Someone on my team received some negative feedback from a client today. As their manager, I was copied on it as well. So I leapt into action! I reached out to the team member… and told her what an awesome job she’s doing.

For one, it’s true. She’s an absolute rock star and a huge asset to the team. But more importantly, she’s earned my trust many times over. She’s gotten yards upon yards of good feedback and positive reviews. So one piece of negative feedback isn’t a pattern. It’s not something that needs to be specifically attacked.

And I know that anyone that cares about their work has a tendency to internalize even small bits of negative feedback. It was important that she not hear that from me.

If you’re someone that manages people, it’s so so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that every minor bit of negative news is a chance for you to put on your leader hat and get to work. But leadership has to be consistent, not laser-focused at the bumps in the road.

Some things are “teachable moments,” but this wasn’t one. And it’s good to get an instinct for which is which.

All human relationships are in motion.

Everything you learn about someone changes your view of them, however slightly. Even no new information changes your view, in that relationships stagnate and fade if not maintained. And as we eternally seek out not only esteem and belonging, but also desire to find others to esteem, our massive interpersonal relationship map is never carved in stone.

At any given point, the other humans that can become aware of your existence are moving either socially towards or socially away from you. It’s fine to intentionally drive some away – I do it. There are people I don’t want to associate with.

But by default, I want my social radius to contain a gentle gravity. I want people, all things considered, to want to know me better.

Humility is often the key to this. Don’t disparage whole groups in comparison to yourself. Don’t assume, without proof, vast estimations of your own ability. Don’t close your mental and social ranks.

When people move away from you, you rarely know it. You can’t imagine how many opportunities you miss if you’re a jerk. The prophesy becomes self-fulfilling: the world sucks so you act like a jerk, but the world sucks because you act like a jerk. If you aim all your “jerk-ness” at one person, then one person gets mad at you and likely tells you. But if you just sprinkle a little bit of “jerk-ness” across all your interactions, then no one ever is bothered enough to tell you. Instead, everyone just slowly drifts away, and the world you live in becomes the world you expected.

If the world sucks, then entertain – at least for a few minutes – the idea that no one can see the whole world. All we can see is the bubble we create. And if that bubble is unpleasant for you – well.

So, when I was about 12 years old, I got really into tabletop roleplaying games. I forged a lot of tremendous friendships through that. I also formed a deeper relationship with my father, because it was my first real major “interest” that he could encourage and participate in. And he did! He cheered me at every turn.

One thing my father always instilled in me, though, was a sense for the opportunity to make money. He loved encouraging me in my hobby, but he also would frequently ask me if I’d figured out how to make money from the hobby. It wasn’t nagging; he wasn’t saying the hobby was a waste of time if I couldn’t profit from it. It was just him teaching me to always look for income opportunities.

I did start to think about who made money from the industry. Like any entertainment medium, there were publishers and writers and such, some of whom even did it as a full-time job. Despite that, my research showed that it’s not exactly a gold mine and most people working in the industry are doing it more for the love of it than for the chance at fortune. Still, I always dreamed that one day I’d be a paid writer in that field, in the same way that young kids who read comic books might dream of drawing them for a living, or designing video games, or whatever.

I’m not 12 years old any more. Long gone are the days when that style of game was my all-consuming primary interest and social activity venue. But I still keep a toe in the water, so to speak. I play on occasion, read industry news, and even – if the opportunity presents itself – send in submissions.

And today, more than two decades later, I got paid for one.

Thanks for encouraging your nerdy son, Dad. I made money from it.

Do you think you’ve been wronged? Is justice necessary?

Many people think this about themselves. Over their entire lives, nearly everyone will think it at least once; for some, it may be close to their most common thought. And for some people, it will be true some of those times!

But the feeling of having been wronged is not the same as having actually been wronged.

Here are some simple steps to take if you feel you’ve been wronged, but you want to check that feeling against the cold light of reality:

1. Can you point to a single person or allied group of people who have wronged you? If you feel that you’ve been wronged by “society” or by some sub-group of society, such as all those of a particular political persuasion, creed, race, nationality, gender, religion, or sub-cultural group, then just remember – you haven’t! You aren’t that important. Whole swaths of humanity are not arrayed against you. You may not have exactly the life you want and some part of that may be because of those groups, but that’s not the same as them doing you wrong.
   
   Here’s an example: I could be a rich & famous athlete if it weren’t for… all the people on Earth with more athletic ability than me. If all those people weren’t out there being all athletic and such, then I could be the Olympic Gold Medalist slash Super Bowl MVP that I always dreamed of! But does that mean that the combined group of “good athletes” have somehow wronged me? Of course not. And if there’s no wrong done, then no justice is required. It would be patently absurd for me to say “I deserve to be compensated for my athletic dreams being quashed.” Sometimes the natural flow of how humans behave and interact with each other will have consequences that are less than ideal for me specifically. That’s just life.
   
   However, if you can point to a specific person or small group, then you at least have the potential of being right about being wronged. So if you can point to a more specific villain, move on.
   
