When you’re deliberating over a big decision, how often are you really doing that – versus justifying the snap decision you already made?

We all do it, so don’t feel overly flawed or bad. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight against that impulse.

Step One: Know when to trust your gut. By process of elimination, don’t trust it any other time. Make a mental list of all of your highly specific areas of expertise. Don’t make the mistake of assuming any knowledge or expertise transfer into any other realms. If you’re a brilliant cardiologist, then you can trust your gut about someone’s irregular heartbeat. That doesn’t mean you can trust your gut about someone’s skin condition, let alone about macroeconomics, personal relationships, or real estate. There’s no such thing as general brilliance.

(Don’t believe me? Go look up some things Albert Einstein said on matters besides physics.)

Step Two: If you’re in one of the 99.99% of realms where your gut instinct is biased to the point of garbage, listen to it anyway. Don’t act on it, but listen. Write down what you think your decision should be.

Step Three: Feed all the “little demons” of bias. Wait three days. Sleep. Get exercise. Eat well. Relax and make sure you’re not mad about something unrelated. Get a hug or six. Go outside. Take your vitamins. After three days of doing that, come back and look at your decision that you wrote down (but didn’t act on yet). And hey, if this seems like way too much trouble – then the decision can’t be that important, can it?

Step Four: In a good and healthy mental state, use all of your formidable mental powers to convince yourself of the opposite course of action from what you wrote down. Assume you were as wrong as possible initially. You got it exactly, 180-degrees backwards. Spend hours researching the opposite case. Become an expert on the other view. Again, if this is too much trouble – then accept that the decision wasn’t that consequential.

Step Five: Act. By this point, you may not be right but you’re not getting any righter. Do what you have to, and be ready to learn from whatever happens.

If you won’t give the major decisions in your life this treatment, then you’ve yielded control of your life to your impulses and biases. Good luck.

You should care, to some extent, about things that happened. You should care a lot less about things people said. And you should care almost not at all about things people said about things people said.

What are you mad about right now? Is it that someone said something about something that someone else said about the opinion of a third person? And is that opinion not even on a thing that happened, but on something said by yet another person?

Too many “saids.” Keep yourself away from that. Just do, and be done.

When you’re tired, low, stressed or upset, you’re still capable of a great many things. Unfortunately, something you’re rarely capable of in those instances is figuring out what you’re capable of. So instead, those days tend to just knock people out – you think you aren’t capable of anything because you can’t think of anything specific you’re capable of, so you just mulligan the whole day.

The next time you have a decent-to-good day, try this exercise: make a map of your own capabilities on the low days. Write out some clear, short instructions for yourself. Say, “These are the small but impactful things that I know I can do even on my worst days. If I have a bad day, I can do just these things and then that day will be a success, and I can step back from the rest without added guilt.”

Some days all you can do is water the plants, eat a healthy meal, and check your email. But it’s still better to do those things than not to do them. At the very least, you won’t be as mad at yourself the next day, and feeling guilty and angry at yourself is rarely productive.

You don’t have to be unrealistic and expect that you’ll be equally capable on every single day of your life. But a little bit is so so so much better than nothing, so give yourself a way to do a little bit, even on the worst days.

Take a small, plain input and turn it into something beautiful in a single sitting with your own skill and effort.

That’s a solid recipe for satisfaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s literally a paper crane. It could be a delicious meal, a knitted hat, a birdhouse. Something that doesn’t have to be permanent – in fact, it’s often fantastic if it isn’t. Just meant to serve its purpose for a while.

Its real purpose, of course, was to center you in a way that lets you carry more joy into the world. I recommend it.

This is advice that I was once given, and have in turn given it to other people: “Set yourself a cutoff point for your workday that you absolutely won’t work past. That way, you’ll work more intensely before that cutoff because you know it’s there, and after the cutoff you’ll be able to have your personal time.” Today I happened to share that advice in a meeting with many of my colleagues.

I’ve always thought of that as very good advice, and when I give it to other people I’m doing so from a place of encouragement, trying to help them have healthier harmony between work and non-work. But one of my colleagues, who heads a different department, really gave me pause with her response. She said: “But that’s not how I work well and achieve low stress. I like to work during the day, then do some yoga, then log back in and work a little more, then have happy hour on Friday, then check some emails over the weekend, etc. That’s the workflow that keeps me enjoying my work and not stressed out about it. Everyone’s best structure for balancing their lives looks different.” (Paraphrased a little, perhaps, but that was the gist.)

