Something I try to stay very aware of is this: Your World is not The World.

Everyone is so, so much smaller of an information sphere than they think. “Everyone is talking about this!” No they aren’t. That’s your world; lots of people in your world are talking about that, sure. Most people in The World have absolutely no idea, interest, or inkling in it.

So when I see particular shifts in the topic de jure, I often wonder: what am I not hearing about?

There must be hundreds of thousands of such bubbles at any given time. So many interesting things are happening! I like to go looking around. I’ll share whatever interesting things I find with you.

Everyone is different. Just getting that out of the way first.

I want to help people. Primarily, what I want to do is help people help themselves; to teach them how to fish, so to speak. Of the millions of things a person can be good at, I’m better than average at a handful – just like everybody else. So typically, my way of thinking is “If I’m good at a thing that a lot of other people struggle with, then maybe I could benefit them by sharing how I go about that thing.”

There are some big barriers to this.

First is just general humanism: People don’t want advice unless they explicitly ask for it, and a lot of times not even then. When people complain about their situation, they typically want one or more of these three things:

1. Someone to magically solve it for them.
2. Someone to tell them that they’re blameless for the situation, absolving them of personal responsibility.
3. Pity, “victim status,” or some other form of preferential treatment or consideration as a result.

So if someone says, “Ugh, I’m so broke, life isn’t fair,” they’re absolutely not asking you for help with their personal finance and budgeting. Even if someone explicitly says the words to you: “Hey, could you help me with my personal finance and budgeting,” then there’s only about a 30% chance that they actually want that, and a 70% chance that it’s a covert way of asking for one of the other three things.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, but the short answer is basically just to live your life in a way that makes the things you’re good at very visible, and if people ask for your help in one of those spheres, carefully evaluate whether they actually want the help. If they do, give them as much help as you possibly can.

But there’s also, I’ve discovered, a second layer to this problem. Namely: I don’t always know why I’m good at something and other people aren’t.

Here’s a real example that comes to mind – I would never have the hubris to say pointedly “I’m a good parent,” because only time will tell. But I can confidently say I’m a non-stressed parent. The existence of my children and their presence in my life and my day is a joy, and it never causes me stress, frustration, etc. Their behavior aligns to my expectations well, I’ve had to give my children any sort of “punishment” fewer than a half-dozen times in my life, and I never find myself rubbing my temples and wishing for “just five minutes of peace and quiet” or anything like that.

Meanwhile, I see other parents doing that sort of stuff all the time. Lamenting about chaos or stress, trying in vain to correct the same behaviors in their children over and over, feeling crushed under the weight of the responsibilities or sacrifices of parenting.

I want to help! But here’s my barrier: I’m pretty sure (though definitely not certain) what works for me. Why only pretty sure? Well, maybe I’m really good at managing all that stuff. But maybe my kids are exceptionally good! Maybe I wouldn’t actually do as well with a different set of kids, so my success is partially – or largely – due to good fortune rather than my skills as a father. I can’t exactly run a double-blind study here.

Also, I’m not sure at all why other people, individually, have this level of stress. I don’t have a camera in their house; I can observe maybe 2% of their total parenting time when we’re together or cross paths at events and such. So maybe their kids are unusually stress-inducing!

Heck, maybe I’m just a genetic freak with unusually low cortisol levels, or theirs are unusually high. Life is complex, parenting doubly so. Everyone is different, like I said. Even if 100% of my success is due to my direct effort (which almost certainly isn’t true), that doesn’t mean my methods would duplicate perfectly in another home.

A core life principle I believe in is this: If you want success in a particular sphere and you’re not getting it, but someone else is, you should examine how they’re achieving that success and at least experiment with those methods instead of your own. Because I do that myself, I try to make myself available for the reverse: If I do have a lot of success in a particular sphere, and others don’t always, then I want to help. But when people have a problem that’s not my problem, personally, it’s not always clear the best way to do that.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try, of course. I can always look for someone who has a lot of success helping people with problems that they don’t personally experience, and ask them how they do it!

Here is a good formula for living a life with as few regrets as possible: Always help when you can.

Once, many years ago, I saw a young woman walking in the rain, looking cold. I was about to pull over to offer her a ride, but I let fear get the best of me. I was an adult man and she was a teenage girl, and I feared the risk of my intentions being misinterpreted. So I didn’t speak to her, and instead drove off.

I’ve thought about that once a week for two decades. I tell myself all sorts of stories – we were in a populated area, not a lone stretch of wilderness highway, so she probably wasn’t walking far. She could have gone into any store for temporary shelter if she was really in distress. Maybe I even misinterpreted her look as distress; she could have just been wet but perfectly content to experience the rain.

