Want to know a sure way to crash? Drive while never taking your eyes off the rear view mirror.

To put it another way – you can’t make choices in the past. “Playing the hand you’re dealt” doesn’t mean “accept everything that happens to you.” It means that you can only start not accepting it right now – not 5 years ago or 5 minutes ago. You can make infinite choices in the future and literally zero in the past.

Missed your exit? There will always be more, and you can make the active choice to take the next one. What you can’t do is go backwards and take the one you missed. Drive on the road you’re on.

Like snowflakes, these days will fall, beautiful in an instant and then gone forever, never to be repeated on this Earth. Holidays are less special for their predictability; the First Snowfall of The Season holds a special place in the hearts of children that cannot be compared.

There are many contests in life that only have a prize for first place. When two teams go to the Super Bowl, only one gets the ring. When you watch the first place runner cross the finish line fractions of an inch ahead of you, it can feel pretty demoralizing.

It shouldn’t.

There may only be an official prize for first place in many contests. But there is an unofficial – yet very important – prize for second in all contests: the knowledge that you rule.

Consider for a moment the gap in ability between Usain Bolt (who won the Gold Medal in the men’s 100-meter dash in the 2016 Olympics) and Justin Gatlin (who won the Silver Medal). Their speeds were 9.81 seconds and 9.89 seconds, respectively. A gap of eight one-hundredths of a second. Now think about the gap between Gatlin’s time, and your best time running one hundred meters. My guess is that the gap between Gatlin’s time and yours is much much larger than the gap between Gatlin’s time and Bolt’s.

Which means Gatlin might have been stinging right after the race. He might have had a strong desire to work on improving himself to close that gap. He may even have felt discouraged that all that work didn’t get him the gold. But he would be wildly, incredibly foolish to think that he wasn’t a good athlete.

I mean, he was literally faster than every human on Earth except one. He rules.

And so do you. Getting so close the finish line and not getting first place might be a gut punch. But it’s also an incredibly strong signal that you should race again, and soon. For you to have come all that way was not wasted time nor effort – it was a trial run that showed you that you are absolutely capable.

Now let’s step away from the Olympics for a moment, and look at the world the rest of us live in. The Olympics are WAY higher-stakes than what you or I did recently that landed us in second place. Come in second at the Olympics, and you can’t compete again for years – and many don’t compete again at all. But if you miss your shot at a job you were interviewing for, a contract you were trying to land, a person you were trying to ask out – you can have a dozen more chances this month. And remember that you’ve already proven that you’re of incredibly high skill; 99th percentile stuff.

If you try out for contest after contest after contest in a particular sphere and you consistently land in 175th place, then maybe that thing isn’t for you. But if you’re landing in #2? You’re right there! Just do it a few more times – maybe even once – and you’ve got it. People who are bad at things don’t win silver medals for them.

Now, let me add a bit of tactics onto my mentality lesson here: responding to your silver is how you get your gold. When I was a teenager and played video games with other teenagers, a common phrase was “almost had it.” That’s what you’d say when you were so close to beating that last boss, he had a millimeter left on his health bar, and then you slipped and he got you. You’d say “almost had it.” Only there were two ways to say it: one kid would smash their controller on the ground and stomp their foot and say “almost had it” like the universe cheated them out of something they deserved. The other kid tightened their grip and grinned, eyes boring into the screen as they restarted, leaning forward into their next round as they said “almost had it,” like another man in another time said “Eureka.”

Guess which kid won on their next play through?

The person who doesn’t get the job reaches out, has great conversations anyway with those people, stays connected, suggests ways to collaborate in the future, builds a relationship that will create referrals and contacts well down the line (and hey, even potentially another swing in the future). The person who loses a contract bid to another rep studies everything about that rep’s style and their company’s offering to improve their own. The person who strikes out on the date request is charming and gracious about it, impressing other people with their poise and setting up future interest. You don’t lose, you get closer.

If you approach your Silver performance with the keen eye of a student, humble and willing to take every opportunity to learn, to advance, to still find advantage in the scenario you created instead of treating it as a binary, all-or-nothing situation – if you do all of that, do you really think you can’t find eight one-hundredths of a second worth of improvement in there? That’s all it takes to get the Gold next time.

I think concentrated help is better than dispersed help.

I think if you had a thousand dollars that you wanted to give away, giving all of it to one person is better than giving a dollar to each of a thousand people.

First and foremost, giving a dollar to each of a thousand people carries tremendous deadweight costs in terms of your effort. Giving isn’t instantaneous and neither is helping. It takes the same amount of time to give a person a dollar or a thousand dollars, so giving one dollar to each of a thousand people takes a thousand times as long as just giving one person the lump sum.

