It flew by me. Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the first post on The Opportunity Machine.

I thought I’d have run out of things to say by now. But it turns out that if you keep living, you keep finding new things to think about.

I’ve done an awful lot of playing and experimenting here. I’ve trialed weekly or monthly features, some of which stuck around for a while, others only happened once, and some are still going. I’ve played around with how I’ve presented my ideas as much as with what ideas I’ve presented.

I’ve had neat milestones, too. The first “fan” I had. The first time I learned that someone had shared one of my posts with her peers of her own volition. The first time (recently!) that someone wrote about this blog. I’ve enjoyed all that very much.

Here’s the huge value-add for me though: since I’ve been writing a daily blog now for two years, that means I’ve written over seven hundred entries. Gun to my head I probably couldn’t name more than 30 from memory. That means that this blog has magnified the power of my memory by more than twentyfold. Thoughts I’ve had that would otherwise have vanished into thin air are now preserved in some way, to be built upon and reviewed and perhaps even disagreed with by a future version of me. But they mean something in a way that a thought you don’t remember doesn’t.

Both of my grandfathers lived incredibly interesting lives, but both died many years ago – my maternal grandfather when I was only 7, and my paternal grandfather before I was even born. They have great stories, but I’ve only ever gotten to hear them second-hand. Snippets and collections of lives that I would have loved to experience more.

I have three children, and I also have a pretty interesting life. It’s not wild to presume that one day I may have grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, and so on – and that they may one day want to know more about how I thought, how I lived, what was important in my life. Perhaps to view their own parents through eyes that saw them as children, or to trace back the origins of whatever values I ultimately pass down to them.

Maybe it will just be me, many years hence, who wants to look back through the eyes of a younger man in a different world and look at the same point in time from both directions.

This blog is part self-help advice column, part chronicle of strange adventures, part campfire stories and part amateur psychology course. It’s more, too – much more.

What it isn’t though – is ending.

See you tomorrow.

Don’t harbor an exorbitant degree of loyalty to losing strategies. Certainly don’t wind your identity up in them.

You do things, and some of those things work. Some don’t. But who you are doesn’t have to be defined by any particular act or even set of acts. If you switch to a meatless diet for health reasons, you don’t have to suddenly “be” a Vegetarian(tm), especially if later it turns out that the diet isn’t working for you.

Not every challenge is zero-sum, of course. Many aren’t; just because you didn’t succeed at something doesn’t necessarily mean that someone else did, nor at your expense. But maybe a strategy won where yours didn’t, and it’s foolish not to look at that strategy and see what you can take from it.

The biggest thing that keeps people from doing that is identity. They wrap their egos up in a course of action and make it part of who they are, instead of saying “this didn’t work, so I don’t need it.”

Sometimes the circumstances of a choice have near-zero consequences, so you don’t need to care. You don’t have to switch which football team is your favorite just because your favorite team hasn’t won in a while, because it doesn’t matter. But if you’re actually betting, and not just cheering? Cheer for whoever you want, wear whatever colors you want… but bet like the money in your wallet is worth more than which color shirt you’re wearing.

I was reading recently that when it comes to improving your life (or some aspect of it), people mostly default to looking for additive changes, ignoring subtractive ones. The feel like their life is missing something, so they look to add to it: Start doing yoga, get that fancy gadget, take that medicine, go on that vacation, find that special someone, apply for that promotion, and so on.

Only a very small group of people will default to looking instead at subtractive solutions. Add it to the list of ways I’ve discovered that I diverge from the typical person in my civilization.

I always look first to figure out what you can get rid of to solve a problem. If I feel like my life (or an aspect thereof) isn’t what I want it to be, I look for stuff to exorcise. Like cutting words out of a lengthy essay or a tumor out of your stomach, removing things generally feels like improving things to me.

There’s this joke where people use the term “retail therapy” to mean “when I’m sad, I buy myself something to cheer myself up.” But if I want to cheer myself up, I throw stuff away. If I need to be less stressed, I really just need to do less stuff.

