How much of your personal environment is truly necessary to your functioning and happiness?

In the pure survival sense of the word, you don’t need a car, or a phone, or a computer. In a really strict and not terribly helpful definition of the word, they’re luxuries. But even though they can be used for leisure-related things, they sure don’t feel like luxuries. They feel like the cost of entry into the modern society that surrounds us.

I’ve always accepted that… sort of begrudgingly. Phone, car, computer – I don’t like being squeezed or forced, so if I have to buy those things in order to unlock the tremendous benefits around me, I’ll do it with the barest investment I can make. I have always bought extremely inexpensive, stripped-down versions of those items. I’ve never bought a new car in my life (for all sorts of reasons they’re terrible investments), and my phones and computers are always whatever version has the fewest bells and whistles.

Those are obvious examples, but I think in general we build this machine around us to navigate modern life, but then we often overdo it and build on more features than are necessary. Everything you have an account for, every subscription service, every organization where you’re a member. Some of these are the end goal – you may have a season ticket to your favorite team’s events because you like to go. But others are means – everything from your metro pass to your subscription to a video call service is part of your Modern Machine.

Not only can there be a lot of bloat if you let this get away from you, but the more you build it, the more it can look like a cage. You build all these tools and frameworks around you and suddenly they’re funneling you into a very specific kind of place, or job, or activity, or lifestyle. You outsource your freedom to things that are supposed to give you more of it.

The modern world has a lot of advantages. I’m no proponent of isolationism (except in reasonable, cleansing bursts, anyway) or completely disconnecting from society. But I am a proponent of being deliberate about your choices, and only taking exactly as much as you need, without yielding anything you don’t want to lose.

If you ever get lost in the woods, build a house. Now you’re not lost anymore – you’re home.

My life is, in many ways, is radically different than it was just a handful of years ago. Sometimes I look around and I don’t recognize it. I’ve gained a lot! I’ve lost a lot. Things have changed.

Plant a flag. Grow some roots. Build a house. Whatever it takes to make the place you are into the place you should be.

I am not at all good at this. I’m a fixer, not a settler. If I had lived during the frontier days of America, I think I would have had a major problem – the allure of what was over the next hill would always have been more attractive than whatever land I was supposed to build a farm on.

Exploration is good. Ambition, drive, adventure – all good. But there’s a balance; the other side of the scale. A place to return to. Even if we’re not talking about a physical one.

My father used to say that if I found something I was looking for in what should have been an obvious place: “If it was a snake it would’ve bit you.”

Assume the obvious, at least as a starting point. Sometimes we come up against a problem and we assume that just because no one has solved it yet, that the solution must be complex or difficult. But maybe not!

Start with the obvious place. The easy solution. It might not work – but it rarely takes long to check the obvious, so you’re not out much effort. But if you skip that step, you could spin your wheels for a long time before you realize to come back to it.

Don’t get bit.

Shockingly little of our behavior stems from deeply-held moral convictions. And that’s a good thing! We shouldn’t have deeply-held moral convictions about most things, because it’s exhausting and alienating and inconsequential in most cases.

That leaves most of our behavior to be driven by the sequence of incentives that surround us. Have you ever picked one place to eat over another because it was closer? Worn a shirt you find slightly less comfortable because you receive more compliments when you do?

Of course. Everyone has incentives, they’re all competing, you’re creating them for other people, they’re creating them for you, and we’re navigating them all the time. But this effect is subtle, in the sense that water is subtle if you’re a fish. Because this is everywhere, you don’t really acknowledge it.

Still, there’s no excuse for being ignorant of it. People will change their behavior if the incentives change. It boggles my mind when people act like it doesn’t.

A few years ago, Philadelphia imposed this really high tax on sugary drinks sold in stores. It was absurd on the face of it, because the two stated goals of the program were entirely mutually exclusive: on the one hand, they said “this many sugary drinks get bought in Philly each year, so if we impose a 50-cent tax on each one, we’ll make X money in tax revenue for the city.” On the other hand, they said, “we want to discourage the consumption of sugary drinks, and this tax will help do that.”

See the problem? You can’t assume (with the first goal) that behavior will remain exactly the same while assuming (with the second goal) that it will change.

The two rules here are:

1. People will always change their behavior, in aggregate, when the incentives change. This is true even if you wouldn’t change your personal behavior, because you are not ‘the aggregate.’
2. Changing incentives changes behaviors, but it doesn’t necessarily change desires. People’s new behaviors will be whichever get them to their original desires most efficiently under the new incentive structure.

Here’s what actually happened in Philly, by the way – BOTH goals failed. The city didn’t gain much tax revenue (way less than the projections) AND the residents didn’t drink fewer sugary drinks. Instead, people just bought the same number of sugary drinks from stores just outside the city limits, and thus with markedly lower price points.