But beyond that, a dollar just isn’t that impactful to most people. I actually think a dollar helps people less than 1/1000th of $1,000, as counter-intuitive as that seems. But here’s why – if I give you an extra dollar, your life will not change in the slightest. (I’m assuming, of course, that “you” live in a western, first-world country like me. If you live somewhere very different, this statement could be very wrong, but the point I’m making will still stand in the end, you’ll see.) You might barely notice or remember. At best, it would go in a vending machine or stuffed into a spare corner of your car. There’s virtually no problem you could have where one dollar would mark the difference between solving it or not. In econ-speak, there are very few cases on the margin where a lone dollar would change anything. Which means that, for most of those thousand people, I might as well have given them nothing.

But $1,000? That can change someone’s whole month. That can be making rent or not. That can be a wonderful Christmas for some kids that wouldn’t otherwise get one. That can be the medicine someone needs this month. In other words, a thousand bucks can really be a blessing.

So when you concentrate it, you do much more than a thousand times more good, because you’re doing good at all versus probably not.

Now, think about how you can help people. Whatever it is you’re good at contributing that people might need. There’s an impulse of fairness in most of us that calls for us to try to “spread the love” as much as we can. But that impulse can lead us to some bad ends – imagine a village of a hundred starving people. You have just enough food to stave off starvation for one person. You could get out a scalpel and divide that morsel a hundred ways, but then a hundred people would still stave, because 1% of “enough” isn’t enough. Once something falls beneath the “actual help threshold,” then it doesn’t matter how many people receive it.

It doesn’t matter how many people you insufficiently help. It matters how many you actually help.

So when you’re looking to help someone, start by helping one person as much as you can. Get them right again, in whatever way you can. That guy throwing starfish back into the ocean when there were millions on the beach? That makes more sense than moving every starfish a millimeter closer to the water – where they’ll still die.

The impulse of fairness comes from an understandable, if misguided, place. It comes from a desire to not have to make hard decisions. If I only have food for one person, letting everyone starve by splitting it up at least absolves me from making the horrible decision of who to save. Most people couldn’t make that sort of decision and still sleep at night.

But the alternative is a hollow sense of fairness and a starved village.

When you can help, just pick the person closest to you and help. Like anything, you’ll get better at helping the more you do it. That means you’ll get better at putting your help where it’s most needed. But in the short term, getting started there is like getting started at anything at all – just do it. Just start. Someone needs your help, someone nearby. Go for it.

I think the people who impose the most rules on themselves are the most free.

It takes extreme discipline to live a free life. If you don’t impose rules on yourself, someone else will impose them on you. The world is like a maze, and unless you make your life too big to fit in it, you’ll get trapped in it.

Sometimes I hear this lament from certain people about how they’d like to just chuck it all and go live in the mountains somewhere. Personally, I think that’s awesome – I want to do that. But these people seem to think it’s easy. As if “living in the mountains somewhere” would somehow take less discipline than living their current life.

You can take a day off from work. You can’t take a day off from your own survival. When you’re every piece of your own life, you can’t falter. You need rules to live by.

Not doing that is turning over some of the framework for your life’s decisions to others. Some level of that may be necessary, but do it deliberately if you must do it at all.

The other day in the store I witnessed an impromptu parenting moment and was, to put it mildly, unimpressed.

The woman had with her two children, looked to be about 10 and 8, both boys. The older boy said something quite unflattering and downright mean to the younger boy. The vicious statement he made also included a particularly unpleasant slur.

The adult’s response was swift but, in my opinion, quite misguided. Her response was: “Don’t use that word!”

That’s it. Then she went back to her errands.

Now, I’m not going to criticize the overall moment, devoid of context. I’m a parent, and I know a lot could be going on there. But I’ll happily criticize the general sentiment that I seem to see so oft-repeated, which is that there is such a thing as “bad words.”

People teach that to their kids as a very foolish shorthand for “don’t be mean.” But that’s not the lesson the kids learn, and it’s not the lesson they carry into adulthood. The lesson they carry into adulthood is that if you want to be mean, you also have to solve a puzzle – different words are worth different points, and your goal is to maximize offense and insult without going over the line.

We teach kids that certain words are off-limits instead of teaching them empathy, decorum, and self-control. And in doing so, we also create vulnerability to those same words in these kids – they grow up thinking that certain words are exceptions to the “sticks and stones” rule.

Yes, words – all words – have the power to hurt an undisciplined or vulnerable mind. And no, the fact that words only hurt certain people is not an excuse to use them, claiming “it’s their fault that they weren’t tougher.” We should, always, be kind. And some words in particular carry an awful lot of historical baggage that may make us more aware of their use.

But I posit that we teach the wrong lessons around this, and that we can do better.

If I put a chip in the mind of every human on Earth that completely prevented the use of certain words, and in so doing managed to eliminate a list of all harmful slurs (imagining for a moment that such a list could even be agreed upon), I would have done absolutely nothing to decrease the levels of racism, sexism, or other prejudice that exists in the world. I would not even have eliminated the tools of the “ists” of the world, for the very second they realized they couldn’t employ their previously favored slurs there would be a mad and unholy race to pick the best (worst?) replacement.

A generation of empathetic, kind, morally-upright people wouldn’t use those terms no matter how widely available and free of social consequence they were. We create social consequences for words instead of intent and actions and it makes us do crazy things, like firing one media law professor for discussing a First Amendment case about racial slurs or even firing a business communication professor who was teaching about the Chinese language for using a Chinese word that sort of sounded like an English racial slur.