I tell myself those stories as a defense against the guilt of regret. Because my brain also tells other stories – what if she was in real danger, and you didn’t help? What if she was trying to get away from someone? What if she was walking in the rain because she was disoriented or in deep emotional distress? The potential answers to those questions haunt me.

In all the years since, I’ve never once regretted helping someone. Those little gestures – grabbing a door for someone, offering to carry something, helping someone pick up something they’ve dropped, offering a hand if they’ve fallen. None of those have ever turned out bad. I’ve never been burned by any of them, or lost time or effort I couldn’t afford.

In fact, all those little gestures have brought me much joy! As a result of that pattern I’ve made friends, held babies, found new friends for my children, and all sorts of other boons – not to mention the great happiness in my heart that comes from living your life that way. I’ve never had a moment of awkwardness or embarrassment or anything else negative as a result of trying to help. But I’ve had two decades of guilt and regret from the notable time that I didn’t.

Even if someone ever did respond poorly to my offer of help (and no one ever has!), it would be easy to shrug off, since I know I was just trying to help and my intentions were good. So there’s almost no way it could turn out badly.

I try to offer advice rarely, instead just “living my life out loud,” talking about my experiences, and letting people take what lessons from it they will. But in this instance, I will offer the advice very genuinely: Help people. Build it as a habit to give those small bits of assistance whenever you can. Your life will be so, so much better for it.

The ability to tell stories is a wonderful ability. Stories inspire, entertain, and educate – all more memorably than facts and figures alone. So being able to weave a good yarn is a great skill to develop.

But there’s another benefit. A while back, I got my kids into a great bluffing card game. In addition to learning how to bluff, the other (and some might say even more important) benefit is learning how to spot a bluff. The same is true for stories. If you’re good at telling them, then you’re also getting better at being told them.

What elements might the teller be leaving out, exaggerating, or changing altogether? Why this story, framed this way? What’s the takeaway the teller wants me to have – and do I want it?

Learning to hear the world, as it really is, makes us wiser. So tell a few stories!

My father loved trash-pickin’. We’d do it all the time. Pick a nice neighborhood on their trash day and drive around, looking for whatever cool things might be going to the curb. We’d find all sorts of neat stuff – some of it just cool to look at for a minute, some of it in perfect condition, some of it fixable by us. We’d keep some, give some away, throw some back, even sell some.

It’s a very fond memory, and I’d told stories of it to my own children, who loved them. So tonight was a nice night… and off we went.

You’d have thought we were going to Disney Land. They were so excited, talking about opportunities and discussing the world. Why people replace things, what that might mean about those things, how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. We got some food, made some jokes, sang some songs.

We also came back with a cool table that they kids spotted!

Activities like that – ones with no real failure state, just “let’s do this semi-specific thing until we decide not to, and talk about it along the way” are such perfect avenues of fellowship.

My father’s spirit with us. Treasure from trash.

Observing without reacting is a powerful statement. Making it clear that you can see, and that you are therefore choosing non-interference with whatever you observe, makes it clear that you hold no immediate objection. Your attention grants permission, grants freedom.

Don’t react to every little thing. Not everything needs your opinion, permission, or endorsement. You don’t always need to weigh in. Give people space and respect – and yourself some calm.

A balance between using your time off to recharge and using your time off to prepare seems, to me, to be the necessary factor for low-stress and happiness.

When I have a day off, if I spend it entirely in “relaxation mode,” I end up feeling stressed and often depressed by the end. But if I’m productive all day, I often feel… well, like I need another day off!

I need to unwind, but like a good watch, I need to be rewound again.

In your view, what’s the primary goal of the education system? What’s the point?

No matter what your answer is, you’re going to have lots of people who disagree with you. Some people might agree that it’s one of the goals, but not the primary. Other people might not agree that it’s a goal at all! They might say it’s a nice secondary effect but not something to specifically strive for, or they might say it should actively be discouraged.

Here’s the core of the problem I’m describing: the education system in America doesn’t have a single, stated primary goal. According to the Department of Education, their goal is to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

But like oh so many mission statements, that one doesn’t mean anything. At best, it’s a vague philosophy, not a goal. “Promote achievement?” Sure, but what are we trying to get them to achieve? Anything? A specific thing? Fostering excellence is meaningless unless you define excellence in the first place. What is excellence? Test scores? Graduation rates? Employment rates as adults?

It’s all too broad. People want too many different things to be able to group them all together and say “we’re going to promote more goodness and less worseness” and have it mean anything.

Why is this important? Because it makes more acute conversations about specific educational policy really, really difficult to have in a productive way.