So, you want to understand and maybe predict human behavior? Okay, here’s the pattern. First, take a look at the action that a group of people are taking (all this stuff works way better with groups where you can average out the weird idiosyncrasies, but this method isn’t worthless when used on individuals – just be careful in your evaluations and put error bars on your predictions). Figure out first what desire they’re trying to meet. The desire is almost never the action. People aren’t buying sugary drinks because they’re below a certain price point. They’re buying sugary drinks because they want them. They’re incentivized to buy them from city bodegas because that was the most efficient method. So if you were smart, you’d look for the “path of least resistance” between the people and the desire that you’ve identified. That will be the new thing they do.

In sales organizations, sometimes leadership makes the silly decision to cap commissions. So at a certain point in the month, quarter or year, you can keep making sales but you won’t get paid for them anymore. In those organizations, you may be shocked to discover, the good salespeople tend to not work very hard in the last stretch of the commission period. They delay. They talk to their clients and prospects, sure, but they drag their feet getting contracts and closing deals. In sales they call this “sandbagging,” because they’re basically trying to delay commissionable deals until the start of the new commission period.

That’s a lot of wasted effort from the company’s perspective. But what else can you expect? Incentives change behavior. Salespeople don’t make sales because that’s what they want. They make sales because they want money. They’ll do whatever is the most efficient thing that gets them money. If you change what that thing is with rules, you’ll create a new “most efficient thing” – and people will do that.

Back when the British Empire ruled India, there was a time when cobras were a real menace. They were responsible for a lot of injuries and deaths in the cities (often of kids) and so the ruling Brits tried to solve the problem by putting out a bounty, paying a certain amount of money for every dead cobra people turned in. What actually happened was that people started secretly breeding cobras because it was a great way to make money. When the Brits caught on, they halted the bounty – and everyone dumped their cobras, which resulted in the population being higher than it was before.

And so here we add rule #3:

3. There is always more than one incentive.

See, the people really did dislike cobras. The reason they weren’t just killing them already (even without the bounty) is that cobras are dangerous! You can get really hurt trying to kill one, and it often might be better to just try to shoo it out of your house with a broom… where it can plague your neighbor. So creating an incentive to face that danger wasn’t, by itself, a bad decision. People really did desire to lead cobra-free lives. But they had an even stronger desire, which was to lead a wealthy life. That created conflicting incentives, and the stronger one won out. And when the bounty was ceased, people had all these cobras in boxes and stuff. They could have killed them instead of letting them go, but… remember that thing about cobras being dangerous and tricky to kill? It’s easier to tip over a box and run.

People will spend a lot of time “gaming the system” as long as they perceive that there are gains for doing so. This creates a lot of wasted effort. For example, Americans spend collectively 6 billion hours doing their taxes every year. As much as possible, most people are trying to game the system. That doesn’t mean they’re cheating or anything! It just means they’re following incentives… in fact, they’re doing what the tax code wants them to do!

Remember, every tax (or tax break) is ostensibly designed to create or change a behavior in the first place. The government wants revenue, but ultimately all sorts of social engineering motivations come into play. Cigarettes get taxed because politicians hope that somehow revenue will be raised and people will smoke less. They’re probably dishonest about one of those hopes, but even still, if you smoked less because of the tax, people could hardly claim that you were cheating on your taxes just because you ultimate paid less to the state coffers.

So when people spend 6 billion hours figuring out what they can claim, remember that it’s because the rules (at least claim to) encourage them to do certain things or not do other things. That’s the incentive.

But of course, oh those unintended consequences. 6 billion wasted hours. More cobras than ever. Extra driving – and extra pollution & congestion – to get that Coke. Always a side effect. Always something you didn’t see.

Choice architecture is hard. Designing incentive structures is hard. Predicting how people will react to them is hard – but predicting that people will react to them, in one way or another, is dead simple.

They will.

Here’s how time flows: Past, Future, Present, Past.

What happened to you in the past shapes your model of how you predict the future. Your model of how you predict the future is what manifests your present actions. The results of your preset actions become what happened to you in the past.

Understanding that flow gives us a good model for how to improve the outcomes.

We predict the future not based on what exactly occurred in the past, but our view of those events. If you got in a car crash, that may shape how you perceive the safety of highway travel in the future, which affects how you live your life now. But your awareness of the truth of those events matters – if you think (incorrectly) that the crash was simply a random accident, you may be more fearful. If instead you (correctly) recognize that it was because you had bad breaks from poor maintenance, you will instead increase your diligence regarding the upkeep of your vehicle.

Truth of physical acts can be ascertained or at least accurately estimated. Truth of motivations and even destiny may be harder, but that gives you freedom.

