It’s so fun to peel back the shiny outer layers of the world and see what happens behind things.

Almost all living organisms produce some sort of outer covering to protect their delicate and complicated insides from outside influence. Skin, membranes, whatever. Even liquid metals develop an oxide layer as just a natural consequence of being exposed to the world, and this layer in turn protects the rest of the element.

Institutions and organizations form public-facing fronts that look very different from the “factory floor.” Cars aren’t just exposed engines riding around.

My point is, everything gets a shield. Naturally or artificially, everything just sort of develops a cover to shield its guts from the outside world. That shield is protective, but it’s also obscuring – you can’t tell how a car works by looking at it, because you can’t see all the parts that really make it work.

That’s true of almost everything. But you can peel back that layer. Sometimes in a more literal sense and sometimes metaphorically, you can go digging around inside. You can find out all sorts of interesting things by opening a back door somewhere and looking around inside.

But it takes some courage. Modern humans have developed a real aversion to poking around where they haven’t been expressly invited. They think that if they haven’t been asked to go somewhere explicitly, then they’ve been banned from there implicitly. That’s not true at all!

We have a local pizza place near us that we adore and is my kids’ favorite restaurant. It’s been a neighborhood staple for a while. One day while we were sitting in the dining area waiting for food to come out, my oldest kid just wandered into the back and asked to see the ovens and such. I admit (regrettably!) that my first instinct was to tell her to come back out and not bother the poor folks trying to work, but I’m glad that my instinct was shot down. Wendy, the wonderful owner, told my kid to come on back and look around and showed her all sorts of stuff. My kid was glowing, and ever since she’s considered herself practically staff at that place – she’s even earned a few dollars in tips by busing tables there!

All from having that perfect child-like courage to ask to look around. Lots of people are actually flattered when you show an interest in their thing and are happy to show you around. And if they’re not – so what? Be on your way and find a new adventure. There are plenty out there.

There is a natural rhythm to life.

Things will happen when they happen. Our brains have patterns, and we unconsciously spread those patterns all over the place. Ebbs and flows in all things.

“What goes up, must come down” is a good saying. It’s true in all sorts of ways.

One of my favorite economic concepts is “regression to the mean.” In a nutshell: when you have a lot of data points, most will be clumped around an average and there will be a few outliers. Every time a data point gets added, it will fall somewhere in the distribution, but in aggregate, most will end up in that middle. That means that if a particular data point falls really far to one edge or the other, chances are good that the next data point will be closer to the middle. So if your average run time for a mile is 18 minutes and one day you run a 16-minute mile, chances are good that you’ll do worse the next time.

If you don’t know about regression to the mean, that can be really discouraging! You ran a 16-minute mile, got all proud of yourself, and then the next day you ran 17.4. Maybe at first you get depressed that your success didn’t stick, and then maybe you start to make excuses – “oh, I was just tired and sore from yesterday,” or “oh, I got complacent and didn’t work as hard,” or something. But the reality was that your 16-minute mile was the outlier, and not a new base average.

Don’t get depressed! For one, it works both ways. If you run a 20-minute mile, you can probably safely assume you just had a bad day, not that your new base time is 20 minutes. Just be careful that the next day when you run an 18.3 you don’t make up fake stories like “I was more motivated because of yesterday’s failure!” Real change doesn’t happen in single data points.

You can improve the average. You can steadily go from 18 minutes to 17 to 16. But you have to stay consistent and work. Trust the rhythm. Things will go up and down along the way – that’s okay. You have to breathe out sometimes, too.

This might be a controversial post!

I have a very clear memory of a moment with my father when I was young. I don’t remember clearly what led to it – just that I felt bad about some interaction with another child at school. Maybe it was an argument, maybe I was bullied, I just remembered feeling bad about it. In explanation of my tears, I told my father something to the effect of “he hurt me.”

His response was advice that I feel is sorely needed by many, and that I carry to this day. He said: “He can’t hurt you, because he’s not touching you. Words can hurt, but then he’s fighting you with his brain instead of his body, and his brain is no match for yours.”

His message was powerful. It wasn’t that words had no power or couldn’t be weaponized, but rather that the power to weaponize a message and use it to hurt could be countered by your own ability to rise above and control your own reaction. No mind has more power over you than your own.

It’s like arm wrestling, but always against a weaker opponent. Mind wresting, and you always have the advantage.

Now, let’s be clear – this doesn’t mean that you should be thoughtless or cruel with your own words, just because someone else could defend. After all, you shouldn’t just arm-wrestle people without their permission, either. It’s still impolite. But it does mean that you always have within you the capacity for defense from insult, offense, and annoyance.

