Anything you think of as something you should be allowed to do must necessarily come with responsibility, and that’s on you to own.

Let’s use driving as an example. By default, you should be allowed to drive. If you can buy a car, no one should be allowed to tell you that you can’t drive it around. But that right comes with responsibility – you need to drive safely, be aware of the basic physics and mechanics of the vehicle, remain sober, pay attention, etc. If you fail to uphold your responsibilities, then the right to drive imposes too much danger on your fellow humans.

This applies even to things that don’t have any official legal requirements. You should never use the legal requirements as the bare minimum responsibility for yourself.

“Be more responsible with your rights than you are legally required to be” is a pretty good fundamental axiom, in fact.

There are two kinds of risk. There’s the risk that you won’t gain what you want, and the risk of actual loss.

If you get a job, there’s risk! You might lose that job, you might not like it, etc. But what you’re wagering is opportunity – i.e. you’re “wagering” any other job you could have gotten. You might end up back where you started, but other than the time you spent (which isn’t nothing, of course), you’re not worse off.

If you build a business, there’s risk too – but a very different kind. Let’s imagine that you have to spend $50,000 investing in said business. If the business fails, you aren’t getting most of that money back. You’d be much, much worse off, and that’s on top of the fact that you also have to spend time as well – and probably more than it would take you to discover a job was a bad fit.

The point is, calling something “risky” isn’t automatically a point of comparison. You need to know what you’re wagering, not just your chances of success.

Dan and Stacy play chess. Dan is very good at chess; Stacy is pretty mediocre, but thinks she’s quite good. During their match, Stacy captures many pieces – more than Dan, in fact! But Dan still wins, achieving the objective of putting Stacy’s king into checkmate.

With a huff, Stacy says, “If the winner of chess was whoever captured the most pieces, I would have won!“

Is this a valid statement from Stacy? Explain your answer.

Okay, now on to the explanation: Of course it isn’t. Dan should smirk at the statement. But why? Stacy did capture more pieces, didn’t she? Yes – when the objective was to put the opponent’s king in checkmate! Dan, being much better at chess, was perfectly aware of how many pieces he was sacrificing, willingly giving them up in order to better position his remaining pieces to win the game. He played the way he did because of the rules and objective. If the objective had been “capture the most pieces” from the beginning, then he would have played with the same amount of skill but very different strategy!

You will see this specific sort of post-loss complaint in a lot of different spheres. “If the prettiest tower of blocks was the winner, then I would have won!” (But yours didn’t fall over, so you won.) “If the candidate who won the popular vote won, then we’d have a different president!” (Maybe – or maybe the candidates would have both campaigned differently, knowing that was the case.)

The point is that there might be very legitimate complaints about the way a particular contest is evaluated. But the time to figure that out is before the contest, not after when you’ve accomplished something other than the evaluated objective.

Dying on the hill of your own ignorance is a hell of a way to go.

It’s fine to not know anything. It’s even fine to think you know something, and be wrong. But for the love of all that is holy, don’t fight tooth and nail for a vague guess with no background.

If you get good at one application of self-awareness, let it be this: Learn to recognize when you have made a vague guess with nothing backing it up. Let it crumble into gentle curiosity at the very first piece of real evidence that you’re wrong. You don’t have to automatically adopt the opposite position – the problem is that you’re adopting any position with no actual knowledge.

Just… just be okay saying, “huh, neat, tell me more” and stop being a huge jerk.

You’re going to lose. Sometimes, inevitably. And when you do, there’s a cost – to your attitude, your energy, your overall mental resilience.

You can – and absolutely should – build up your resilience. You should get used to losing, and make losing not hurt as bad. You should build up a tolerance, in other words. Work on yourself. But no matter how good you get at it, you can only minimize the psychic cost of losing, you can’t eliminate it.

And that’s why you should choose your losses carefully. Don’t lose for no reason.

First, make sure the competition (whatever it is) is meaningful. Would winning be a great boon? Then the risk of losing is worth it. Would losing devastate you in more ways than one? Be careful. Spend your risk like a budget.

Don’t compete just to compete – in other words, don’t lose just for the sake of losing. Know the rules. Know how to play. An early, easy loss to learn the rules (or build that tolerance!) is fine. But if you’re in a slump to begin with, do some building before you do some gambling.

You’ve gotta lose. Lose smart, when you do.

Arbitrary ages of majority are weird. As odd as it seems, I think this is one way we’ve gone backwards a bit.