Those schools fired those teachers, but I don’t blame the schools. The schools are simply responding to incentives from their customer base, as all businesses do. No, the blame lies solely with us for raising children this way. For slacking off in our lessons about politeness and kindness and empathy so that instead we’ve taught that all the bad in humanity is somehow bundled up with certain specific combinations of letters.

I don’t want my children to never use slurs. I want them to never say sentences where such slurs are appropriate components. I want them to never feel in their heart like such a sentence bears value to their hearts and the hearts of humanity. I can say vile, hurtful things in sentences composed of words that, individually, would be appropriate for any kindergarten classroom. That doesn’t make those things okay to say – they are poison for my soul if I let them reside in any mind, my own included.

Make no mistake – that lesson is the harder one to teach. Dealing with anger, pain, or jealousy in a healthy way, being compassionate to other humans (even those that are not compassionate to you) and understanding the eternal importance of even, civil discourse are all great challenges to developing minds and the mentors helping them to grow. But we mustn’t shirk those duties, and we certainly can’t be fooled – as I believe many of us have been – by the idea that policing a subset of those words will do the aforementioned for us. We have fallen into the false belief that if we simply impose enough social consequences on certain words, then people will automatically become the moral beacons we should have been raising all along.

Words are a symptom; an outpouring of what is in our minds and our hearts. A holy tongue cannot be attached to an unholy soul, but a holy soul will not seek poison for its tongue, even if it’s available.

You know, if you shine a laser pointer at a sponge, it stops. It won’t go through and shine out the other side.

But if you hold the sponge under a small stream of water, the water gets through.

There are a million paths that lead through the sponge. Just none of them are perfectly straight. So if you can only move in straight lines, it doesn’t matter if you’re fast and bright. You must be persistent and clever, instead.

Water is persistent and clever. Be like water.

I’m going to share a secret with you. A formula. A pretty tried-and-true way to stick out in someone’s memory.

“Once upon a time things were normal. And then they became bad, and here’s why! Then I did some cool things that only I could do. Then things were normal again, or even slightly better, because of what I did.”

That is every story ever. That’s the system. Replace the vague language with specific detail, but do not change the essential formula. That story will stick out in someone’s mind for a long time. Way longer than unconnected, irrelevant details.

Interviews. Dates. Sales calls. Family reunions.

You have cool stories in your past. You just might not know how to tell them. The above is how – use your details, truthful ones, things that really happened. But when you’re trying to figure out what order they go in, how to line them up – that’s how.

Anyone who you interact with in some way replaces you.

If you go to a restaurant, the chef there replaces you, if only for an evening, as the person who cooks your meals. By default, you do everything for yourself – all other interactions are acquired.

If you work for someone else, you’re replacing yourself with them as your boss. If you hire a nanny or use a daycare, you’re replacing yourself (at least some of the time) with them as the caregiver of your children.

It’s not a bad thing. But it’s a good reminder – always replace up. Always use someone better. Don’t replace just to replace. If you have to replace yourself, do it with someone you admire.

The best thing isn’t always good. But it’s still the best thing, and that means it’ should be your choice – the thing you act upon.

The best choice may simply be the best choice of available options. A think a truly powerful person is someone who can realize that even a bad option is the best one, and take it. If your leg is caught in a bear trap and the only way to make it back to civilization is to cut it off – well, not everyone can do that. But the ones who can’t don’t survive.

So let’s say you’re presented with an option – a course of action, a path. You don’t want to do it. Then you need to answer one question:

“If not, then what?”

If you don’t have a better idea, then then even an idea you hate may be the best idea. Of course, “nothing” is one of the choices – sometimes. Imagine you’re employed, but looking for something better. A job offer comes your way, but you don’t like it. “If not, then what?” Then you stay in your current job. Your current job may be better than the offered one. Okay.

But let’s say you’re not employed at all – you have no income, bills are piling up, etc. You get that same job offer. You still don’t like it, but: “If not, then what?” Then you starve – so take the job you don’t like, and then look for a better one.

I have a rule with my kids that makes me both more and less strict than a lot of typical parents. When I’m preparing dinner, I’ll get my kids’ input. I’ll say something like “I’m thinking about chicken and broccoli for dinner. What do you think?” If they say yes, great. If they say no – “If not, then what?” They have to make a suggestion. They can’t just say “no” and expect me to rattle off fifteen options until they pick one (parenting tip: they’ll never pick one). So I make my suggestion, and if they actually have a reasonable counter-offer, I’ll make it. If they say “how about ravioli instead,” then I’ll reward them for making a decision and make ravioli. But if they say “umm, I don’t know,” then they get my original offer.

That’s good training for anyone. “No” might be a complete sentence, but it’s not a complete plan for yourself. A long line of negatives and refusals won’t get you where you want to go. Your goal is movement. If you don’t like a particular direction, no problem – but if not, then what?