Let’s say you buy yourself a chair, only you buy one of those things that’s technically only a chair in theory – what you actually get is a box of wood and screws.

Actually, you get wood, screws, and instructions. (Usually.)

There will be a nice, neat (sometimes comically-poorly written) pamphlet that tells you how to assemble a chair.

Chairs are nice that way. Most things in life, however, don’t come with instructions. That’s very, very awesome.

You heard me: awesome!

Why is that so great? Because of why instructions are written in the first place.

The reason your chair comes with instructions is simple: there are more ways not to build a chair than to build one. Given the pieces that come in the box, there are maybe 2-3 ways tops that will result in a usable chair and minimal destruction to your immediate surroundings. The simplest of those 2-3 is probably the one detailed in the pamphlet, but a really skilled carpenter might know a better way to assemble the components. The point is, though, that there are probably several million ways not to build a chair out of those pieces. So if given the choice between writing a pamphlet that tells you all the ways not to build a chair versus all the ways to build one, the latter uses significantly less paper.

But that calculus exists for everything. There’s no pamphlet of instructions for most activities because the number of ways you could do them is vastly, vastly larger than the number of ways you couldn’t.

Why is there no instruction manual for falling in love? Because you can fall in love in a few billion ways – given regular, unplanned exposure to the human race it’s almost impossible not to, at least once. Why is there no instruction manual for “how to make money?” Because there are as many ways to do that as stars in the sky.

So when you find yourself confronted with an activity and you think “I’m woefully unprepared for this – I’ve never received any instruction at all” – rejoice! That means you’re about to do something that has a million different ways to succeed, and a million more. When you’re at the South Pole, no matter which direction you walk, it’s North. When you’re at the bottom, everywhere is Up.

Most people worry about lack of instruction not because they’re worried about not doing “it” right, but because they’re worried about doing “it” (whatever “it” is) horribly wrong. But you can’t! Your only outcomes are varying degrees of “right,” and you can improve as you go.

There. Let this be your instruction manual for all of life. You don’t need more than this to get started.

Sometimes you do something for a long time without really meaning to.

It’s okay – some functions of your life have to be on auto-pilot. If you put conscious effort into every single decision every single day you’ll burn out incredibly quickly. But the balance is tough to strike, and often people end up putting too much of their lives on auto-pilot before deciding they want to make a change.

Change is good and you shouldn’t be scared of it. Often a major change comes with a decrease in a current level of something you want, but also a big rate of increase in that same thing.

A typical example is salary. You might make $100k a year currently, but your salary growth is a steady 1% annually. If you took a different job it might pay only $70k, but if it had a 10% annual growth rate, it wouldn’t take long before you’d be doing much better than before. You can replace “salary” with more intangible things, too – happiness, stress levels, prestige, etc. Sometimes you have to give up a little of your static benefit in order to invest in trajectory.

I hear pretty often that people don’t want to be “pigeonholed” or put into one specific box; they want to be seen as multi-faceted. But meanwhile, the thing people are labeling them with is the only thing they talk about; it’s their whole life. I’ll say, “Hey, if you don’t want to be seen as just ‘the web developer guy,’ then stop talking about that.” And they’ll respond that web development is 95% of their skill set, years of experience, etc., and that without it they don’t have anything.

That might be the choice you have to make! If you want the benefit that twenty years’ experience gets you in social capital, you have to accept what that twenty years was spent doing. You can look for transferable skills and adjacent experiences, but it’s still twenty years’ experience in those things. If you want people to see you for your modern art, then that’s what you have to talk about, even if you’ve only been doing that for a month.

You may have to give up some of your static reputation, some of your static identity even. And it’s natural to be wary of that, but of course it’s exactly the crucial ingredient in change. In exchange, you get a new trajectory, the ability to invest in a new style of identity and reputation, unfettered by the box that everyone has built around your old one.

I tend not to dwell in the past. Once something has happened, the waveform has collapsed and it’s no longer able to be influenced by anything I do. As a result, I usually treat any event that’s happened in the past as simply background – the boundary conditions of my current universe. It sets the stage, but I have no more emotional investment in something that happened to me yesterday than I do to the events of World War One.