2. Okay, so you’ve got a specific person or small group in mind, and you feel as though they’ve wronged you with their actions. Here’s a simple (if not completely flawless) test to do to see if you may be right. Consider the actions taken that wronged you and the timeline over which they happened. Now, pretend that you never existed at all – imagine an alternate world where you simply do not exist and never did. Are the actions of the supposed villain exactly the same? If they are, then you probably weren’t wronged.
   
   For example: let’s say I’m not mad at “athletes.” I’m mad a specific athlete, who did slightly better than me on some pivotal qualifying event in my youth, knocking me out of the running for a scholarship to an athletic training program that may have been my ticket to stardom. As a result, I feel like this person has wronged me, because they are solely responsible for me not getting that scholarship. But if I apply the “What If I Never Existed” test, I realize… that athlete would have done everything exactly the same. They didn’t gain their good fortune at the expense of mine.
   
   You can see how the opposite would work: a thief that steals my car would fail this test. If I had never existed, I’d have no car to steal, so the thief’s timeline of actions is altered.
   
   The long and short is: it’s not impossible, but it’s pretty hard to wrong someone if you never actually interact. But if you have interacted, now you’re getting closer to the possibility that you’ve been wronged. Move on to the next step!
   
3. Ask yourself what would your life be like if they never existed. Let’s imagine that the person or group actually did have their events altered if you never existed, meaning we’ve satisfied a few criteria: A.) you’ve interacted with each other enough to have had an effect on outcomes, and B.) your outcome is bad, and likely theirs is good. But is that enough to say you’ve been wronged?
   
   What if they never existed? How is your life altered? In the case of the athlete, I clearly have a better outcome if they never existed – but since that example didn’t make it past step 2, there’s no wrongdoing to check here in step 3, as much as I might like there to be. What about the car thief, though? If they never existed, I still have a car. So a car thief is a specific person, they clearly had an effect on their outcome because of me, and their effect on my outcome was negative. Strong case for wrongdoing!
   
   What about a business partner that betrays a handshake deal? Let’s say we enter into an agreement that allows us to each make $10,000/month in a shared venture. After 2 years, he cashes out without telling me, ending our enterprise and making off with $100,000. Has he wronged me?
   
   Passes Test #1 easily. Passes Test #2 as well – their actions would be different in the timeline where I never existed. But Test #3 is trickier. I don’t want our arrangement to end, because I’m making $10k a month. But I’ve already made $240k that I wouldn’t have! The breach of trust stings (and certainly I’d never do business with this guy again), but if I apply Test #3 and say “where would I be if he never existed,” the answer is that I would be nearly a quarter of a million dollars poorer.
   
   So let’s say you have a specific person who has negatively affected your outcomes overall, and has done so in a way that wasn’t just a byproduct of their own life, but rather came from them directly interacting with you. Have you been wronged? Do you deserve justice?
   
4. Test #4 is the last one. Would preventing what happened to you have required violating important rights – rights that, if violated, would pass tests 1-3?
   
   You can prevent a thief from stealing a car without restricting any of their rights. They don’t have the right to another person’s stuff, so preventing them from stealing it can be done without violating their own rights. But you can’t prevent a better athlete from beating me in a contest without restricting their right to live their life. You can’t prevent me from being annoyed at the color of my neighbor’s fence without restricting their right to live their life. You can’t even prevent a business partner from doing something you don’t want him to do (by force, that is – it’s perfectly fine to have good contracts) just because you don’t like it.

This series of tests isn’t perfect. There are wrongs that might slip through the cracks here, and there are valid actions that may get caught in them. I am not in any way trying to present some new or even novel way of interpreting natural rights or redesigning a justice system. I am not a great philosopher.

But I do want to make a point. The point is this – probably 99.99% of people who feel wronged have not thought this hard about it.

Babies and toddlers learn a lot really quickly. I mean, they learn so fast you can watch it in real time. I remember the first time one of my kids learned how to get water into a cup and bring it to her mouth, it was like watching the Moon Landing. And suddenly they go from not even being able to pick up an object to being completely proficient in its use in about 5 minutes.

The other day I was teaching my 3-year-old knife safety. Minute one, she was timid about holding the knife. Minute four, she was slicing up vegetables like she’d been a professional chef for years.

Little kids can learn so much so quickly for two reasons. First, they don’t know anything to start. That’s important, not only because it means there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit of knowledge and plenty of space to put it, but it also means they’re clear of a lot of misconceptions or prior bad habits that would prevent learning.

The second reason is because most parents keep their kids in relatively low-risk environments. There’s almost zero risk to failure for kids. Not only physical danger, but social danger – no one is making mean-spirited fun of a baby for failing to grab a spoon correctly and getting applesauce in her hair.

Humans deeply care about both kinds of risk, and that often prevents us from doing the kinds of stupid things that would actually lead to really rapid information-gathering.

If you want to learn something quickly, first build an environment where you have little risk. This isn’t hard! In front of your computer, by yourself – boom, you’ve done it. Once you have that, get stupid.

You don’t know how to use a new piece of software that your job is introducing? Open it up, and just hit random buttons on your keyboard until something happens. Something will! And your proficiency will grow rapidly from there.

