Imagine that at some point during Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career (let’s say around the Predator-Terminator era), I convinced him to let me “train” him. Maybe I even had to pay him for the privilege, or maybe he just owed me an unrelated favor. In any case, I tell him to lift some weights or whatever, having predictably exactly zero impact on his total physique and resulting success.

But guess what that does for me? It lets me say, in perfect truthfulness, that “I trained Arnold Schwarzenegger!”

Okay, so that’s just step one of my devious plan. What’s step 2? Well, using my “success” at training Arnold, I now begin to advertise my training services – my ultra-elite, highly-sought-after (lol) services. If I’m good at marketing, soon I’ll have all sorts of people trying to hire me as their trainer. Except, I don’t actually know anything about training – isn’t that a problem?

Heck no! See, all I have to do is be super exclusive about who I allow to be my client. I won’t take scrawny people trying to get buff, I’ll only take people who are already super buff and want to get even more buff. People that were already going to be successful on average. Then I’ll give them busywork that sounds good and build a lot of ritual into it. There will be plenty of success stories among my clients, I can claim credit, and each new success story feeds into the whole process.

I don’t have to do a thing. And I’d be immune from criticism! My own clients couldn’t criticize me, because if they were successful what could they criticize? They’d never have a counter-factual to prove that they could have been successful without me, and claiming so would make them seem ungrateful or foolish. If they weren’t successful, I could easily blame their own work ethic, and not my training – after all, look at all of my clients who were successful! And people who weren’t my clients couldn’t criticize my methods, because what do they know?

But as long as I always screened for clients who I could predict would be successful without me anyway and convinced them that, on the contrary, they needed me in order to succeed – then I’d have a steady stream of self-sustaining false positives to keep my grift going forever.

Now, you might think all of this was an allegory for something or other. You’re probably right. This grift exists in a lot of different forms, all around you. Whenever you see someone taking credit for contributing to someone else’s success, be careful. It does happen! We help, and are helped by, others all the time. Very few people succeed entirely without help, mentorship, training, coaching, etc. But that just makes the grift version that much easier, because a real version of the same effect does exist. Bill Belichick probably contributed in a real and meaningful way to the success of the Patriots, for example. But that doesn’t mean that you can always tell. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that any team that Belichick coached would do as well. There are lots of factors to consider.

Consider them.

I am more interested in knowing myself better than in knowing most things external to myself. I think of it as knowing your tools being more important than knowing your project. If you know your tools, you can accomplish anything.

But to understand yourself better, you need tools as well. External tools. Maybe there are some truly great philosophers that could get to great insights from just themselves, first principles, and logic, but I’m not among them. I need books and conversation and music and experiences and all these other things. They help me understand myself better, which then helps me get more out of those things, which helps me understand myself better.

And then what? Well, then nothing. Maybe I pass along one percent of the knowledge I’ve gained. Most of it wouldn’t be relevant to others. Maybe a little bit would be relevant to people very much like me, but how many of those could there be? Maybe, again, some truly great philosophers manage to create patterns of thought that can be duplicated by many and helpfully, too. Probably not me. But maybe I can donate a clue here or there.

It’s good to hang lanterns as you go. Leave those clues. For yourself, as much as for anyone.

Your goals aren’t stationary. They will move to evade you. You have to be prepared to track them when they do.

Just because you’ve made 10% progress towards your goal doesn’t mean that there’s always guaranteed 90% remaining. Those goalposts shift! Sometimes they shift in your favor, but often not.

Get reacquainted with your target on occasion. Track it, don’t let it get away.

I am a raging completionist. Whenever I get an idea in my head, I envision the end state of that idea, and then I want to work maddeningly on it until it’s done. Whenever I am delayed by something outside of my control, it itches.

Here’s another problem: I don’t instinctively like sharing my work while it’s in motion. And another: I think (incorrectly) that I do my best work alone.

All of these add up to a dilemma where I take on a project, then get stuck. I can’t finish immediately, and that frustrates me, and the frustration causes me to distance myself from other sources of help and inspiration, and thus I feel incomplete until I’ve ground my way out, using far more effort than should have been required.

Great advice I received today on this topic: you can’t get to a hundred percent without getting to five percent.

Sometimes you are 100% in the right in your disagreement with another person. They’re wrong and you’re not.

Doesn’t change a thing.

Your boss is doing one thing, and you think they should do another? Even if you’re completely right – so what? Nothing will change just because you’re right. No cosmic entity comes down and adjusts the world to be in balance with your correct view.

You still have to decide to quit or not. If you quit, you have to decide what else to do. If you stay, you have to decide how to navigate it.

This is the source of so much frustration in people. They get to a point where they’re sure they’re right, and then… nothing happens. It feels like it should! Once someone is “right” (which usually means finding a few people who agree with and validate you, but it could genuinely mean proving the correctness of your side), that person then subconsciously starts to expect the world to just change. And then it doesn’t, so what do most people do? They proclaim their right-ness with more fervor. Perhaps the universe just didn’t hear you.

Nope, sorry. Right or wrong, it’s still your life. You’ve got to manage it. Accepting that – truly internalizing that lesson – will save you so much frustration it’ll probably add five years to your life. It’s worth it to let go of being right.