A strange consequence of this that I’m noticing lately is that I have a terrible concept of how long ago something happened. I’m responding to emails today (the standard Monday excavation) and as I’m responding, I’m starting to feel guilty for how long it’s taken me to get to something, when I realize that this email came in at 8 PM on Friday and wasn’t urgent. Very little actual time has passed and I’m nowhere near “feel guilty” territory, but it feels like forever ago. Events that happened last week feel like the distant past to me.

The future is the opposite to me. It feels like every event in my future is going to happen five minutes from now, all the time. Then once they happen, they happened ten years ago. It’s like the Doppler effect but for time instead of sound.

Despite being the kind of kid who stretches her festivities out for several weeks, today is the actual day of my oldest daughter’s birth. On this day, eight years ago, I became a father for the first time. I know most parents say something like “it feels like only yesterday, it flew by,” but that’s honestly not how I feel. It feels like a million years ago – so far back I can barely remember it, and certainly can’t remember a time before it. The hiking trip we took to celebrate this birthday, which we took the weekend before last, already feels like a decade ago.

But you know that sensation you get when you’re late for something? The sort of panicky, anxious energy you get where you start to rush small details and review your mental checklists of everything you needed to do before a particular event? I feel like I’m already doing that for her high school graduation, her wedding day, the ribbon-cutting at her company. Like they’re just around the corner.

I can hardly wait. At least I won’t have to for long.

It goes without saying that you need to know the essential elements of something before learning the advanced stuff. The tricky part is that this remains true even if the basics are generally wrong and you know they’re wrong – you have to learn them anyway.

For instance, my job involves me (to boil it down considerably) helping people improve their careers. The “basic” career advice that you’ve heard all your life is really, really terrible. Most people find it very frustrating and not very successful, so when they want a more advanced (and way more effective) approach, they come to me.

But almost all of the methodology I teach relies on understanding what the basic (and incorrect) approach is. My lessons lean on the frustrations you’ve already experienced as “teachable moments” to illustrate certain other topics. Every once in a while, I find someone that simply doesn’t have that background, and it’s tricky.

For instance, I once helped someone who had gone to jail before his 18th birthday (and had never held or even looked for a job before that), and wasn’t released until after his 30th. Not only did he have zero career experience, he didn’t even understand most of what people talked about when they talked about how bad some interviews were, or the frustrations of sending out countless resumes without response, etc. Heck, he didn’t know what a resume was!

Trying to teach him the correct way to do this stuff was really difficult without that foundational knowledge, even though the foundational knowledge is mostly wrong. But I actually had to find a way to teach it to him anyway, which was an interesting challenge. I’m happy to say that he landed a really great role and is once more a productive member of society, so that particular story has a happy ending.

I use my own job as an example, but I’m sure there are thousands more. People often have to “un-learn” the bad habits of basic knowledge before moving onto advanced versions, but despite that, there’s no way to skip right to the advanced stuff.

Keep that in mind the next time you’re frustrated by having to “start at square one” on some particular topic, even knowing that “square one” is mostly garbage. Learning the garbage may be essential to learning the gold.

I’m okay with people saying nice things about me. In fact, probably like most people, I really like it. I’m not above admitting the surge of pride that comes with seeing a social media post about me from someone I’ve helped. If a client, co-worker or CEO praises me in that context, I love it. It’s a big motivator for me.

Even in more private contexts, I like this. If I get to overhear one family member or friend telling another about some positive thing I’ve done, it really refuels me.

On the other hand, I’m really, really awful with people saying those same things to me.

If my boss posts on LinkedIn “John is super awesome, look at this great thing he did,” then I’m over the moon. If she says to me “John, you’re super awesome, and this thing you did was great,” then I stare blankly, as if at an oncoming truck.

Sometimes people say really, really nice things to me. Often in a professional context, people will express to me that I did a lot for them, helped them in really significant ways, changed something important in their lives for the better. This is what I live for – the act, not the compliment. All I want in the world is to do those things, but when people compliment me for it, I shake.

I feel like no amount of gratitude I could express would be equal to the compliment they’re giving me, because it really means the world to me that they’re saying it. People don’t have to say anything at all, so when they go out of their way to do so, I’m consistently blown away.

Recently, someone I’ve been working with for some time gave me such a compliment. It’s been so fantastic to work with him and I’ve enjoyed every second, and yet still in that moment I didn’t know how to properly thank him for what he was saying. Instead, I expressed this sentiment, about how I didn’t know what to say in exactly that scenario.