Imagine how quickly and easily you could learn to drive a car if it were impossible to hurt yourself while doing so. Like, imagine they made a virtual reality driving simulator that was so accurate that it really felt like you were driving in real life, except that you could be by yourself, immune from harm, and totally invisible to other people. You could be an expert driver in hours.

Well, we’re not there yet with driving. You still have to learn to drive slowly, because there’s risk involved, so you can’t be stupid. But with a lot of things, that’s not the case. Lower your risk, and then goof around. You’ll have fun and learn quickly – just like those kids do.

I have a particular client who has been doing absolutely stellar work recently. I commented as such, how much she’s accomplished and how far she’s come, and she said “It doesn’t feel like it.”

As a father, something I notice is that my kids never seem to age. I mean, they obviously do, but they never seem to. The only time it becomes apparent is when I have cause to really reflect on what they were like in the past, most usually because I look at a picture of them from the past. I see my children every day, so their growth is always incremental from the last moment I saw them. Taken in small doses, it seems to vanish entirely. Only in big chunks can you notice a distinct change.

On occasion, write down what your life is like on that day. Date it, and just put it away somewhere. That way, on occasion you can look at these snapshots the way I occasionally look at old pictures of my kids. And just as I say “wow, they really have grown,” you can say the same for yourself.

Moving a mountain never feels like moving a mountain. Because you don’t move mountains; you move rocks. But if you move enough of them then the mountain moves, too.

People often have big epiphanies or major breakthroughs that don’t actually lead to any changes in behavior or lifestyle. The inertia of your daily life is a powerful force.

If you think about it, most of what you’ll do each day is set. You’ll sleep, probably in the same spot you slept the night previous. You’ll wake up and do some amount of “morning routine” that doesn’t change. You have to spend X hours a day feeding and grooming yourself. You probably have a schedule of work. And so on.

And in order to do any of these things with even a prayer of efficiency, you probably do them in a relatively stable order. So you don’t have a whole lot of time left over to begin with. And now you’ve had this huge epiphany, but it might not affect most of the stuff I just mentioned. Did your major breakthrough change the fact that you have to sleep and eat and shower and go to the bathroom and dress yourself and talk to your children and pay your bills? Maybe it changed how you do some of that, but if 85% of your day stays the same, how do you expect the new idea to stick?

So… move your desk.

Or your bed. Or park your car in a different spot. Or get a radically different haircut. Do something that you’ll see every day and will remind you that you did that thing specifically to mark the occasion of a major idea that you want to act on. Disrupt your own routine without abandoning what it gives you. So that the idea has something to grab onto, to stick to, and grow.

Some folks will put about a hundred times more mental energy into lamenting the loss of something than it would take to either get it back or make a new one.

There are a very, very small number of “once in a lifetime” things. Most things you value can be repaired or replaced – from favorite mementos to interpersonal relationships. Either accept that it’s gone and move on, or work to undo the damage caused by its absence.

But sorrow will carry you down with it. Shed, and move forward.

Most people say “no” far too reflexively. They dismiss or decline before they’ve even thought about it. They say no to things because they’ve said no to them before, or because there was even the slightest bit of uncertainty in the option, or even because they’ve set their internal default to “no.” This is a terrible habit.

Why? Because a reflexive “no” almost never gains you anything in life, but every single thing you said “no” to was an opportunity to gain something, even if only information. Your two options for answering any opportunity should be “conditional yes” or “deliberate no.”

A conditional yes is just that – a yes, “if.” It’s a good first answer. But the other is equally valid if done correctly. There’s nothing inherently wrong with saying “no,” of course. You can – and should – say “no” to a great many opportunities. But don’t let it be your default or your reflex. Think about why.

How can you raise the cost of a “no” on yourself? Simple. Keep a “No Jar.” It works just like a swear jar (a concept that can be applied in lots of interesting ways), except that instead of putting in a dollar when you curse, you put in a dollar when you say a reflexive no. A “deliberate no” is free – so if you take your time, think about it, come up with several reasons why the answer is “no” and what would have to be different to make it a “yes” – then that’s different. That’s free. But a “no” fired off within seconds of hearing the option? That costs a dollar.

“I don’t know what I want to eat tonight,” you lament. Your friend or partner suggests a place, and you immediately scowl and say “nah.” Boom – one dollar in the jar. Looking for work and a family member sends you a job listing? If you immediately trash it, that’s a dollar. The point isn’t to force you to say “yes” to everything; that’s why it’s a dollar and not $100. It’s just to raise the cost of saying “no” just a little bit so that you’re more likely to give each option a proper weighing and build a habit of keeping an open mind.

And here’s the side benefit – when you’re ready to say “yes” to something truly great, you’ll have a little startup capital to do it with.

A clean house is a fortress in which you can weather any siege the outside world can throw at you.

No matter what your living situation is, it’s improved by cleaning it. You can live out of a car, but it’s still better to live out of a clean car. Clutter is the fertile soil in which grow the weeds that will poison and choke you.

Clean your space.