Today I had a number of exciting conversations. Reflecting upon my day, what struck me was how varied the types of conversations were. Because of some of the work I’ve been doing lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about communication styles and how they impact not only what information we communicate directly, but the very shape of the person we are in another person’s mind as a result.

Today alone, I had the following impactful conversations:

• Someone shared with me many great ideas and goals in a brainstorming session.
• Someone came to me for advice with a difficult situation.
• I interviewed someone for a job with our company.
• I taught someone a skill.
• I met someone for the first time and had a deep conversation about their history and struggles.
• My boss and I shared business strategy and management advice with each other.
• I laughed at a silly situation and then made plans with a loved one.
• I taught a valuable lesson about patience via some discipline (don’t worry, that one was my kid; I don’t just randomly go around parenting strangers).

These conversations were all so different; formal to informal, emotional to logical, purpose-driven to carefree. They involved a wide range of people who were all so very different from me and from one another.

We have so many words we can use, a vast myriad of orders we could put them in, and infinite ways they could be interpreted. It’s an absolute miracle we can communicate anything at all, let alone the deep and nuanced thoughts that we share with each other so many times a day.

That’s why I love slang. I love new slang terms, because every new way of expressing an idea is a million million new conversation paths that can spring into existence. Every piece of shared experience is a way to help someone understand something new – even if that someone is you.

My boss said this phrase to me the other day, and I absolutely love it.

Her and I were having a discussion about taking action without prior instruction, and how the source of that instruction can be internal or external to the process itself. In other words, sometimes you need to know what you’re doing before you do it, but other times you can use the process itself as the method by which you learn to master it.

You can build the plane as you fly it.

Now, this is a spectrum, for sure. Humans aren’t neatly divided into people who can do this and people who can’t, and nor are tasks neatly divided into ones you can learn as you go versus ones you can’t. Both of those things are incredibly wide ranges, and even their intersections differ. There might be certain kinds of “planes” that I personally can build as I fly them, but someone else couldn’t. But they in turn might be able to build an entirely different kind of plane in mid-air while I couldn’t.

However, spectrum or not, this is definitely a skill that can be developed overall. The ability to process new information in real time and incorporate it into what you’re doing quickly is very valuable, and you can get better at it.

You know what’s good practice for this? Cooking. Try this: go to the store with $30. Buy raw ingredients that you like – no prepackaged meals or things with the word “instant” in them. Don’t worry about a plan; just buy the raw foods you like. Whatever meats, dairy products, fruits and veggies, etc. that you generally know you enjoy.

Then go home, put them all on the counter, and turn the stove on. Throw something in a pan. Go! Make a meal! Stuff is cooking!

This is a great method because the stakes are low. You don’t stand to lose more than $30 and an evening. And there are many different paths to success – there are a lot of ways a random assortment of ingredients can turn out delicious. So this is a low-risk way to force yourself to have to incorporate information as you go: “That smells good, but it looks done! These don’t taste right, what do I add? This was awful, how do I salvage it?”

Like most things, if you want to get good at this, you should start with low-risk scenarios where you’re free to make a lot of mistakes. That’s how you learn anything, so give yourself the space to do it. Don’t worry if you’re not a master at first – no one is. But you’ll get there.

You’ll build the plane as you fly it.

“We lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume!”

It’s the econ nerd in me, but I love that joke.

I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw someone comment online about applying for jobs being a “numbers game.” This is old, terrible advice, and it goes more or less like this: the way to land a job is volume, volume, volume. Apply to as many things as you can and something will eventually stick. the person giving this advice actually advocated NOT customizing the application or doing anything special, because it “just wastes time” and this is a numbers game.

I’m not going to tell you that this is terrible advice. Of course it is. I’m going to tell you why.