And he said, “Dude, you just say ‘thank you.'” He said it isn’t about justifying their opinion or matching their emotion with my own. It’s just about giving them the space to say what they want to say, because they need to express their emotion. That was incredibly good advice.

Gratitude is important, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complex. Thank you.

Change is a journey between two points – Here and There.

Change doesn’t come without motivation. You need a catalyst; a reason to alter whatever it is you’re altering. But there are two distinct kinds of such motivation, which we’ll call “Push” motivations and “Pull” motivations.

“Push” motivations are all the reasons why Point A sucks. You hate Point A. Point A is uncomfortable, miserable, and unpleasant. You want to leave Point A as quickly as possible and never look back. Or do you? That’s the thing – sometimes change is involuntary. It can still be very good (and we’ll get to how to ensure it is in a minute!), but certainly you’ve encountered unwanted changes in your life. When you do, sometimes your “Push” motivation isn’t so much a motivation as an actual push. Quitting because you hate your job is a “Push” motivation. So is getting fired, even if you liked your job. In both cases, something is pushing you away from Point A.

“Pull” motivations, on the other hand, are the things you like about Point B. A “Pull” motivation might motivate change even if there isn’t a thing wrong with Point A. Maybe you’re perfectly comfortable in your current house, but a fantastic deal on a beautiful place opens up and you have to jump on it. Having a heart attack is a “Push” motivation to get in better shape, but deciding that you want the thrill of finishing a marathon is a “Pull” motivation, even if you’re otherwise in average (and comfortable) shape.

“Push” motivations are just as valid as “Pull” ones as far as initiating needed change. But “Pull” motivations help ensure that the change is healthier and more positive. If you quit your job because you hate it, that’s well and good – but you might end up in an even worse one because you were only motivated by getting out of your current situation. Meanwhile, quitting because you’ve found something you’d rather be doing is more likely to initiate a positive result.

You can combine these! If you find yourself on the verge of unwanted change due to an involuntary “Push,” you can always find the right “Pull” and add it to the mix. Just because your car was totaled in an accident doesn’t mean you can’t shop for a new one with the motivation to find your dream car. Focus on that Point B, not just putting distance between you and Point A.

Life will push you. But you have to pull yourself up.

There’s a whole series of folksy parent-isms that range from irrelevant to the point of being actively misleading (like “life isn’t fair” – maybe true, but very bad advice) to being the exact opposite of the truth. I love thinking about them, and one of my absolute favorite from the latter category is “money doesn’t grow on trees.”

Because… of course it does.

But let’s take this apart, shall we? First off, trees grow a ton of stuff that’s worth money. Heck, trees are worth money. But that’s surface-level insight that I think most people figure out by the time they’re adults (or much younger in some cases), so let’s go a little deeper.

Let’s say money – as in actual currency – did grow on trees. That wouldn’t be any more helpful to you, for a whole host of reasons. One of those reasons is that “growing on trees” is not the same thing as “effortlessly appearing before you.” I mean, oranges grow on trees, but you don’t have an infinite supply of oranges appearing in your kitchen on demand and for free, right? Even abundant resources that grow in nature without our help still require us to put in effort to go and get them.

In fact, interesting story – a few cities have tried to help their homeless population by planting only fruit-bearing trees in public spaces, as opposed to typical shade trees. The idea being that having some free food just literally growing in public spaces would be great for those that might have difficulty getting their next meal ordinarily. Sounds good in theory, but it didn’t help. Why? Because those public spaces are frequented by lots of people that aren’t part of the homeless population, and nothing was stopping or discouraging them from picking the fruit for themselves.

Which brings up another point – even if money did grow on trees, that neither means there’s an infinite supply of money nor that you would be the one to get the limited crop that did exist.

Now, let’s take the phrase in the spirit of its intent – usually, this is a parent’s way of saying “we don’t have infinite money, so whatever expensive and ludicrous thing you just asked for, the answer is no.” But think about the message that sends on a deeper level. It says: I have to work for my money, which is inherently harder than it would be if money grew on trees. Money growing on trees is a Utopian fantasy.

But which is easier – buying corn or growing it yourself?

