When you come up with smart things, you should record them. And you should read them! Nothing is more embarrassing than when you forget a lesson that you yourself have taught.

I made a mistake this week that I’ve warned against – in this very blog! I violated the advice my father gave me, which is that while it’s fine to make mistakes, you should try at least to make all unique ones and not repeat any.

But all humans are flawed! So what do we do? Write it down again.

Hammer it in. Lessons repeated are lessons learned. Personal responsibility and self-ownership are hallmark lessons, and I shouldn’t have missed it. I’ll forgive myself – but I will strive to do better. I will own the mistake and get better.

I will try to make a new mistake next time.

Crystal clear water has a ton of uses. So does solid earth. But mud is… mud. There are definitely a few obscure uses here and there, but for the average person mud is an inconvenience at best, and a disaster at worst.

Lots of things are like that – at their absolute worst in the absolute middle. We’re often taught to compromise, take a middle-of-the-road approach, consider all viewpoints and reach a consensus, that sort of thing. But for a lot of problems, that’s the absolute worst case scenario.

Someone’s about to jump a big gorge on their motorcycle. One person advises: “Give it all you’ve got! Full speed is the only way you’ll make it across!” Another says: “Don’t go at all, it’s a terrible idea! Stay here!” So the guy decides to compromise: “I’ll go, but I’ll go at half speed.”

Worst possible outcome.

Appreciation for anything must come from nothing.

Kings – men born to royalty who have never tasted anything else – cannot eat like kings. They can only eat like men. They can only taste food with a dull tongue that has never been sharpened by hunger, never learned to savor.

But the men who have climbed from nothing, when they eat the meal they’ve earned, they eat like kings.

Lots of people have their normal, everyday wardrobe, and then they have their “work clothes.” For some people, that means casual clothes on the weekends but a suit during the week. Or it might mean pajamas on most days but a smart outfit for meetings. Whatever the case, most people who do this have a routine they use to make sure their “work clothes” are ready before going to work.

Makes sense! You don’t want to worry about finding and assembling your outfit when you’re trying to get ready to go to work. You want the suit of garments you’ll wear to be prepared.

Do the same with your attitude.

Some people go into “work mode” when they’re at work. Maybe they’re more relaxed in their speech at home, but want to be professional in a work environment. Maybe they’re casual about their responsibilities in their own apartment, but have to be buttoned-up at work.

The thing is, if you’re rusty, you want to prepare your thoughts the way you prepare your clothes.

You know that “back to school” feeling you get on the night before returning to work after an absence? You make sure your clothes are all together, your bag is packed, your car has gas in it, all that stuff. But what about your mind? Have you given some thought to how you want your attitude to be different in that environment?

Make some notes, write them down, and put them with your things. Read them out loud as you’re getting ready in the morning. Remind yourself what you’ll do with idle time, how you want to react to stress, and what you want to accomplish. Put on your suit of thoughts the same as anything else.

It’s the most important thing. Don’t neglect it.

My children are finally all old enough to have really solid snowball fights. It was three on one! I was soundly defeated, laughing hysterically as I was pelted with snow.

Life isn’t something to “get through.” Game-ify your environment. Find the things that are inconveniences, ball them up, and throw them at each other. Make angels in your problems.

I received two instances of virtually the same compliment within a day of each other, from two different sources. The compliment regarded my writing: I had submitted two writing projects, and they were well-received. The compliment was specific enough that receiving it from both sources (neither of whom had any knowledge of the other) made me pause.

The compliment was “Your writing didn’t require any (or only very minimal) editing before publication.”

Nice praise for a writer! Naturally I like the compliment because in addition to being praise of my writing itself, it also makes me easy to work with, which is a plus in any career. But while I’ll happily accept the compliment, what gave me pause is that I often don’t think it’s true.

In fact, if asked to describe my own writing, I will often say something like “I think I have very good ideas and interesting thoughts, but they often require a great deal of polish before they’re good enough to be absorbed in a meaningful way by others.” I usually don’t think of myself as a great self-editor. Most of my writing, this blog included, is “first-pass” writing.

That made me think of another phenomenon that occurs when I write, and in fact just happened today. Usually when I think about a topic I want to write, I’ll first do a quick review search of my previous posts in case I’d already covered a topic as well as I want to. And what almost always happens is that I say “Wow, my previous writing was very good! What a shame that today’s writing won’t live up to that standard.” It’s an odd pattern.

