A very small percentage of your thoughts are deliberate. The majority just pop into your head, usually in reaction to something.

Whether deliberate or not, those thoughts make you feel a certain way, and those feelings drive your actions. Sorry – I know you want to think that every action you take is directed explicitly by consciously-chosen and bias-free thoughts, but hahahahahahaha.

Those actions you take then create results in your life. Those results might be good or bad or in between or a combination and life is complex. But here’s the thing – the results then generate further outside stimuli.

Which creates thoughts.

So now you’re in the loop, the pattern. You see what’s happening? Feedback. White water rapids, carrying you along, mostly without your active consent.

But all is not lost! Get on that life raft. (That’s a joke, as you’ll see in a minute).

There’s a term for this pattern, called TFAR, which stands for Thoughts – Feelings – Actions – Results. But we can play with that acronym and flip it around and then it becomes RAFT, which I like better because it has a sort of symbolic ring to it.

The point though, is that you can interrupt this cycle and shape it in the future. You can work backwards from the results you want to see, in order to recognize the actions, feelings and thoughts that will get you there.

First, you need some awareness. Look at the current results – the ones you wish were different. What actions did you take that got you there? Write it down. Write it down. Write all of this, because it’s helpful.

Now, write what you were feeling when you chose that action. This will be uncomfortable, probably. Good.

Now, write down what belief led you to feel the way you felt. That’s the core “thought” that led to everything else.

Was that thought really and truly a conscious, deliberate thought? Or did you think that because some outside stimuli dropped that thought into your head, and you internalized it and it set off this whole negative chain?

Interrupt that cycle. Recognize it. Write down the result you wished had happened instead, now. Then write down what actions would have led to that result. Then write down how you’d have to feel in order to take that action. Then write down what you’d have to believe in order to feel that way.

Memorize that new core thought. Make that the internal voice. Write it on your arm if you have to. But the next time the original thought, the one that set off the whole thing, comes back into your head, you’ll be prepared. You’ll know to stop, and before the whole chain begins again, you’ll repeat the thought you want to be true. You’ll say it like a mantra, over and over. You’ll write it down a few times. Anything to embed it.

Then, like a planted seed, let it grow. Let a different cycle take over, a positive one. Get out of the rapids and onto the RAFT that you want.

Sometimes, kids want to do things that are extremely kid-like, and that adults have a strong aversion to. Intentionally getting super muddy in the rain usually falls into this category.

I’m pretty neat & tidy. The word “freak” may have been attached there, unflatteringly, on more than one occasion. I love going out into the woods for extended periods of time, but in my normal day-to-day, I prefer to keep traffic in my home and immediate surroundings pretty scrubbed.

So I’m not very pro-mud, as a rule. But kids gotta kid, man. Some things you just have to say yes to.

I really love meeting new people. Not only is it an enjoyable experience, but like anything else, it’s a skill you can get better at.

Having an interesting conversation the very first time you interact with someone is a fantastic ability. It keeps you enthused about meeting people over and over, which has nothing but positive effects on your life. And if you’re interested, then you’re interesting as well. That helps you get to conversation #2 and beyond.

I’ve found that it’s not really about asking the right questions. It’s about presenting yourself in such a way that the other person feels comfortable giving interesting answers. Anyone can write down a list of unusual conversation-starters, but if the person you’re talking to feels like they’re being interrogated or you’re just checking questions off a list in order to seem interesting (rather than genuinely being interested) then they won’t open up.

Don’t just meet people – let them meet you. Your genuine self is worth getting to know.

When I hear people loudly espousing opinions that I disagree with, I keep my mouth shut. I have good reasons.

But when I hear people loudly espousing opinions that I agree with, I keep my mouth shut even tighter. In a sort of a mirror post to the one linked above, here are my reasons why I don’t generally admit when I agree with someone:

1. I want to avoid echo-chamber reinforcements. I don’t really want to create a situation where I pull people closer to me just because they agree with me on certain opinions. Surrounding yourself with only extremely like-minded people is the way to a closed mind. I’d rather listen to everyone, establish truth myself, and live by it. Others don’t need to know.
2. I don’t want my future silence to imply disagreement. If I keep silent sometimes, and other times shout “heck yes,” then my silence starts to mean something that I don’t want it to mean. I like reserving my ability to quietly observe.
3. I don’t want to be associated with everything said by the person I agreed with one time. Agreement on one subject or issue has a tendency to creep into associations of all kinds. It’s one of the reasons I avoid political labels, too. If someone shouts “X” and I agree with X loudly, it becomes harder to distance myself when that person says “Y” and I disagree.
4. Sometimes you don’t agree with someone enough and that becomes a problem. I remember reading an amusing comic where two guys argued because one of them really really liked the movie 300 and the other one only really liked the movie and that was of course a heinous offense. But that happens frequently! Sometimes I agree with someone, but they’ve taken the view to a point perhaps 5-10% more extreme than I would, and if I say “Hey, I agree with you almost entirely, except for maybe this minor quibble,” then I’ll get attacked worse than if I disagreed entirely. It’s a fact of life that heresy gets vilified far more than opposition.