This also doesn’t mean that this first line of defense should be the last. If you see cruelty and injustice in the world, you should act against it even if you’re able to defend yourself from the heartache it would otherwise cause. But let’s be realistic: a calm, clear mind is a better actor against injustice than a raging, sobbing mess. If someone can reduce you to tears with a barb or jest, you’re in no position to fight the good fight to defeat real injustice.

The first battlefield in any fight is your own mind. If you allow your enemies to occupy that territory, you’ll never win anywhere else.

If you are very, very patient, every safe is crack-able.

If 28-34-16 didn’t work, try 28-34-17.

Tweak. Improve. Iterate.

It’s not the best position to be in, the position where you’re literally just trying every combination. There are better ways, but sometimes the better ways fail. When you’re down to just trying every combination, don’t do it at random. Do it in an orderly way. Track your progress.

Don’t get frustrated. Not because it isn’t frustrating, but because being frustrated doesn’t help.

Even if you don’t succeed, I’ll tell you this – a tracked, categorized failure is better than a random, jumbled one.

You can always sell a well-recorded history of an interesting failure as a good story and a road map for others, if nothing else. It might turn into fuel for a better idea down the road. But none of that happens of you get reduced to this point and just start flailing.

When your back’s against the wall, more than ever, be deliberate.

There’s a particular kind of dirty rhetorical trick you’ve probably encountered called a Motte-and-Bailey fallacy or doctrine. In case you don’t want to read that whole other post (though it’s good!), here’s the gist: it’s when someone attaches an uncontroversial statement to a controversial argument and switches back and forth as if they were the same thing to pull the rug out from under you. Here’s a fake example to illustrate:

Sue: “All men should have to give half of their income to the Women’s Rights Group of America in order to rectify long-standing inequalities between men and women.”

Steve: “I don’t agree.”

Sue: “Oh, so you don’t think women are people?!”

Steve: “Whoa whoa! No, women are definitely people.”

Sue: “So you agree with me, great.”

Now, that’s an extreme and absurd example, obviously. But you see what Sue did? She made it seem like believing “women are people” and believing “all men should donate half their income to a specific women’s rights organization” were the same thing. The controversial argument is the ‘bailey,’ the place where you actually want to be. The uncontroversial argument is the ‘motte’ – that’s not where you want to end up, but it’s way easier to defend. When someone attacks (read: disagrees) with you, you retreat to the motte, which isn’t where you want to be long-term, but it’s way easier to defend.

Now, on an individual basis people do this all the time, and they often do it with a lot more subtlety and it works often. But that’s not the thought I want to put forth (for more thoughts on that, read that linked piece by Scott). The thought I want to put into words here is that a great deal of well-established institutions in our society have a built-in Motte-and-Bailey that they will often deploy to justify terrible behavior.

For instance, let’s look at higher education. When people defend or advocate for our current university system, they’ll make grand claims about the transformative power of a college education, the human capital improvements, the lifetime returns on earnings from the investment, and the civilizing and even enlightening nature that colleges and universities grant to society at large. That’s the bailey – the position they want to occupy. But like all baileys, it falls apart easily: there’s tremendous research out now that clearly shows that all of that is bunk. Colleges and universities don’t do any of that. (Rather than defend that position myself, check out the research on your own: read Cracks in the Ivory Tower and/or The Case Against Education, both excellent books).

But when you bring up those very real and substantially-supported arguments, those same people retreat to their motte: “So you don’t think education is important?! What, everyone should just stop learning?”

When you look at it like that, the ploy is obvious and you might think that no one would fall for it. But of course, nearly everyone does – because the vast audience for these kinds of public debates just latch onto the motte argument and repeat it: “So-and-so thinks we should just abandon all learning and no one should be educated!” And then you get attacked for that position, even though you don’t hold it, and the whole thing goes sideways.

Law Enforcement is another one. Advocates say that law enforcement is the essential glue of an orderly society. When someone suggests that there are critical, necessary systemic reforms that are needed, those advocates retreat to their motte: “So you just want lawless chaos in the streets, huh? I hope you never get robbed and have to call someone!”

All large institutions have good and bad things they do. Major corporations might provide really useful or essential goods and services to society, but pollute or exploit. Large charities might do real good in their area of influence, but also waste money or manipulate data. Political organizations might advocate for genuinely beneficial societal improvements but also damage the fabric of the political system in which they operate.