How right she was! I still think my initial advice was very good – for me. And maybe for some people like me! But it’s absurd to think that there’s a right way to harmonize the different pressures in your life. They’re not all equal across people, and certainly our inner responses aren’t equal, either.

That’s not to say that all approaches are equally good, of course! For any given individual, there are definitely unhealthy structures and habits to avoid. But across many individuals there will be many different things that work and don’t, and that’s a good thing for me to remember.

Maybe for you to remember, too.

A man once carved a very heavy stone into a very beautiful statue. He took great pride in his work and enjoyed how the accomplishment made him feel. His community gathered around and praised him for his work. One person even pointed out that the statue was so well-crafted that even its shadow was beautiful.

There was another man, jealous of the first. He was not jealous of the statue, for he had no appreciation of art nor did he find virtue in work. But he was deeply envious of the esteem of the community.

The deepest cries of his heart’s envy reached dark places, and soon a demon appeared before the jealous man. He made him an offer: “I will give you a shadow that appears just as beautiful as the shadow of the statue, and I shall cast it in front of your home where all may see. Though you will have no statue, your peers will see the shadow and imagine that you do, and will praise you thusly. All I ask in exchange is that any time you would spend building in the future, you instead spend in service to me.”

The jealous man, who had no intention of ever putting in the work to build anything anyway, marveled at his good fortune and agreed instantly. True to his word, a splendid shadow stretched out before the man’s home as if a most glorious statue were hidden just around the hedge. And the people did indeed come and praised the jealous man, for they thought he must be a sculptor of great measure himself.

Soon, people began to ask if they could see the statue itself that would cast such a beautiful shadow, but of course the jealous man would not allow them inside his garden. The more people wanted to see, the more he had to keep them away, until soon he was friendless and isolated for fear that his secret would be discovered. The people from his community gave one last appeal: “Allow us in to see the statue itself on tomorrow’s first light or we shall not care for you again, for we tire of looking only at a shadow.”

Desperate to retain their esteem, the jealous man worked furiously all through the night to try to create a statue that would equal the shadow. But not only did he have none of the ability needed, every piece of stone he attempted to gather simply vanished, for he had already promised his labor to the demon, who had not forgotten.

In the morning, the jealous man was weeping alone in his garden when he was visited by the true sculptor. “Turn away,” yelled the jealous man. “Be gone from here!”

“I already know your secret,” said the sculptor. “I knew it from the first day.”

“How,” demanded the jealous man. “How could you know? The shadow was as beautiful as yours!”

“A true craftsman knows the difference between the statue and the shadow. Eventually all people come to understand it.”

“It isn’t fair,” cried the jealous man. “I have traded away years of my future for a shadow, and you got everything overnight.”

The sculptor laughed. “Overnight? I labored for years to move the stone, years more to carve it, and years before that to learn my craft. You simply weren’t paying attention yet, because work did not impress you, only the result of work. And so you tried to bargain for the result without the work, but one cannot chase both the statue and the shadow. We both gave years of our lives, but I gave them to my own future self, and you gave them away to a demon so that people would think more of you than is deserved. And now you chase those very people away so they don’t discover your fraud.” And the sculptor walked away, leaving the jealous man with nothing of substance, a slave forevermore to his bargain.

A statue will cast a shadow, but a shadow will not a statue make.

Our communities have become very intentional. We talk to who we want to talk to, listen to who we want to listen to, identify with who we want to identify with. Geography isn’t as huge of an influence as it once was (although certainly it still has some impact). But geography is still a binder – you can create communities of choice through technology all you want, but you still live with your neighbors. I wonder how long it will be before geography stops being the controlling factor? How long before technology makes travel, communication and construction all so easy that people could live anywhere they want and still visit anywhere else easily and communicate effortlessly? Until the echo chamber becomes a literal one?

I like being forced by circumstance to talk to just, you know, people. It’s healthy to mix it up.

What is the perfect action? One that aligns with what you want in the immediate term – it causes no distress. One that aligns with your long-term goals – it causes no worry. One that serves the people you care about – it causes no strife. One that is moral – it causes no harm.

Such acts are rare. When you see the opportunity, do not hesitate.

If you asked me in a vacuum whether or not I’d prefer to accomplish more or be less stressed, I’d say “less stressed.” In practice though, I almost always choose a higher overall level of stress and accomplishment rather than a lower relative level of both.

I want to do things. Not just “I want to have things done,” but I actually want to do those things. (And yes, there’s a difference. Lots of people want a nice garden but don’t want to garden. I enjoy the steps towards my goals, for the most part.) But things cost juice, and a big component of juice is stress. So I usually end up paying the cost.