In order for something to qualify as a “numbers game,” a few conditions have to apply. One, the outcome has to be more or less determined by chance, rather than skill or effort. Roulette is a numbers game. Play it enough times and you’ll win, but there’s no way to play roulette “better.” You can’t affect the actual spinning of the wheel or where the little ball lands. Two, putting up volume has to be the actual best use of the time that can be spent on the activity. The best way to sell Girl Scout cookies might just be to generically pitch everyone that walks by your booth (just ask my daughter), rather than trying to craft a tailored pitch to every individual. And three, the chance of any random attempt getting you the result you want has to be positive.

So that doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as a “numbers game.” Just that job applications absolutely don’t fall in that category.

Imagine someone said to you, “building a house is just a numbers game. You just gotta gather all the wood and nails and stuff and throw ’em off a high cliff, and eventually they’ll fall in the shape of a house. Reading blueprints or carefully planning your approach is a waste of time, because it’s just a numbers game. If you can throw a pile of building materials off a cliff two or three hundred times a month, you’ll eventually get a house.”

You’d think that person was stark, staring mad. You’d be right. One, the outcome of whether or not building materials turn into a house isn’t up to chance – it’s determined by skill. Two, your time would be MUCH better spent learning carpentry and construction and applying those skills than just throwing building materials at random. And three, there is of course absolutely zero practical chance that this process could ever result in a house, even if you tried it a million times.

“Finding a wife is just a numbers game. Don’t bother learning anything about them or talking to them or anything, that’s a waste of time. Just walk up to every woman in town with a diamond ring and ask them to marry you. If you propose two or three hundred times a month, you’ll find a wife.”

Now, this analogy is actually a little closer to treating the job hunt this way. Why? Because there actually is some chance that you can find a wife this way – or at least, a better chance than the odds of a random pile of building materials landing exactly in the shape of a sturdy one-bedroom rancher. But consider – is the wife you find this way likely to be a good fit for you? Consider the kind of person who would accept a proposal from a total stranger. Consider that you know absolutely nothing else about them, and might not even want to marry them if you did.

That’s what happens when you treat important activities as numbers games. Even if you occasionally “get lucky,” how lucky did you really get? Rather, you probably got a very bad deal that won’t last long and you’ll be back to throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks in no time.

The tired claim of “it’s all a numbers game” comes from a place of frustration and anger. Nobody likes rejection, and frequent rejection can take a major mental toll. One of the absolute worst things to hear when you’ve failed a bunch is that there’s something different you should do. Of course, that’s the best thing that can happen! If there’s something you can change, you can still succeed. If there were absolutely nothing you could improve and you were still failing, then that would unfortunately mean that you’re simply unable to do the thing you’re trying to do. So finding out there’s room for improvement is awesome news.

But it doesn’t feel like awesome news, and I get that. So what most people do is defensively blame the world. They say that the outcome is a result of luck instead of effort in an attempt to absolve themselves from the shame of their failures. It’s natural to want to blame a capricious universe instead of working to get better, because we often would rather be absolved of fault, even if that meant sacrificing the opportunity to be better. So this is a natural response, but like many of our natural instincts, you have to fight it tooth and nail to become better.

Most things worth accomplishing aren’t numbers games. They’re the result of effort, intelligence, and boldness. This isn’t a game of roulette – it’s your life. It’s worth putting the effort in.

I deviate from the norm of my society in several specific ways that are so severe that I often can’t comprehend what the middle of the bell curve could look like.

For instance, most people are at some level nervous or anxious about public speaking. It outright terrifies some people, and most folks would prefer not to.

I love it. The more people, the better. I’m more nervous talking to one person than 10,000.

To me, public speaking is easier. It has rules, and I do well with rules. Tomorrow I have a big speaking engagement, and I’m more nervous about the pre-talk meeting with my boss than the actual event.

I have a number of extremely irrational phobias that are so ridiculous I don’t even want to mention them here. So I understand the concept of an irrational fear of an unlikely event. But when thinking of my fears, I can articulate to you EXACTLY what I (irrationally) think will happen. My higher brain knows that the statistical probability is very low, but the vividness of my mental image makes me afraid of this thing regardless.

So, that’s my question: for those of you who are genuinely afraid of public speaking, what mental image do you conjure as the event you fear? What does it actually look like? Do other people even treat fears this way?