When talking about themselves, of course these institutions will always talk only about the good that they do. The bad stuff, even if they don’t want it, might be costly or inconvenient for them to fix. Even worse, they might not want to fix it, as institutions that grow larger over time tend to become corrupt and self-serving by their nature. That means when someone points out the bad stuff, they don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to fight out in the bailey, they want to retreat to the motte, and accuse detractors of wanting to dismantle the good things themselves.

I don’t have a solution; this is a pretty deep problem if I’m being honest. But a small step might be just shining a light on it. It’s good to be familiar with the tools of the scoundrel; maybe you won’t get hoodwinked yourself.

It takes me much longer to think about what to write than to write it, on most days. Writing comes fairly naturally to me (though that’s dangerous in its own right, and I’ll get into why in a bit), but I give thinking some serious thought.

I don’t like to overly deliberate, and I do like to engage in “productive thinking,” where I’m actively doing something value-creating while thinking. In the short term that might mean that my “thinking time” will also be workout time, laundry time, etc. In the long term it means that even if I can’t decide what I’m going to build, I’m still going to be gathering tools and materials, scouting locations, etc. in preparation for when I do decide.

But while I don’t like to overly deliberate (I believe action is vital), I also never like to act in haste. I like to look at a problem or task or situation and roll it around in my head for a bit. Examine all sides. Live in it. Maybe even try a few initial attempts in my mind. Then when I act, I go all in.

When I write these blog posts, I usually (to an outside observer) just stare at the blank screen like a zombie for a bit. What I’m actually doing is moving words around. Preparing a concept. Then I write like crazy, straight through. It can look like I don’t plan at all, but I just plan differently.

Still, that can be dangerous. When something comes pretty naturally to you, you have a tendency not to develop technique as well. My writing could definitely be better. I think it’s improved dramatically since starting this blog, because practice makes better, if not perfect. But still, I think it would be worthwhile for me to actually take a writing course of some kind – so suggestions welcome!

Regardless, always give yourself a few breaths and a few heartbeats before you engage. Especially with speaking – it has an odd way of being permanent. Words can cut. And before you cut once, measure twice.

If you’ve read my blog with any sort of regularity (or you just know me as a person), then you know I’m a pretty grounded, pro-science, logical guy. Not a lot of mysticism in my life. Given that, what I’m going to say next may surprise you: I believe in “signs from the universe.”

I do! But I have a pretty grounded, scientific, logical reason.

First, what do I even mean by “signs from the universe?” Well, let’s say you’re trying to decide between buying a red or a blue dress. And on your way home from work, you hit every red light, and then you find that the front door of your building has been freshly painted red, and you receive an unexpected present from a relative and it’s a red pair of shoes. Signs from the universe that you should pick the red dress, right?

Ah ha! Here’s the trick: if you said “yeah, that’s a sign! pick the red dress!” then you should pick the red dress.

If you said, “no, those are just coincidences, they don’t mean anything,” you should pick the blue dress.

Why?

Because people believe in “signs from the universe” when the universe tells them what they want to hear. They ignore such “signs” when they don’t. But that’s way more useful than it sounds! Because we’re often bad at being attuned to what we really want. We’re plagued with indecision. In the initial scenario, you couldn’t decide on the red or blue dress – but in your heart of hearts, you knew which one you wanted. You just couldn’t quite pull the trigger.

Letting “signs from the universe” (read: “convenient excuses”) push you towards what you truly wanted can be a great decision-making aid. It’s like a more advanced version of the coin flip trick.

(If you’ve never heard this, the Coin Flip Trick works like this: take your two options and assign them heads and tails, respectively. Then flip a coin, but don’t look at the result, keep it covered – what are you hoping for, in that instant? Heads or tails? That’s your answer, you don’t even need to look at the coin.)

So if you’re trying to decide between two or a few options, and you can’t easily eliminate them (meaning the decision is probably pretty close), then go ahead and follow signs. The ones you’ll believe will point you towards the thing you want anyway.

Here’s a weird piece of human condition:

Sometimes I’ll see a group of people that I think are unified around their love of pineapple pizza, let’s say. This is a divisive topic! Lots of people hate pineapple on pizza, and some of those people are of the kind to turn that hatred into hatred of people who like pineapple pizza, instead of just hating the pizza itself.

So I’ll see two people talking who both love pineapple pizza, and I’ll think, “oh, how nice, two people share an interest and they’re discussing it and–” and then suddenly one of them will say that the other one doesn’t like pineapple pizza the right way or something, like maybe they like crushed pineapple instead of chunked or Sicilian pizza or something, and suddenly those two people will be at each others’ throats.