This is compounded by the fact that I have never ever been good at what I hear people refer to as “stress management techniques.” The only thing that tends to make me less stressed is having things done, but doing things costs stress, etc.

Why write about this here? I don’t like turning this blog into simply a personal venting space, but I do think it’s important to face your flaws head-on, and this is the space where I do that. So the way I see it, I have three possible avenues:

1. Do less stuff. This would make me less stressed in the short term, but I think it would also make me unhappy in the long term. I do like the stuff I choose to do, and I don’t think any of my big rocks are things I’d get rid of in my life. But it is technically an option.
2. Find better ways to remove the stress that results from doing stuff. I guess… meditating? I have no idea. I wouldn’t even know how to begin, but I know this is theoretically possible.
3. Figure out how to reduce the cost in stress for doing stuff. This is where I think the gold is. If there’s a discrete unit of stress, then right now each thing I accomplish is costing me X stress. Could I reduce that to X-1? Maybe even X/2? I think it’s possible.

So there’s the real trick. How do I make accomplishing things less stressful overall?

There’s this thing called the “flow state.” That’s one way of describing this mental space of excellent workflow where you’re accomplishing meaningful, deep work for extended periods of time, and you’re really enjoying it. Feeling it. In the zone. That sort of thing. When people study this, they note that for most people, getting into The Zone requires (in addition to normal stuff like good habits, no distractions, good health, etc.) just the right mix of difficulty and reward for your work.

If your work is too easy, you’re bored. If it’s too hard, you’re stressed. I’m never bored, but often stressed. Does that mean my work is too difficult? That’s tough for me to imagine. The results of the things I’m choosing to do are very good. I’m in high margins in my chosen spheres, and I’m getting the work itself done pretty efficiently. I don’t think core difficulty is the problem.

So maybe it’s that “other stuff?” I’ll be honest – I do not sleep well. I cut WAY back on caffeine in the last year (which I’m happy about for a host of reasons) but it hasn’t done anything for my sleep cycle. And really, I think this is the core problem.

I don’t sleep well. But I’ve “not slept well” for so long, that (for lack of a better way to describe it) I’ve gotten good at not sleeping well. I can function efficiently on 3-4 hours of sleep a night, get everything done that I need to, not make mistakes, etc. But I think the cost of that is all the extra stress.

Now, the real question – is it possible for me to find a way to reduce my stress costs without fixing my sleeping habits, or are the sleeping habits upstream from everything else? If the sleep is foundational, then my road is a hard one, because I’ve been trying to sleep better for more than twenty years. But maybe it’s possible to make other changes that can reduce my stress cost without fixing the sleep habits.

Open to suggestions, as always. And if I find anything interesting, I’ll let you know.

Today was a wonderful, exhausting, wonderful day.

I had no other agenda besides spending the full day with my children, and with the sun finally starting to shine in earnest, we made the most of it. There was a tiny bit of a chill wind, but far from cold enough to prevent a trip to the park, a pizza dinner, and a trip to the local favorite ice cream store. They chased dogs, climbed playground equipment, made about a billion new friends via other families doing the same thing we did. They got hurt a few times, which sounds bad but doing some rough play is essential for growing up healthy.

If I had to define the role of the parent as succinctly as I could, it would be thus: the role of the parent is to provide opportunities to grow to their children. That’s the whole of it, right there. Your job isn’t really to teach – you will teach, but largely as a by-product of living a good life with them. Your job is to provide opportunities to learn, and that’s adjacent but not the same. I play with my kids because I want to, selfishly, because I love and adore them and they’re hilarious. But a sizeable part of their life needs to be spent gradually growing away from me, testing out new relationships, encountering the world on their own terms, and picking up knowledge I never even had in the first place, and thus could never teach them.

If I may get VERY nerdy on you for a moment… when I first learned I was going to be a parent, I had this idea that I would be like Link from The Legend of Zelda. Always protecting and rescuing Zelda (my kids) from danger, always adventuring on their behalf to give them whatever they desired. The reality is that the kids are Link. As the parent, you’re the old man in the cave that says “It’s dangerous to go alone, take this,” gives them their first sword, and then takes no part in the sprawling adventure that awaits.

You provide them with the tools for success, not the success itself. You don’t show them the right way to do things – you give them ample opportunities to safely mess up and learn it themselves. You don’t teach them what you think is important – you build trust so they’ll ask you what they think is important. And then you watch them flourish.