So when will I allow someone to know that I agree with their position? For the most part – only in private, only if it’s someone who I trust to be a rational thinker, and only if there’s the possibility of good discussion as a result. In other words – rarely.

Of course, I have zero problem voicing my own opinions and views – heck, I do it here every day. And some of those views may be very similar to others you find elsewhere. That’s fine! If, by association, someone were to say, “Hey, Johnny wrote this and it’s really similar to this other thing written by this other person, I guess they agree on this topic,” then that’s just fine. Agreeing with a sentiment, opinion or view is markedly different from agreeing with a person, and I don’t mind the former.

Now, turn this around on me. I write things every day! Some of those things you may agree with. Some you may not. That’s good and healthy. It’s possible you may even agree with most of what I write – that’s fine too! After all, I write in the sincere hope that people will find benefit, and in order for something to benefit you it has to change you in some way, so in a way I do hope that my writing influences others, convinces them of the merits of my arguments. It may even be the case, as has happened once or twice, that you read something I wrote and agreed with it to the degree that you shared it with others. I’m okay with all of this.

But I don’t ever want to be unassailable. I write to expose my thinking to the elements. I invite people to disagree publicly and agree privately if that is their wont. I encourage people to agree with caveats, or agree with 50%, or agree but think I don’t go far enough! In other words, I sincerely hope that more than causing you to agree or disagree, these posts encourage you to think, and discover, and evaluate. Your mind has more knowledge than this blog ever will.

I’m generally a patient person, but there are certain kinds of waiting I hate.

I really dislike “active waiting,” where waiting is the only thing I can do. For instance, if I order something and it’s going to take a week to arrive at my house, that’s totally fine, because I can just live my life during that week. But waiting in line for something, where I have to just stand there until it’s my turn? Argh. Give me a deli-style “take a number” system any day.

I was thinking about waiting today because there are certain goals you can actively pursue and certain goals that simply take time, and can’t be rushed by additional action. It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

For instance, you can’t build a meaningful relationship with someone – a friend, a family member, a romantic partner – any faster by doing it harder. Bonds are built over time. I can’t raise my children into competent and heroic adults any faster by trying to jam their days over-full of lessons and trials. They just have to grow.

You can work in your garden all you like, but at a certain point you just have to accept that you can’t make a tomato plant grow any faster than it wants to. You can help it be healthier, you can make it safe. But it gives you a tomato when it wants to.

I love goals that can be accelerated by action, but not every goal is like that. In fact, very few are! It’s a rare treat to get an attainable goal that’s entirely dependent on you and no outside factors. Meaningful patience is a challenge, but getting good at it is utterly rewarding.

Gratitude and patience are inexorably intertwined. If you are grateful for the movement, your goals become less about the end and more about the rewards of pursuit. If you are grateful for your children as the wonderful humans they are, then you don’t have to be constantly waiting for the next milestone you can brag about or celebrate. Instead of being impatient that your workouts haven’t yet yielded every result you want, be so so grateful that you have the health to even lift those weights or take those steps. Notice a few breaths each day, happy that they’re pulling you forward.

So tomorrow, the U.S. Department of the Treasury is coming out with a new thing that you can buy. Instead of just printing all the money themselves, they’ve decided that they’ll sell smaller “mini-mints” to private individuals. This sounds like a great deal, right? I mean, it’s literally your own money printer.

Here’s the fine print: the up-front cost is a million bucks. And the machine can only print denominations of US currency that are currently in circulation, which means the largest single bill you can print is a Franklin – $100. Oh, and the machine can only print one bill per day.

It’s a great deal! …isn’t it?

Well, assuming you had a million dollars liquid to buy one, you’ll have made your money back in just under twenty-seven and a half years. After that, though, you’re totally just making free money! That is, if you completely ignore the opportunity cost of tying a million bucks up in this silly machine for almost three decades.

Okay, but let’s say you don’t have a million bucks, but you still want this machine. No problem, says the treasury! You can finance it! And heck, this is the US Treasury, not some private lender, so they’ll keep the interest rates low and they won’t do any sort of background check – anyone who wants a money printer can borrow the money to buy one.

