed each time. And that’s what you should be doing (especially with kids), because not only do you make them better but you also replace a relationship based on dependence with one based on respect and love and far deeper bonds. But if you, like me, find yourself often valuing yourself based only on what you can do for others, then it can be hard to deliberately push that away.

When I was a young man in my late teens, I found myself (as young men of that age often do) in a bit of a pickle – a difficult situation, the exact details of which are not relevant here. I managed to resolve it myself, and only after that did my father learn about the whole thing. He was initially shocked and appalled that I hadn’t come to him when I had the problem; I generally did. He said, “Why didn’t you just tell me? I could have taken care of this in a day. You know I have superpowers.”

But really, that had been my entire motivation for resolving it myself. I knew he was so savvy, strong, competent that he could practically snap his fingers and it would have been over. But I told him: “If I never figure it out on my own, how do I get my own superpowers?”

We hugged. It was a good day. And, truth be told, it didn’t make me need him one iota less.