You have to be 18 to “be an adult.” Except it’s 19 to smoke, 21 to drink, 17 to drive, 25 to rent a car… and all of that is different in different states. Well? Are you an adult or aren’t you?

Even ignoring the fact that there’s nothing different about a person at 17 years, 11 months, and 29 days versus that same person at 18 years on the dot, we also have to realize that a thousand different 18-year-olds are different in a thousand different ways.

We need an official Rite of Passage again. Instead of an arbitrary and automatic “adulthood” label, we need a specific trial, accomplishment, or ritual. Something done with the support of your family and the oversight of your community that grants you the rights and responsibilities of adulthood only when successfully accomplished.

I’m not saying it has to be barbaric – the rite of passage doesn’t have to be wandering around in the woods until you kill a bear. Imagine something like the citizenship test, but for adulthood: You have to take a test covering subjects like personal finance, local laws, employment readiness, interpersonal conflict resolution skills, etc. What the kids today like to call “adulting” skills. And if you pass, you become a legal adult. If you don’t, you remain legally a “minor,” regardless of age. You can take the test when you want, but a failure requires a year-long wait before taking it again.

Perfect system? Hardly. But our current system isn’t perfect, either. 16-year-olds with abusive parents are trapped even if they’re capable of surviving on their own. 19-year-olds with mental handicaps are forced to “age out” of support systems. Kids can take a bullet for their county but can’t legally buy a beer.

I just think it’s worth thinking about.

If you aren’t sure, you’re probably wrong. If you can’t prove – or even say – why you’re right, you’re probably wrong.

You don’t have to always be right. But try not to be wrong too often. That means defaulting to “I don’t know” is a viable path. Being curious is better than being wrong.

I have a friend I’ve known for about five or six years. He’s a good guy, his kids like my kids, we share hobbies – fantastic adult friendship all around. But since I met him as a full-grown adult, he pretty much only knows this version of me. He didn’t “grow up” with me the way some of my other friends have.

But he has his own history, of course. And though we didn’t know each other growing up, we did grow up in the same area.

Just this week, he told me a story from his own youth, just something he’d heard (not something he had been present for). A pretty wild story, by all accounts, that a friend of his had told him about a party, et cetera et cetera.

And then I started laughing.

The story was about me.

We traced back the origins – the person who told him that story nearly twenty years ago had dated one of my friends and was at the party where I did the absurd things in question. Small world!

There’s no lesson here. (Except maybe, “Reputation is a wild animal you don’t control once released?”) But I laughed and laughed. My father would be pleased.

Bottling up your emotions, never letting yourself express anger or hurt, is poison. But that doesn’t mean you should give yourself endless leeway to indulge in your worst impulses.

Good fences make good neighbors, and that’s true of the emotional neighbors as well – your feelings and your responsibilities have to get along, and the best way for them to do that is to have a little structure. A fence isn’t a prison; it’s a guardrail.

In life, you are rewarded roughly proportionate to how much responsibility you take on and how well you shoulder it. Taken to the extreme, it’s a recipe for burnout and disaster. But the other extreme, where you never ever say “Instead of feeling my feelings right now, I have a job to do, and I need to put that first,” is a recipe for a joyless life of zero accomplishment.

Be the shepherd for yourself.

So, you’ve decided you want to do something new! You want to pursue a new hobby, a new promotion, a new relationship. That’s awesome! But of course, you’ll have to make some room in your life, which means you have to get some things off your plate. But how?

Here are some options:

1. Reduce. If you currently spend 10 hours a week doing something, can you accomplish most of what you do now with only 4 hours? Chances are good that you can – if you truly restrain yourself to that 4 hour block. Work tends to expand to fill the time you give it, so chances are that whatever you were doing has “expanded” to fill ten hours.
2. Delegate. With a little up-front investment in training time, you may be able to get someone to take over a task or three. Especially if those tasks would benefit them (like an employee learning new skills and getting new opportunities to shine), this is a great option.
3. Combine. Can you put two things together? Let’s say you like to watch a particular show every day, and you also want to work out every day. Can you do those at the same time? How about taking a walk with a friend, to get social time and exercise time together?
4. Buy out. In the amount of time it takes me to mow my lawn, I can earn much more money than it costs to have someone else mow it. So as often as I can, I buy out the tasks that don’t bring me particular joy. Time is more valuable to me than saving a few bucks by shoveling my own snow.
5. Cut. Finally, if all else fails, some things just have to go. Everything has a season, and maybe this task’s season has ended in favor of whatever new thing you want to do.

Do the things that bring you joy, and spend your time wisely!