You lost your job. Was it because the modern job market isn’t to be trusted, and so you should never put in effort again? Or was it because of something more real, something narrow that you can identify, and shift in response?

If you’re going to let the past dictate your moral predictive model, then do so in a way that motivates you, not the opposite. Don’t let the past tyrannize you into abandoning the future. Let it motivate you to create a better one.

There truly are days where you just need to do for the sake of doing. To keep your muscles – mental & physical – in shape for tasks to come. To be ready for the next chapter.

You will leave things behind. Sometimes things you didn’t want to – but that can’t be helped. The same effort trying to cling or recapture will always be better spent turning the next page. You don’t have to be bitter. It was good while it lasted, and sometimes that’s what you have.

So kick off your spurs and get back on there. Go around the block once or twice to remind you the way. Make your bed, brush your teeth, and push.

Do for the sake of doing.

If someone was about to get on a bus to go to the grocery store, how would you summarize their goal?

You could say that their goal is to get to the grocery store, but that’s not right. That’s just a means to an end. The end goal is “satisfy my hunger, need for sustenance, and desire to eat something presumably tasty without sacrificing too many resources like time and money to do so.”

Their goal certainly isn’t “Get on a bus.” But more on that in a minute.

You aren’t really at the “core goal” behind an action until you reach something you can’t substitute. The person has to eat, so ultimately food at the right intersection of quality and cost is the goal. Literally everything else is a method, a tool, a path – one of several. The person in question presumably thinks it’s the correct path, but you’ll never know if you don’t see them as options, leading to a true goal, rather than as goals themselves.

It’s possible that a bus trip to the grocery store isn’t the best way for this person to get the food they want at the best value cost for them. Maybe ordering grocery delivery would be better – maybe the increased cost of delivery would counteract the time cost of the trip as well as the travel costs. Maybe not! But the point is that it’s worth looking at through the lens of knowing what you actually care about.

In general, people aren’t great at this. But they’re awful at it when it comes to their careers.

When you ask people what their career goals are, they mostly answer the equivalent of “my goal is to get on a bus.”

Let me show you the layers between true goals and what most people say & focus on. My true goal is to live a life that inspires my children to want to do awesome things with their own lives, while simultaneously creating the launchpad that allows them to do so (meaning valuable lessons, good social skills, health, and a good starting point for financial security) and letting me spend ample time just enjoying being with them as they grow up. My principles dictate the cost limits on this: even if it would improve the outcome of that goal, I won’t rob a bank, hurt anyone, etc. And you’ll notice that my goal isn’t stated in terms of a moment in time, but rather in terms of a pattern for my whole life. No single moment is a true goal.

Simply stated that way, you can see that there may be many, many ways to accomplish that goal! But there are some foundational things I’ll need to have. Obviously my own health needs to be good in order to give a good example to my kids, as well as to live long enough to see the full arc of their lives into adulthood (and to keep up with them!). I’ll need to have enough financial health to, again, be a good example – but also to save for them, provide opportunities for growth and education for them – but not sacrifice so much in terms of time and responsibility that I become detached from their lives. I also have to care about my own development in those areas, in order to learn with and guide my children. But those, while good things to do, aren’t true goals. I don’t have the true goal of financial health for myself – it simply strikes me as the most obvious way to provide financial health for my children.

Here’s a silly hypothetical counter-example: Let’s say an eccentric billionaire offers me a deal: as long as I never make more than $20k per year for the rest of my life and have a zero-dollar savings account balance every year, then this billionaire will provide each of my children $10 million upon their 18th birthday. I would take that deal in a heartbeat, because it gets me to my true goal.

Having identified my true goal and what strike me as the most efficient paths to it, I now start looking at options to execute on those paths. That means deciding between home gym equipment, a gym membership, or a personal trainer. It means deciding on savings vehicles for the kids. It means finding a job that has a good mix of schedule flexibility, opportunities for personal growth, and income. But none of those were goals. I didn’t have a goal of buying my own set of free-weights, starting a Roth IRA, or finding a specific job as an executive coach. Those were just tools to help me travel the path to my true goal.

Whew! Okay, now go back and ask someone else what their career goals are, and they’ll say “Work at Facebook.”

That is not even close to a goal. That is the equivalent of saying your goal is to get on a bus, when what you really really want is to satisfy a core need. But if you never realize that, you miss so many opportunities. If you’re so laser-focused on the bus, you might turn down a pop-up street market that is right across from the bus station and has better prices, quality and selection than the grocery store. It would have been better, but you weren’t even thinking about the true goal, just the silly tool that’s only one tiny piece.