Some people look at five objects and a shelf that only fits four and think “I need a new shelf.” I look at that and say “which of these objects am I throwing away today?”

Try it. The next time something feels wrong, try solving it by taking something away instead of by adding something. If nothing else, it’ll be a change of pace for most people and maybe lead to more creative thinking. But for some, it may just be exactly the change you need.

There’s this prank that you can play on someone that involves a bowl of water and a broom. It also involves a ceiling. If you use a plastic bowl and a room without anything really valuable in it, it can be a pretty harmless prank, and videos of it have floated around the internet for a while.

The prank is this – you get a bowl full of water, and then you stand on something so you can reach the ceiling, and you put the bowl up against the ceiling. You make sure there’s a broom nearby. Then you call in the intended victim and just sort of casually say “Hey, can you help me with something,” and when they come in, you ask them to grab the broom and use the handle to press the bowl into the ceiling. You’ve got to have that perfect tone in your voice so that the person doesn’t question why they’re asked to do this absurd thing.

Then, when they’re essentially using the broom to hold the bowl against the ceiling, you let go and climb down. Then you just leave.

Because now the person is holding a bowl of water above their own head against the ceiling, and there’s no good way to get it down without just letting go and it falls on you. I may not be explaining this super well, so just watch:

Why am I talking about dumb internet pranks?

Because sometimes you do this to yourself. You don’t mean to, but sometimes you just solve a problem in a way that is essentially holding it up against the ceiling with a broom. Once you realize it, it’s too late. You’d love to construct a more permanent solution, but you can’t. The only way to do that is to just let the water fall and start over.

So then the only thing to do is look around and decide how much damage the water’s going to do. Either that, or hold the broom forever.

I’ve written before about my love of my “primitive camping” hobby. I like to go in with just a backpack and hike for miles until I find a suitable site, tame it just enough to stay there overnight, and then leave it as I found it and hike home. I also love all sorts of other flavors of camping, from barely-counts-as-camping renting a cabin to pitching a tent at a campsite, but the backpack-only style is my favorite.

So this time, I brought along The Beansprout (age 9) on her first such trip.

She took to it like a fish to water.

She was my trailblazer, navigating with a compass, hiking miles with a ten-pound pack, cutting through thorns, scaling rocky cliffs, literally fording a river at one point! (Okay, more of a decent-sized stream, but adventurous nonetheless!)

Her inherent wilderness skills notwithstanding, she’s definitely still The Beansprout, which means that she also pretty quickly dug up an animal skull, had me affix it to the end of her walking stick, and then declared herself The Forest Witch, in command of all creatures of the woodlands and layer of curses upon the unworthy.

Never a dull moment with this kid, for sure.

But the greater lesson is this: I honestly wasn’t sure, prior to the trip, if she was old enough. For regular camping, sure – but a multi-mile hike into the woods? Heavy pack? No easy out? And then she blew away every expectation. People – kids and adults alike – rise to their challenges. If you don’t challenge, you never rise.

And if you never rise, you can never become The Forest Witch, and is that really the life you want?

If you get a full night’s sleep, only a small percentage of it is “REM sleep” and that’s supposed to be the truly restorative stuff. You might get like 90 minutes of REM sleep but for most people that’s all you need. Less than 2 hours of REM sleep would be enough to fully restore you.

But the rub is that most people can’t get 2 hours of REM sleep without a bunch of normal garbage sleep around it.

Lots and lots of people put lots and lots of time and effort into trying to improve that. Everyone from scientists to mattress companies try to find ways to get into REM sleep faster, extend it longer, require less sleep around it, etc.

I think that’s valuable work! Could you imagine if eventually we developed medicines, devices, or techniques that allowed you to just drop right into the “good” sleep, do it for 2 hours, and then wake fully rested? I’d pay a lot for it.

I was thinking about that in relation to creativity. When I put myself in a creative flow I can do pretty cool things. I might only do them for 30-60 minutes but get a lot out of it. But my best, most creative 30 minutes often happens in the middle of a 4-hour block.

When I first get warmed up I have to create “the zone.” And when I know I’m approaching another scheduled responsibility the fire tends to cool a little and I’m wrapping up, saving files, organizing things. But that sweet spot in the middle is where magic happens.