For example: A given school district has gotten a minor grant for an additional program. Should it allocate that to an arts course or a gifted and talented program? It’s a rhetorical question – I’m sure you have your view on the actual question, but I’m not debating that here. What I’m pointing out is that the question itself can only be answered from the perspective of what you think the ed system’s goals should be.

As a professional coach, one of the central pillars of our profession is that we don’t impose a goal on our clients; we help them refine what their own goals are, and then we help them achieve those goals through better processes and decision-making clarity. So if one of my clients asks me something like “Should I take this new job,” I’m not answering whether I would take that job, or even if I think it’s a good idea overall. What I’m doing is running that question through a fairly simple formula with the client.

First, we go back to their Main Goal. Then, we work through whether or not taking the new job (or whatever decision they’re facing) is likely to move them toward or away from that goal. Since we have a Main Goal, this process is much easier than it would be if we’d never defined a Main Goal to begin with. Without a Main Goal, pretty much every decision has pros and cons – the job has higher salary but is farther away, it has a better manager but worse public visibility, etc. – and we don’t know which factors are more important than others because we don’t have an objective to measure them against.

I started off by talking about the education system because it’s a great example to illustrate this problem, but it’s far from the only example. Any project, organization, or endeavor needs to be aimed at something. The more goals you try to mix together, the worse you are at accomplishing any of them. Likewise, the more people who work on any given enterprise, the harder it will be to keep them aligned and communicating well. So big projects with lots of goals have both of these problems.

In general, try to break your goals down into their smallest cohesive endeavor. And before you try to influence someone on what should be done, make sure you’re in agreement on the baseline goal of what you want accomplished! Otherwise, there’s not much point to the discussion.

A tree that falls in the woods with no one around to hear it does not make a sound.

For the exact same reason, a sunset is not beautiful. Roses do not smell sweet.

All that is beautiful in the world is the result of random physical inputs being assembled like a glorious symphony by the incredible machine that is your mind.

The smell of a rose is just bits of rose particles drifting against your olfactory nerve. A sunset is just photons emitted by the sun, bouncing around against particles in the air and curving around the gravitational horizon of the Earth. A symphony is just the rattling of strings and reeds, ricocheting off the air around it.

“Just.”

Of course, all of those things can be sublimely beautiful. But that beauty is in you. We imagine that if we were to vanish, the sunset would still be there – but it wouldn’t be. Not in that way.

A platypus can sense electrical impulses from a distance. Migratory birds can sense magnetic fields. If you had either of those senses, then sometimes you would sense an electrical impulse or a magnetic field that was gorgeous. That would touch you in the way that the most transcendent mountain view or soaring symphony could.

If that’s difficult for you to picture (and I imagine it might be!), then remember – if you can’t imagine a magnetic field being heart-wrenching, then a creature who could detect magnetic fields but who didn’t have a sense of sight would probably have an equally hard time imagining how a sunset could be beautiful.

Imagine a migratory bird became sentient and could talk to you. It has this extra sense you don’t have, the ability to actually perceive magnetic fields. It doesn’t “see” them or “hear” them – those words describe other senses. Human language doesn’t have a word for that sense, because humans don’t have the sense itself. So the bird coins the term “kleet” for the sense. Then the bird says to you one day:

“If a magnetic field shifts and there are no birds to kleet it, does it make a kloot?”

Does it make a what? “A kloot.” Well, I don’t know. What’s a kloot? “A kloot is the word for something you kleet, the way a ‘sound’ is the word for something you hear.” Okay, then that answers your own question – if a kloot is just the word for when a bird kleets a magnetic field, then of course it doesn’t make a kloot without a bird around. The kloot is in the bird, not the magnetic field. I can’t kleet a magnetic field, after all.

Of all the phenomena in the universe, a tiny percentage is perceivable by humans. Within that tiny percentage, our brains make incredible beauty and bestow it upon our hearts. What a fortune it is to be a human, to be alive.

Sometimes you find yourself in a bad situation, but the best proposed solution makes you anxious. Maybe you have a bad boss making your job miserable, and the best solution is to set some boundaries with them, but you’re worried about their backlash. Or maybe your car is starting to make weird noises and overheat, but you’re worried that if you take it in to the shop you’ll be faced with a big bill. Insert any example you like.

The solution might make you anxious, but you always have to remember the grim alternative is staying in the bad situation! Yes, your boss might get mad if you set boundaries. You might even get fired! But what happens if you don’t? You just stay in that bad job forever – or, more likely, you quit or get fired anyway as it gets progressively worse.

Bad situations often have thorny exits. But exit you must. Because otherwise, you’re accepting that the bad situation is the best you’ll ever have.