Many of my moments of clarity and epiphany come as a result of deliberate thought, challenge, or mental exercise. I practice thinking in my writing, in my conversations with others, in the work I do. But all of the most deliberate reflection in the world can’t capture everything, and once in a while a big “ah-ha” just kind of slaps you in the face.

That happened to me this weekend. I was talking with a dear friend of mine, and he made an observation about me that I had never considered, but immediately rang true. He told me that in all the time he’d known me (and we’ve known each other for 25 years), he had never known me to be satisfied. With anything.

Wow.

Now, he didn’t mean in the sense that I was never happy, pleased, or proud. It’s not that I don’t think things are awesome or that I dislike everything in front of me. What he meant was that I never felt… done.

There’s always a new thing to do. Always more to accomplish, to improve. Always another goal, another adventure, another project. He was right.

In order to have a bit of vulnerability here in this space, I will share why.

I’m not greedy. I live very simply, in fact, from a material perspective. I’m not overly status-hungry, either. I don’t want my life to have “more” of anything in it, except maybe freedom and family. I have a simple house, but I would be fine in it forever… except I do already have a ten-year plan for improvements and changes to it. So the assessment wasn’t off.

But my point is that my lack of apparent satisfaction doesn’t come from a desire for more, or a sense of dissatisfaction with my current life.

It comes from fear. It comes from my fear that if I ever stop pushing, moving, planning, improving, striving and working – then I won’t have anything. I won’t be anything. I define myself by these things, by the effort I put into every day. When I take a (admittedly necessary) day to relax and recharge, I don’t feel human. My “days off” are still very often filled with projects, active hobbies, intentional family outings, etc.

My brain thinks of things I want to do faster than I can do them. I could force myself to take a day off from doing things, but I can’t force my brain to stop coming up with things to do.

There’s no end destination in mind. I have long since recognized that I will never be “complete” and have the big “To Do” list of my life completely checked off. I honestly fear the day that I simply can’t think of more to do, because I’m not sure how I would exist then.

In a conversation with a different friend recently, I was idly joking about what I would do if I won the lottery, and was saying that I probably would live a very similar life, except I wouldn’t work. He laughed, and said “of course you would.” He’s right. Maybe I would change a few things about how I worked, but money is a tiny factor in the motivation behind both my work ethic and what work I choose to do.

I am proud of my accomplishments, and I’m excited for the next ones. But I’m also afraid. Afraid of what it would mean to be more comfortable, to be less personally ambitious. Afraid of what lies in unused moments, so I use every one to the fullest I can. I can feel laziness and sloth lurking around every corner, ready to grab me like a tar pit, impossible to escape from. Even at my most weary, I fear rest more than I desire it.

On reflection, I can recognize this as a flaw, or at the very least a challenge – an obstacle in the way of a truly happy, healthy and fulfilled life. But I can’t intuitively map its effects onto my life. I can’t point to the exact spot where it’s doing damage, the thing that would be better if I changed. I can’t diagnose it.

Could I find a balance? Could I change this? Something so fundamental to me. So definitive. What would happen to me then? Should I strive to find these answers, work on this facet, build a different foundation for all I do?

Or is this the one time when I simply have to be satisfied with how things are?

How frequently do you accompany your serious decision-making with some light but consistent physical activity like walking?

In my experience, there are two vital components to good decision-making. You must gather correct information. And then you must have calm clarity when evaluating that information.

For that earlier stage, the most important thing to remember is that until you have enough information, that’s the only thing you should be doing. Don’t judge, evaluate, or deliberate – yet. Just gather. Find the pieces. Take notes.

When you’ve reached the point where relevant information is no longer coming in waves but a trickle, stop. Diminishing returns won’t help you, and you can deliberate until the day you die if you really want to, so now it’s time for phase two: The Walk.

You have the information, so stop trying to make the decision with all the negative physical and environmental distractions around you. Drink water, eat a light meal, put away electronics and go walk around outside. Wander a while. Take only the decision with you as a companion.

Those steps are vital, and their order is vital. You can’t make a good decision without information. But you can’t process that information from a cramped, dehydrated, tired, hungry, noisy and flashing cage.

Remember those steps, and make better decisions.

Several times in the past few days I’ve been in a situation where someone was asking or telling me something important, and there was nothing for me to say. In one case the person was angry. In another they were hurt. In another they were just thinking out loud. In all those cases, my ear was more important than my mouth.

I didn’t like it. I never do.

You can always say something: the wrong thing. I try to avoid that.

Listening instead of speaking isn’t a magical balm. People don’t automatically get better because you were a good listener. They don’t suddenly solve all their problems.

But nothing would make that happen. There was no exact combination of words that if only you figured it out, would make every problem vanish.

That’s just life, sometimes. Listen to it.