Working for your money is actually much easier – in the short term. If you had to actually plant “money trees” and then wait for them to grow and start yielding little pennies when they were very small and eventually ten- and twenty-dollar bills at maturity, you’d be waiting a long time for any sort of income. Which of course is what you would have to do – so called “wild” money trees would be picked clean long before you ever got there, unless you were willing to camp day and night by the money forest until the first bills started to unfurl in the Spring, and even that would be a lot of work.

Natural resources are abundant. And useless – until you do some kind of work to make them useful to you. Even if you had a backyard full of fully-mature, blooming Money Trees – that does nothing until you go out and harvest the crop. You still have to work somehow.

And of course, you absolutely can plant money trees. I mean, they’re called trees. You could plant something that yields something else that someone will pay for, harvest it, and sell it – it’s called farming and it’s pretty much the first invention. Even in a more modern and less literal sense, you can plant seeds now – investments, small businesses, etc. – that will return passive income for years to come, after a ramp-up period that’s slower than simply getting a job. In fact, it’s a pretty good idea.

Money grows on trees. Go plant some.

Over this past weekend my oldest daughter and I went camping.

What fun! This was her first backpacking trip and we had such a blast. She’s such an amazing adventurer. We hiked for five hours, covering roughly nine miles total. She scaled cliffs and trees, bounded along rocks in a riverbed, collected samples of mud and bark and fungus. The phrase “Daddy, watch this!” was uttered about a bajillion times, and I watched every one.

During one of her climbs… she fell. Head over heels, tumbled right down to the bottom. As a matter of practical skill, the karate lessons have paid off in terms of self-awareness and resilience; she tucked and rolled, landed extremely well, and bounced right back up. But then more importantly – she attacked that cliff.

Not once or twice, but a dozen more times – up and down, sideways, different paths. She wanted to let that cliff know who was boss. It had taken a bite out of her and she was determined not to allow that to pass. She aggressively attacked her weakness and in its place she made herself strong.

Something that kids obviously take for granted is the ability to be single-minded. When you’re 7 (nearly 8!), there aren’t dozens of other responsibilities and worries and stresses and deadlines pulling at your brain, so when you decide I am conquering this cliff it can be the single focus of your entire existence. That lets you summon all of your powers to the task, and very little can stand against that.

The thing to remember as an adult is that even with all the deadlines and all the responsibilities – they don’t own you. It’s the other way around. When you’re at the base of the cliff, none of those things have a physical ounce of weight if you don’t let them. Leave them at the bottom, be free, and climb.

Show that cliff who’s boss.

Some things are unhealthy but we think about them every day. Usually we call those “addictions,” but they could just be bad habits. Either way, they’re dangerous. They’re not only unhealthy actions, but they’re eating away at your thoughts even when you’re not engaged in them directly. Thoughts aren’t infinite; you only get so many each day, and wasting them thinking about things you’d rather be doing isn’t productive.

Some things are healthy to engage in every day but they aren’t things we’re passionate about. I’ll fully admit that only every once in a while do I really “look forward” to my workout. I almost never wake up and think about it first thing. 99% of the time I’m happy about it after I’ve done it, when the endorphins are high and I have a sense of satisfaction, but the act itself is something I’ve had to incorporate into my routine because I believe in it, not because I’m obsessed with it.

But there are some things that are both healthy for you, and obsessively occupy your thoughts. Things that would be beneficial if you completed or engaged in, and are also things you can’t go a day without thinking about.

When you find something like that, fight like hell for it.

Passion will get you through hard days. Long-term motivation can overcome short-term hardship. Being passionate about something isn’t sufficient on its own, but it’s a heck of a booster for your work ethic. So something like that – a great goal that you’re legitimately obsessed with – is a Golden Target.

And yet, people let Golden Targets go to waste all the time. It’s amazing how often humans will pick comfort over meaning. How often we’ll pick not rocking the boat over standing for virtue. We’ll let the hardship involved in pursuing a worthwhile goal convince us that the goal isn’t worthwhile.

It is.

Because if you’re that obsessed, you have two options – chase that dream for all your worth, or don’t. But if you don’t, those obsessive thoughts aren’t going anywhere. Instead of being your best friend, they’ll be your worst enemy. Instead of motivating you to amazing success, they’ll poison all your other efforts and keep you from meaningfully caring about or engaging with anything else.

Check your obsession and make sure it’s healthy. But if it is, listen to it. It would be unhealthy not to.