An explanation, a definition, an accurate description – whatever you want to call it, putting a boundary around something so that it can fit within a framework in your mind. It’s good and bad. No, scratch that – it’s amazing and it’s terrible.

Why?

Because that particular tool can be used to make your life far better, or to trap you and kill you. It all depends on where you are in relation to The Box.

I’ll give you an example. Malfunctions within the human brain are nothing new, but giving discrete malfunctions names, causes, definitions, etc. – that’s relatively new, all things considered. So maybe a few generations ago a kid would just be hyper or active or “a handful,” and now that kid has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. That’s drawing some clear, bright lines around something that may not have had those lines before. Putting a box around it.

But now, this can go one of two ways. A great one and a terrible one.

The great one: “Wow, now that we understand some of the causes and likely effects of this particular configuration of neurons, we can encourage where we need to as parents, we can adjust our discipline and communication so that the worst of the resulting traits are mitigated and our child flourishes.”

The terrible one: “Everything our kid does is excused and will not be improved in any way, because the ADHD diagnosis serves as an excuse for all behavior.”

People do both. Have you received a diagnosis of depression? That’s The Box. If you say “Now that I have a name and a definition, I can use that to understand my pain, to improve, to get better, to defeat it,” then you’re using The Box as a cage for your enemy, and that’s good. But if you say, “Well, the reason I don’t work towards the things I want to achieve is because I have this diagnosis,” then you’ve put yourself in The Box. You’re the one who’s trapped.

When we, as humans, feel like there’s some giant but vague shadow over us, preventing our successes, it can come as a relief to get a name for it. “Thank goodness,” we think. “I’m not fundamentally broken as a person, there’s just some very specific malfunction, and it’s real and it’s valid and maybe even other people have it, and so it’s not my fault.” That is the first step on the road to the death of every dream and aspiration you’ve ever held.

Think of going to the doctor because you feel generally ill. Fatigue, aches and pains, all that. But you don’t know the cause. After several tests, the doctor returns to tell you that you have a malignant tumor, and that’s the cause of all your ills. Imagine then saying “Oh, thank goodness! My illness wasn’t imagined; it was valid and real and justified, and now no one can judge me for feeling sluggish or weak.” That would seem a strange reaction. The point of looking for a root cause wasn’t to justify your sensation of illness – it was so that you could find the cause and then destroy it.

Remove that tumor! Defining a root cause for anything about yourself that you’re unhappy with is only the very first step. The acquiring of a target, if you will. The next step is to exorcise it from yourself! Put it in The Box, while you yourself escape from it.

The actual aim of showing off, if you think about it, is to convince people that you don’t need any more information.

I get it. We all want status and esteem. We all want people to respect and admire us. That desire is stronger in some than in others (much stronger), but at least a little bit we all want people to think we’re cool. So we show off, we flex, we strut.

In small doses, it’s fine. Be proud of your work, your accomplishments! Be happy to share with others, too.

But really, don’t try too hard to convince others that you’re done learning and improving. Because otherwise you might just be.

There was this riddle I remember as a kid that really stuck with me for some reason:

“If a hole is ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, how big is half a hole?”

Answer: there’s no such thing as half a hole.

I think I found it clever because it really got me – I had spent a while trying to puzzle out if the question wanted me to say “five feet by five feet by five feet” or “ten by ten by five” or actually figure out what each dimension would be in order for them to all be the same but still halve the volume or what (it was roughly 7.94 feet cubed or something). So when I read the answer it was like getting knocked in the head, and it made me laugh.

Because it’s true! There’s no such thing as half a hole. If you have a hole in a boat and you patch up one side of it, the boat still sinks.

You can’t jump halfway off a cliff. You can’t dig half a hole. You can’t solve half a problem.

Some things truly are “all or nothing.”

Today was just one of those days where it’s absolutely perfect to be a father.

Lazy lounging morning with egg sandwiches and snuggles. Then snowball fights and snowman building outside. When it got too cold and wet, hot chocolate and arts & crafts in the kitchen. Then a movie night and home-cooked dinner (devoured by kids that had worked up quite an appetite). Bath, books, bed.

Just perfect.

The thing is, I planned a lot for this day. I knew the weather was coming, so I had snow gear prepared, as well as a staging area in the kitchen for pulling it all off without making a mess. I had bought disposable tablecloths for the arts and crafts. Fixings for hot chocolate and meals the kids love. Everything squared away so I could say “yes” to as many requests as possible. So that we could engage with the day.

There aren’t too many days like this in your life, but there are some. Perfect ones, just waiting for you to engage them. Don’t get caught unprepared when they happen.

Sometimes I’ll sit down to write, and the topics that pop into my head first are topics I don’t actually want to write about. That’s usually a signal to me that my attention has been stolen; I’ve lost control of my focus.

The thoughts that grow, grow from the seeds you plant. If all you do is watch cable news or doom-scroll social media, you’ll grow angry, stunted thoughts.

Better instead to realign. Decide what you’d like to think about, and then give yourself the right start to those thoughts. I’m off to my books; good night!