Shortening the time it takes for me to get into “REM Creativity mode” or extending how long it lasts in the face of looming responsibilities would be of great help to me. Because of how I currently work, my best work happens pretty exclusively in the wee hours, because that’s the only time when there aren’t any upcoming responsibilities for several hours (sleep? what’s that?).

So just like the scientists and mattress makers, here I am.

Insight is a matter of diligent cultivation and manufacture. It doesn’t spring fully whole from flashes of inspiration.

Tautologically, you can’t grow without changing. If you stretch something to make it longer, it gets thinner. If you squash it down to make it wider, it gets shorter. Energy and mass must come from somewhere, just like character.

Relative movement is key. Relative. You can find great meaning in being the one who climbs the mountain, but you can also find great meaning in being the island amid a stormy sea. Relative. But if you are static in a static environment – no movement, no meaning, no growth.

I was putting away groceries the other day and went down to my basement where I store the paper towels. As a father of three, I often buy pretty large bundles of those, so I was putting away the 12-pack I just bought… in the stack of about four other 12-packs that were already down there.

Paper towels don’t expire so it’s fine to have a lot, but I definitely didn’t remember getting so many. What happened?

Then I thought about it. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply shocks were happening and paper goods in particular were in short supply. So many stores instituted a “limit one per customer” rule. Prior to that, I did what most people probably do – before going to the store, I check to see if I’m out of something and then I only buy it if I am, or close to.

But the supply shock and “limit one per customer” rule changed my habits. Instead, I just always bought the one I was allowed to, every time I went to the store. There was no guarantee that when I was out there would be replacements, so I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to get a scarce resource.

Now (at least where I am), the supply lines are mostly evened out, and paper towels are easily accessible. But I just never really reset the habit of always grabbing a pack when I was at the store. Now that I’ve thought about it I will, but it shows how easily we can fall into habits surrounding scarce resources – or events.

“Any time is never.” If you can do something at any time, you’re far less likely to do it with any sort of frequency than if you can only do it under very specific and infrequent circumstances. Some people love the idea of 24/7 gyms because they don’t feel pressured to get there by a specific time or miss their window, but for many other people the pressure is exactly what gets them there. Needed to get there by 8 PM before they close motivates you – “not needing to rush” really quickly slides into “not needing to do it.”

I think this is the reason why “accountabili-buddies” can work so well – study partners, workout partners, or project collaborators. It’s not because you’re cajoling each other into working harder (or at least, that’s a very small part of it). It’s because the crossing of schedules naturally provides a limit on when you can do the thing you’re doing together. And when you only get 2 opportunities a week to get together with your project partner, you’re far more likely to make sure you take advantage of those opportunities.

You want a good habit? Build a small circle of people who think nothing like you – people who, in fact, might ordinarily be your adversaries – and then be so nice to them that they stay in your circle anyway.

Not too many. Be choosy. Pick for high emotional intelligence; people who can understand and empathize with people they disagree with. That way you can have constructive discussions even when you agree on very little.

The more different from you, the better.

If you cultivate this group well and consistently to the point where you can have high-trust conversations with them, it will be one of the most valuable resources in your life.

Why?

How many different ways can you order the following five letters: A A A A A ?

One.

How many different ways can you order these letters instead: A B C D E ?

120.

If you have a group of five people who all think alike, you’re very likely to get the same kinds of answers and solutions to conundrums as just one of them thinking alone. More people who think exactly like you aren’t very additive to your brainpower. But a few different brains can form VERY different connections, and series of connections, which can lead to great innovation.

Add one “A” to the first list, and the answer is still “one.” Add a letter “F” to the second list and the number jumps to 720. Add a “G” and it becomes 5,040.

Now, at a certain volume trust begins to deteriorate, communication is harder, group dynamics start to come into play, and all that. I think 4 plus yourself is probably the ideal number. But the point is that the ideal number definitely isn’t “zero.”

You should have weird people in your life – and you should be the weird person that they want in theirs.