People’s lives are their own. In addition to the respect you should afford others with regards to their own decisions, they always have more “local knowledge” than you do. But even if you’re in a situation with someone where it’s appropriate to give advice, you should aim to “teach someone to fish” as much as possible.

That means asking questions. It means leaving ego at the door and not making assumptions. It means respecting that their fundamental goals and values might differ from yours, so good advice needs to be good advice for them, not always what you would do.

All that being said, there are definitely times when you need to give someone an action. Sometimes doing too much gentle question-asking in an attempt to get them to a solution just makes them frustrated, and if you “prime the pump” a little you can get great results.

There’s a careful way to do that, however!

For instance, let’s say you have a friend who is in the market for a new car, but they’re really indecisive. You know a lot about cars, and you also know a lot about this friend’s daily activities and vehicular needs, and therefore you probably have some good suggestions. But you don’t want to run their life for them, and nor do you want to take responsibility for their happiness! You ask a few leading questions, like “what kind of mileage do you want,” and “how many seats do you need” and so on, but you’re getting nowhere. You know they need a decent-sized truck with a lot of hauling power, but they just don’t seem to get there.

One idea you could try: give them hilariously bad advice and gather their response! For instance, tell that friend, “I think you should go with something really light and compact, like a Mini Cooper.” You know they spend every weekend hauling firewood and take frequent off-road detours in their job as an electrical lineman. They know this too, so now they suddenly scoff – “a Mini Cooper? No way! I need something with horsepower, and with a ton of cargo space, and a lot of clearance. A Cooper doesn’t have any of that.”

Now you can just slyly grin and ask, “Well, what does?”

See, what you gave them was a focus point. You gave them a suggestion, and they had to explain why it was a terrible one. In so doing, they were able to articulate what they needed.

You weren’t telling them what to do. You were shaking the dust off.

There are other ways you can get the same effect. They all revolve around the same concept: instead of starting with a blank page and asking them to fill it in, give them something, anything, to anchor to and deviate from as needed. Give them hypothetical advice and let them explain why it’s good or bad, in what ways, and where you need to go.

I do this all the time with people and food. Someone will say that they’re hungry but they don’t know what they want to eat (all you people with significant others say hey!). I immediately just name something at random, no deliberation. Sometimes it’s a hole-in-one and we eat there. Other times (…most other times), they say, “no, that’s too X,” or “no, that’s not Y enough,” or some such. But great! Now what I did was force you to add at least one actual parameter. Rinse & repeat a few times and we’ll have actual dinner plans.

That isn’t the same as giving a command or removing agency from someone. But it does nudge them out of their indecision. And sometimes that’s all you need.

Everything you do takes two kinds of time: active time and “dead” time.

Let’s say you have an eight-hour workday. It starts at 9 and ends at 5, Monday through Friday. So you have a 40-hour workweek, right?

No way. You have to commute. You have to arrive early enough to be settled in and ready to work at 9, not walking in the door at 9. You have to get ready to commute. You might have to change when you get home. All told, from the moment you have to start doing work-related things to the moment you stop, you might be looking at 50 hours a week, 60, 70.

This isn’t me railing against the modern work week or anything. It’s just an example of how nothing actually takes only the time it takes. You might be working on a task and someone says “Hey, can I interrupt you for a minute and have you handle this very simple task? It’ll take 2 minutes.” They might be correct in that the task itself is a 2-minute task. But the total disruption to what you’re doing could be way longer. First, you have to stop what you’re doing, losing momentum and having to regain your place later. The other person has to explain the request. You have to get to where you can do it – maybe it’s physically in another location, maybe you have to open different programs, maybe you have to retrieve a different tool or find different info. Then you do the task – boom, 2 minutes, great – and then you do all of that in reverse to get back to what you were doing originally.