But “low” interest doesn’t mean “no” interest, so there’s still a little overhead to pay now. And the machine can still only print a max of $100 per day. So borrowing to get one of these machines is an even worse deal than buying one outright, it would seem.

And of course, that even assumes that everyone uses the machine to its maximum capacity! But it turns out, that might be difficult. The machines still need ink and paper, and there isn’t always enough for every machine, so sometimes the machines are idle. Sometimes people choose to print $50 bills or even $1 bills with them, just because they like those better. Sometimes people just don’t print bills! Even though the machine is relatively simple to use, it isn’t automatic – each day you want to print a bill you still have to type in what you want and hit “print,” and some people just don’t do it. Some people pay for a machine and never even bother to go pick it up and plug it in, believe it or not. Some machines are defective or outright broken when they’re bought – but there is no customer service and no refunds, so those people are just out of luck.

So here’s what happens. A whole lot of people want these machines, because the fine print is lost on them and all they hear is “money printer.” Most people that buy them borrow for them. And so most people who have them are not only in a ton of debt, but they’re in debt that they probably aren’t going to be able to pay off.

It’s fine to be compassionate to those people! You should always be compassionate. But if someone were to suggest that the collective debt of these money-printer-owners is a “crisis,” then the very first thing that should be discussed is how irresponsible and predatory it was for the US Treasury to sell these machines in the first place.

Because here’s the thing: if there is enough debt over a single asset to be called a “crisis,” then by definition that asset is a terrible investment and it should stop being bought. If apples sell for ten cents apiece but apple trees cost two hundred thousand dollars, then apple trees would be a terrible investment. You could still buy an apple tree because you liked it, but then we’re talking about consumption goods and not investments, and you can’t make the same arguments about debt.

Let me just beat this (by now, hopefully obvious) analogy to death a tiny bit more:

When you propose that the US Treasury stop selling money printers, there will absolutely be someone who claims “What a monster you are! People need money! If we stop selling money printers, how will they get money?!” (Very likely this person works for the US Treasury’s money-printer division and is doing very well.) The argument will catch on among certain people. They’re pulling a bait-and-switch, swapping out one vehicle for accomplishing something for the thing itself.

People generally need money, sure. That’s not the same as saying that they need to buy money-printers for a million (borrowed) bucks. Some things stick around for a long time, but that doesn’t mean they’re good.

Predicting our future wants is pretty much our entire ambition.

Everything you work for is delayed. Instant gratification is a myth; we live in a world of instant distraction from things we really want. But that’s the rub – the instant noise that surrounds us has, I believe, weakened our ability to predict our own future wants. That’s what hurts us.

If you know for certain that in five years, you will absolutely want (or still want) a certain thing, it’s much easier to work diligently towards it today. But if you lack the certainty of any particular thing you’ll care about next month, let alone half a decade from now, it will be hard to focus on it.

Kids provide excellent clarity here. I am certain to my core than in five years I will still want my children to be happy and healthy. That gives me a lot of purpose day-to-day. It doesn’t have to be kids, though! As pro-child as I am, don’t take this to be any sort of encouragement to have children specifically.

Rather, it’s an encouragement to talk to yourself in the past so you can talk to yourself in the future. Are you working your tail off today for something you don’t think you’ll care about in the future? Are you slaving away for a job that doesn’t really move you towards your more meaningful goals?

Were you doing that five years ago, and it’s hurt your happiness today?

Stay away from care-a-minute instant noise that tells you to change what you want every other breath. Make sure that the things you actually allow space in your heart are enduring. Let other things delight you in their moment, certainly – but don’t give them the ability to displace the important things. Humans can only truly care about a small handful of things. If you allow ephemeral things to take those slots then you’ll significantly damage the foundation of your ability to translate caring into consistent action. You cannot build a life on top of caring about the latest celebrity gossip, political scandal, meaningless assignment at a dead-end job, or acquisition of some trinket.

Instead, care about something lasting. Give your future self many gifts – adventure and security, knowledge and happiness, wealth and purpose. You cannot get those things today. But today, you can begin to care about them so that you have them tomorrow.

The woods are calling me. I can hear it. Camping season is just about here.

Some day in the not-too-distant future, I’ll go and never come back. I don’t want to truly be a “mountain man” or anything; I have no desire to leave civilization entirely. I just want to be a little farther away from it than I am now.