But maybe, just maybe, practice and refinement and being critical of your own work in just the right measure really do add up to some level of proficiency. Maybe not just writing, but reading your own work over and over and over every single day, multiple times a day, instills a sort of self-editing process that happens quickly, automatically and without notice.

Maybe, just maybe, I’m okay at this.

I like to be a doer, not a complainer. If there’s something I’m dissatisfied with, I do my best to work towards change or, if change is impossible, to reach satisfaction internally instead.

But getting to that point took a lot of work, and sometimes complaints just spill out. The start of all major change is current discomfort, and often we express that discomfort via complaints, venting before we work up the steam to change.

With a good process those complaints can become actionable direction!

This is a process I use with clients that do a lot of complaining but not a lot of moving, and don’t seem to know what they want to be moving towards. Moving away from pain is okay, but moving towards happiness is better – even if it’s harder.

I call this process “The Opposite Game.” It’s simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Step One: Accept all of your complaints, at least initially, as valid. Write them down in a bulleted list. “My boss always yells at me and treats me like garbage.” “I’m totally overloaded at work.” Et cetera.

Step Two: On the other side of the page, write down the exact opposite statement. “My boss always compliments me and treats me with respect.” “I have a stress-free workload at my job.” And so on.

Now, look at the other column. If your life looked like that, would you feel more satisfaction? Happiness? Great! That’s our road map. Some of those things may require change. Some of them may require you to find something new – for instance, you might not be able to make your boss act differently, but now you know what to look for in a new boss.

When we’re deep in the fog of frustration it can be difficult to even envision a happier life. Nearly impossible to itemize it into things to pursue. But you can get a great starting point just by taking the opposite of your complaints. From there, you may revise your goals over time – maybe what you really need is not to have a boss at all, for instance. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and this is a really great process for turning your complaints into helpful advice for yourself.

It also does one extra thing that’s valuable: it reminds you that there is a better world. That your complaints aren’t permanent. That there exists a version of you that doesn’t have those complaints, and that version is within your capacity to become.

Roughly 15 years ago, I rode a bicycle 150 miles in a single 9-hour span.

That really happened! It was part of a charity bike-a-thon to raise awareness of and money for MS research. At the time, I was a very casual cyclist, averaging about 15 miles a day a few days a week, and never doing more than 25 in a single run. So naturally when some of my much more experienced cycling buddies said they wanted to do this event and invited me, I arrogantly said yes. How hard could it be? 150 miles wasn’t that much more than 25.

Oh boy.

I cursed and swore more in the last 2 miles than in the entire rest of my life combined. I couldn’t move for three days after. But I made it. It was exhilarating and one of my proudest moments.

No evidence of it exists whatsoever.

I was young. I didn’t know what I know now; that chronicling your own accomplishments is so important, because no one else will. I took no pictures, I didn’t write about the event when it happened, I didn’t download any press coverage of the event (not that it would have referenced me specifically out of thousands of participants, but at least I could have pointed to that and said “I was there”). Heck, I don’t even still have the bike. If you told me you didn’t believe that I had done it, I couldn’t prove it to you.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, of course. And a lot of the value of the event is internal and no one can take that from me. But a lot of your accomplishments in life can serve the purpose of being foundational for obtaining new opportunities.

You accomplish so much more than you note, and you’ve achieved so much more than you’ve archived. I’m not nostalgic nor sentimental and I’m anti-stuff, but a digital footprint takes no space. A blog post or a picture isn’t clutter. Record your moments. You’ll be glad you did.

I try to argue with myself pretty frequently. In fact, some days I don’t even have to try.

It’s good practice! If I have a particular opinion, insight, or plan of action then my mind will sort of automatically drift to counter-arguments for that position. I’ll try to talk myself into a different viewpoint.

The beauty of this happening in side my own head is that there’s no outside social pressure. I can be very genuinely “on both sides” of any view because I’m not trying to impress a tribe or gain status. I’m trying to be real, and correct. I can steel-man the argument on both sides and come to better conclusions.

It also makes me pretty well-prepared to debate any of these topics in real life, should the need arise. If I have to explain myself, I’m prepared to do so.