This is why blocks of related work time are valuable – the “dead time” tends to be clustered around the start and finish, so if you have fewer starts and fewer finishes you have less dead time. (Incidentally, that’s why I always preferred a four-day workweek of 10-hour days as opposed to an 5/8 setup when I worked hourly. If you manage hourly employees, try it.)

The reason this is relevant is because dead time adds up. Especially if you do a lot of smaller, unrelated tasks as opposed to big blocks of uninterrupted things, the dead time can really kill productivity and efficiency if not managed – or at least expected.

Consider: you have 10 tasks to do, and you (accurately!) predict that each of them alone will take 30 minutes. So you end up assuming you’ve got 5 hours of work ahead of you, but it ends up taking twice that and you end up very frustrated, behind schedule, or failing. That’s the dead time – those 10- and 15-minute transitions barely seem like enough to consider during the planning stage, but they add up very quickly when you have a lot of them.

And also, like, people go to the bathroom. They eat. They stretch their legs. Those are pretty important.

When you’re planning your own tasks (and especially other people’s!), make sure you’re giving ample allowance for dead time. It’s fine to try to cut down on it – if there’s 45 minutes of dead time on either side of every 10-minute task, that’s a problem – but you can’t ever really eliminate it and you’ll be frustrated and stressed forever if you try.

Junk collects in all sorts of odd neglected corners. That’s why we change the oil in our cars – even if everything is going well and there are no major incidents, processes just collect dirt and detritus.

You’re no different. You’re a process.

There are apps on your phone sending you reminders you haven’t needed or heeded in months. There are emails in your inbox that have long since outlived any relevance. There are habits you have that don’t help you anymore.

Every few months or so, change your oil. Go somewhere, physically, outside your normal routine and just check in on all those things. Get rid of stuff you don’t need, clean everything, and put it back on the road.

During my entire childhood, I was “gifted & talented.” I was the bright kid. Top of my class. Great grades. And so on.

It was all bunk.

Since most schools group by age, almost every school will have a cutoff date for each year’s incoming kindergarten class – if you’re not 5 years old by that date, you wait until next year. My birthday happens to fall about a week after the traditional cutoff date. It was close enough that my parents could probably have made a stink about it and gotten me in anyway, but since I had a close cousin who would be attending the following year anyway, the family decided not to push it and just let me roll over to the following year’s class.

I wasn’t the bright kid. I was a full year older than all of my peers!

I’m going to tell you a secret – even an average 6-year-old looks like a freakin’ genius next to a group of 5-year-olds. That whole year is a big deal. Sure, there are individual exceptions all over the place, but we’re talking about group dynamics here – I was definitely at the far end of the bell curve, but it was only because I was in the wrong bell curve.

(Fun note: this is true in high school sports, too. Want a kid to be a rock star in high school football? Make sure he’s born just after the cutoff date so he’s the oldest kid in his grade, and thus more physically developed than his competition.)

Anyway, while I certainly don’t think I’m unintelligent or anything, I’m certainly not the genius I was painted as in my youth. Another note of unfairness – I remember how often that aforementioned cousin got compared to me academically, since his grades were never as good as mine. But I don’t recall it ever being mentioned once that he was a year younger than I was! It was wildly unfair to compare our fourth-grade report cards, but we spent so much time together that it just naturally happened. He wasn’t any less smart than I was, I just had a full trip around the sun’s head start on him in brain development.

And in fact, that same cousin does extremely well. He turned out great – he has an awesome job, a wonderful family, owns two houses, is satisfied with his work, great circle of friends. No one is without their flaws or troubles, but I admire him greatly. My dumb straight A report card never did a thing for me, but you know what he developed far earlier than most?

A stellar work ethic.

My cousin is an absolute workhorse. One of the hardest-working guys I know, in fact, and he’s been that way forever. I had to kill a lot of bad habits in my 20’s that he never developed in the first place because he was grinding too hard. And he enjoys his success! He’s a workhorse, but not a workaholic. He spends time with his family, he has a tight circle of friends, and he barbecues at his lake house. He’s in his 30’s.

A year younger than me, remember?