The problem here is subtle, but pervasive. The problem is that humans are actually really bad at liking or hating stuff. Concepts, objects, whatever – we’re bad at it. What we’re good at is associating that stuff with certain people, and then liking or hating them.

You see this message everywhere. The reason “hate the sin, love the sinner” is even advice is because almost no one ever does it. They hate the sinner (however they’ve defined the “sin”) through and through.

This causes people to build barricades around their “Labels of Identity” and commit to purity tests of all kinds in order to jockey for position. And this, in turn, betrays their ultimate motivation.

You can’t help it. For most people, the ultimate motivation is “tribal status.” Meaning you’ve picked a group (or maybe just fallen into one), and all your motivations ultimately come down to wanting a higher position of respect within that group.

If you really just loved pineapple pizza for pineapple pizza’s sake, you’d buy it and eat it and make it and maybe even share it! You’d tell other people that had never had it that they should try it. You’d make them some! You’d be okay if they didn’t want it, but you’d offer. And if you found someone else who loved pineapple pizza but maybe a different kind than you, that would be awesome, because obviously that person is a kindred spirit, or at least more so than the person who hates pineapple pizza.

But in reality, many people attack the person who likes pineapple pizza the wrong way more than the person who hates it. That’s because most people don’t think of themselves as “people who dig pineapple on their pizza,” but as “Pineapple Pizzatarians” with logos and bumper stickers and badges and flags and commemorative pens. It’s a group, and group identity matters to humans more than almost anything else.

Know your Maslow. People really get stuck in that level 3-4 range. (I think that’s a big part of why physical discomfort can reduce stress – one of Maslow’s insights was that you simply can’t care about the next level up when you’re still grappling with your current level. Putting myself into the woods for a few days was a way of artificially returning to levels 1 & 2 for a while, and while you’re there, you can’t even fathom the problems of the higher levels.)

But this isn’t really a post about Maslow (though in a way, I think most posts are). It’s a post about how that tribalism explains one of the worst aspects of our behavior, which is our tendency to attack close ideological neighbors instead of the more distant enemies we might ally against.

Move away from the tribalism. Question your own people, don’t take things for granted just because they’re said by people you want the esteem of. Learn the basic building blocks of reality, the things that aren’t fancy or exciting or filled with slogans but are essential to good understanding. Learn statistics, Public Choice theory, psychology. Read books, not headlines.

And don’t attack people who want most of what you want just because they don’t agree on the last 1%. There are people out there who disagree with you 99%, and if you want to make substantive changes to your society, at some point you’re going to have to treat those people like humans and figure out how to work with them, instead of just yelling at your closest allies for not being even closer.

The reason to study the flaws of humanity is to rise above them. Know your Maslow, then make him wrong.

I like it when small, useful objects make my life better. My favorite kind of object is any that lets me get rid of two or more other objects, thus reducing my overall level of stuff-having while maintaining the same utility.

I appreciate smart phones in particular, because I’m of an age where I once owned, separately, a camera, calculator, flashlight, CD player, address book, notepad, alarm clock, Dictaphone, camcorder, and of course telephone – plus probably other stuff I’m forgetting. At the utility of the smart phone keeps increasing without the device taking up any more space, so that’s a big plus.

I’m usually on the lookout for such items – things that replace other stuff, add utility, etc. One thing you have to be careful of is when an item combines the utility of two or more other things, but sacrifices quality on them in such a way as to eradicate any efficiency gains. There’s no point in having a combination spatula/flashlight if it isn’t as good as a regular spatula or flashlight would be. (By the way, patent pending on the Flashula, that’s all me. You’ll see!)

So sometimes, I build my own thing. Sometimes I’ll want two or more things to be combined, and I’ll actually have a lot of fun tinkering until I get it exactly right because my use case is so specific that the market doesn’t have such an item. There’s a certain thrill in knowing you’ve crafted something truly unique, that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Even if it’s use is incredibly narrow, it’s useful for you.

Many problems that you think of as unsolvable actually just need the right combination of two tools. App and software developers are great at this – they listen to complaints like “I always have to make this certain kind of document in THIS program, but then when I want to send it to someone else I have to use this whole OTHER thing” and they make a combination platform that lets you both make AND send that thing. Hooray!

Think about two things you need to do regularly and see if there’s one tool that could replace the two you currently use. You might make your life a little better. You might invent a million-dollar product.

You might just have fun.