Small barriers are the key to healthy habits. I have a pretty healthy diet; I don’t completely avoid junk or unhealthy foods, but I only keep healthy things in the house. If I want something outside of that, I have to go out and get it. I’m obviously capable of doing that, but the additional barrier keeps me from doing it too often. It keeps it a “treat” instead of just a default.

Your social media apps are like that. I don’t keep those apps on my phone – if I want to check a social media account, I have to either go to my computer, or I have to use my phone’s internet browser and log into the site. That’s a pain, so I don’t do it too often. It’s not never, but it’s not automatic.

That’s how I want civilization. I want it accessible, but inconvenient. I don’t want to live hundreds of miles from the nearest city or deeply suburban area – but I want to live maybe 40 miles from it. Close enough to visit when I want to, far enough away that it ceases to be the default lifestyle. Something I have to consciously choose to do on a case-by-case basis instead of the environment that takes over my life.

Right now, the grass is still greener on this side. There are still too many advantages, especially with three young children, of living my suburban lifestyle. Proximity to family members and modern conveniences and ease of maintaining my home all win out over the majesty of the forest… for now. So for now, the roles are reversed: the forest is what I keep close so that I can visit it, and the city is my home. But not forever.

There are lots of reasons why you should take the initiative and do things before anyone asks you to do them. One of those reasons is, of course, that taking the initiative looks good – but that’s far from the only reason.

If you decide to pitch a project rather than waiting for an assignment, you have a lot more control over what you do. When you get assigned something, you have almost none.

When someone asks for something, they spend the entire time between when they asked and when you deliver thinking about the ideal version they could get, and you’re actual version has to compete with that. When you pitch something, you are the ideal version.

When you pitch something, the only outcomes are “they love it; you move forward” or “they don’t love it, but you’re no worse off and even maybe still a little better for showing moxie.” If you have an assignment, completing it well is mostly just treading water, and messing it up can set you way back in terms of social capital and reputation.

Don’t wait for life to give you homework assignments. Decide what you want to do.

Idle time is a hole in my soul. I am envious of people who can take advantage of “free time” in a healthy way, but that’s never been me.

Free time, for me, tends to immediately get filled by unhealthy things. If I find myself unexpectedly having a scheduled thing delayed by an hour and I have to wait, for instance, all the things that naturally occur to me to do in that hour are unhealthy. I’ll doom-scroll social media, I’ll eat an unhealthy snack, I’ll bug someone who’s busy, buy a thing I don’t need, etc. These are things I don’t ever do when I’m planning – but they’re what happens when my plans get disrupted.

So why can’t I just fill unexpected time with something productive? I overthink it, primarily. For instance: very rarely do plans get delayed in such a way that lets me know exactly the length of the delay. Sometimes people text and say “I’ll be an hour late,” but more often that text says “I’m running late, be there as soon as I can.” That means I don’t know if I have time to squeeze in an extra workout or get some writing done. I hate starting things and not finishing them.

The reality is that I need the rigidity of a packed schedule in order to not be slothful. I’m pretty good on the other six deadly sins, but that one haunts me. I’m terrified of being slothful, lazy, idle. I think it might be the most dangerous of the seven, because it’s so sticky. It actually takes a lot of effort to maintain wrath all the time! But sloth? That takes no effort at all.

So I fight against it by always giving myself planned things that need to be done. I don’t trust my instincts; given free reign to “do whatever I feel like,” the choices my id makes always chase short-term satisfaction instead of long-term health. I feel as though the best way for me to never do unhealthy things is to never have time to do them; to always be doing so many healthy things that there’s no room for anything else.

Then, when time to do something else is thrust upon me unexpectedly by the random chaos of daily life, I don’t have a healthy thing to fill it with. The obvious solution would seem to be to keep a list of “Healthy Things to Do in Case of Emergency,” but the question is – if those things are good and healthy to do, why would I only do them in case of emergency? Shouldn’t I be doing those things all the time, and not just in case of an unexpected wait?

As is often the case, writing this out has given me a thought. There is one particularly healthy outlet that is easy, can be done at any duration, and while it’s something that I do normally it still has plenty of marginal utility for extra time spent on it – reading. Reading also has the benefit of relaxing me, whereas waiting is generally pretty anxiety-driving for me. If idle time is a wound, my beloved kindle may just be the first-aid kit I’m looking for.

So I’ll make a habit of keeping my kindle more accessible (right now it resides in a specific “reading nook” in my home, but having it a little more on-hand may be the key) and take it with me when I leave the house more often. Make it easier to make something healthy the default. If you’re the kind of person whose instincts are tuned towards healthy choices, bless you. If you aren’t, all is not lost – the fight for your own physical, mental and spiritual health is one you can win, no matter where you started.