My oldest daughter is incredibly bright. I’m trying to keep her from realizing it. I explained to her tonight that intelligence is like flour, eggs and milk – but hard work is turning them into pancakes. You can make even mediocre ingredients into great pancakes, but without the process of mixing and cooking, even the best ingredients won’t taste good by themselves. Intelligence is the raw material, but only hard work will make anything of it.

She’s in karate, and she’s very good. Talented. But tonight, watching her in class, I noticed something. There was a particular exercise they did that she wasn’t very naturally good at – it involved balance and rhythm, which aren’t her strong suits (she’s tall and lanky, which makes her naturally great at a lot of exercises relating to speed, jumping, and reach – but not balance). She dismissed it quickly, not just because she wasn’t good at it, but because she was so good at so many other things she didn’t think it mattered.

Boom, target acquired!

I told her at dinner afterwards that if she could do fifty of that exercise in a row without messing up (in front of her instructor!), I’d give her $100. I even let her pick that number.

Let the games begin. Natural talent is great, and I want to always encourage her in the things she enjoys and praise her for a job well done – but that work ethic needs to come now. Because “gifted & talented” really just means you had the head start, but once everyone is grown up, the advantage fades. Then it’s all about who can out-work the competition. And I want to make sure it’s her.

Plenty of people are troubled by impostor syndrome. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s that feeling a lot of people get where they think that their success and skills and abilities are all in some part false, over-hyped, or built on a house of cards – while of course everyone else is a solid professional who really, actually know what they’re doing. You’re just one slip-up from everyone learning what a fraud you are, says this anxiety.

Hey, just in case you needed to hear it today – it’s not true!

It’s actually pretty difficult to fake competency for any length of time, so if you’ve “had everybody fooled” for anything more than a few days, you probably actually do know what you’re talking about, and you’ll be fine.

In fact, that’s what I’m thinking about today. A sort of impostor-syndrome-by-proxy, or a “second order impostor syndrome” that I notice seems to affect people.

Here’s how it works: You know your stuff with regards to some particular subject matter. You’re actually quite the expert. And you don’t doubt yourself! You feel very confident in your knowledge. Where the doubt kicks in is when you think about anyone else feeling that way.

So it’s sort of like the reverse of impostor syndrome in a way, too. Unlike impostor syndrome, where everyone else probably thinks you’re fine and YOU think you’re a fraud, in this version you actually have full confidence in yourself and you think everyone ELSE will think you’re a fraud.

Opposite but related! You see, if you think that everyone else will think that you’re a fraud, you’re just as unlikely to put yourself out there as if you think you’re a fraud.

You think to yourself, “I know I can do this,” or “I know I’m right about this,” or something, but then say, “but I’m just XYZ, so they won’t listen.” (Substitute anything you like for “XYZ” – you think you’re too young, or you don’t have some credential, or you haven’t been in the industry long enough, or whatever.)

You doubt your ability to make yourself seen and heard in your area of expertise.

Second-order Impostor Syndrome. You don’t think you’re a fraud, but you’re convinced everyone else will think so.

Often this comes with a fear of rejection, or even a fear of insulting someone by even offering your knowledge. “Who am I to tell this big shot how they could improve their website?” or “Who am I to suggest that some CEO might be leaving money on the table in their manufacturing?”

I’ll tell you who you are: someone who knows something they don’t.

No matter how successful someone is, they’re not omniscient. All it takes to learn something from someone is for them to know something you don’t. And even really successful people have blind spots – in fact, the larger your realm of responsibilities, the more likely it is that there are places you can’t see directly.

Combine that with the fact that if someone really is such a big shot that you feel a wide gap between you and them – what have you got to lose by offering up your insights?

People think of taking risks like jumping across a wide chasm, where the two possible outcomes are making it to the other side or plummeting to your death, and thus often decide it’s better not to jump at all. But that’s the wrong analogy. It’s much more like trying to jump to reach a high shelf from where you’re standing – the two outcomes are that you make it or you don’t, but if you don’t you’re just back where you started, no worse off. In that case – why not jump?