Imagine that no matter what you chose to do for a living, you would be paid the same amount. Not free money – you still have to work a more-or-less full-time job, but the income is fixed no matter what you pick. And let’s say that the amount of money is small – enough to live on, but not much more. No wolves at your door, but not a life of luxury.

What would you do? I think the intuitive answer is that you’d seek to maximize your happiness with your work. You’d do work you truly enjoyed with people you liked. You’d seek meaning and purpose in your work, perhaps. Maybe you’d just do something easy so that you weren’t stressed. These all seem like viable answers.

A lot of people seem to think that they’re actually in this situation, but don’t do the obvious things. People seem to think that no matter what they do, they can’t “get ahead,” but instead of accepting the fact they think is so immutable and maximizing the other aspects, they just keep working at jobs they hate and complain about them. They hate the grind, their bosses, their environments, the actual work they do, and yet they keep at it – even though they’ll loudly tell you that they think it’s all for nothing.

Maybe this is just an example of actions speaking louder than words. Maybe for all their grousing, these people really do believe that if they grind long enough they’ll catch their lucky break. Or maybe they’re just in a sort of permanent “survival mode,” afraid to make any change at all for fear it will be a negative change resulting in an even worse situation.

I’ve always thought of ambition as a good thing. I still do, but I’ve been re-defining the word a lot lately. I used to think of ambition as applying only to money and status – more impressive titles, more money, “climbing the ladder.” I put a lot of myself into that way of thinking.

But maybe that’s not the only way to look at ambition.

I’ve always thought of someone’s level of happiness as innate. People just have a certain baseline level of happiness, and the only way they can adjust it is mentally – just “be happier,” maybe by ignoring bad things outside of your control. But maybe happiness is something you can actually change through external factors that you build into your life.

What if the original hypothetical scenario I presented in this post applied to happiness instead of money? What if you had a certain baseline happiness that couldn’t improve as long as you maintained a more-or-less active life. (In other words, it could decrease if you just sat around in the dark all day, but as long as you generally did stuff a normal adult would do, your happiness level would reach a baseline level, but never improve.) This happiness level was enough to keep you from breaking down during the day, but not much else – not joy, but call it “survival happiness.” What would you do then?

Would you maximize money by working in high-stress, high-danger roles, realizing that you wouldn’t get any happier if you were less stressed and safer? What would you do with the money, if the rewards couldn’t make you happier, either? Purpose matters – I think intellectually it’s worthwhile to make the world a better place even if you yourself don’t get joy from it. But what would that look like?

There’s a tremendous amount of research that says past a certain point of material success, you don’t get any happier from it. And that point of material success is pretty low! Basically as long as the wolves aren’t at your door and your bills are paid, people’s happiness is more or less completely unaffected by increases in living standard. If Bill Gates is happier than me, it’s not because he has more money.

Just like in the first scenario, though, lots of people think they’re in exactly this situation but don’t do what it seems like they should. Lots of people think they can’t get any happier, but they don’t seek out meaningful things besides happiness, such as purpose or meaning or even money. They just keep doing what they’re doing, perhaps thinking that if they grind long enough, they’ll suddenly hit this moment of enlightenment and their baseline happiness will shoot up and sustain itself at that higher level.

Two things I’m realizing more and more, day by day:

1. Absolutely nothing is automatic. Nothing just happens if you do the same thing day after day. If every day you make ten dollars, then after a thousand days you’ll make ten thousand dollars, that’s it. You won’t suddenly make a million. Likewise, if you’re stressed and anxious and miserable today, you’ll be stressed and anxious and miserable for the rest of your life unless you do different things.
2. Absolutely nothing can change from inside your head. You can’t think your way into wealth, you have to act. But you also can’t think your way into happiness. It’s not a matter of a different perspective or reflection or choice, except in the sense that different perspectives or choices can lead you to different actions. Actions which build a different life.

If you want the room around you be more green, you can either paint everything in the room green, or you can wear green-colored glasses. But when it comes to happiness, there are no glasses you can put on to make the exact same life make you happier. You have to get out the paint and paintbrush and get to work.

I admit that’s scary. It’s scary to me. Just like the people who are in a survival mindset with money, afraid that any change may actually wreck the delicate house of cards they have and make their situation worse, many people can be “survival happy.” They have just enough happiness to not jump off a bridge and they’re afraid that anything they change will make things worse.

But you can’t think like that. You can’t. It’s scary. It’s terrifying. But you can’t protect and shelter a candle flame forever. You have to risk moving away from it to build a bigger fire you can light with it. Otherwise you’ll just watch it slowly burn out.