How long would it take you to double a dollar?

It’s not as easy as it sounds. To really “double” a dollar, you have to make $2 by using nothing but the original dollar. You can’t just reach into your wallet and pull out a second bill; that’s cheating. You can’t even drive anywhere – that’s using resources beyond the original dollar, like your car and gas, etc.

And you can’t just sell something you already own, either. If you start with nothing but the clothes on your back and a dollar, you don’t really win the challenge if you end the day with two dollars but no shoes. Now, if you manage to sell your shoes for $30, and then find an identical pair that you can buy from somewhere else for $29, you’ve won. You ended the day as you started it, except with an extra dollar.

When you think about it that way, it’s more of a challenge. But you could do it. I believe in you.

My oldest daughter recently asked me for help with some task that she was more than capable of completing on her own. In very typical-dad fashion, I admonished her for relying on me when she was more than able on her own, but the off-the-cuff comment I made stuck with me. I rather liked it, so here’s what I said to her:

“You have brains, eyes, hands and feet, and those are the only tools you need to solve every problem.” (And truth be told, you only really need #1 on that list – plenty of people have solved plenty of problems without one or more of the other three.)

So I believe you can double your dollar – you have brains. You might even have other assets. Once you double your dollar, you can do it again. And again.

Don’t let anyone tell you it’s more complicated than this. It’s not. I believe in you.

Remember learning about the atom in grade school science? I do. Even though I never did a thing with it, the model of the atom made a big impression on me.

I found it weird. In the middle, you had protons (which are positive) and neutrons (which are neutral). Then circling WAY outside of that were these tiny electrons (which are negative). First, I found the naming convention really weird, but I got over that. What made me intensely curious was why protons and electrons didn’t seem to be mirror images of one another. Protons are much bigger, stationary, and hang out in the center with neutrons. Electrons were tiny, fast, and circled way outside. Neutrons were just… there.

Okay, this isn’t going to be a post about actual atoms because, to be frank, the above paragraph represents more or less my sum total of knowledge on the subject. But that model IS a great analogy for a good method for living your life, and I love analogies.

You see, when we “put ourselves out there,” and talk about our interests or our skills or our passions, we come up against this wall of fear that says that for every person we find who agrees with us, for each kindred spirit who will support and encourage us, there will be ten times as many “haters” who will detract and admonish. We’re searching for a few positive “protons,” but we fear we’ll find many negative “electrons.”

But that’s not what happens! In reality, there are mostly two kinds of people you encounter – people who support you and think you’re awesome, and people who are indifferent and don’t care either way. That second group, the neutral “neutrons” won’t get in your way, won’t stop you, won’t interact with you at all. They cost you nothing in your journey, even if you gain nothing from interacting with them.

(This is a sales lesson, too – you might only win 3 deals out of a hundred pitches, but the other 97 didn’t cost you anything but time. They don’t detract from your success, they just didn’t add to it. They were neutral, not negative.)

The negative “electrons” – the haters – are waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over there. Far away, in a distant orbit. Repulsed by your positivity and the positivity of those you seek to engage with. No one wants to hang out with them. And you’ll rarely have to deal with them at all.

(In fact, if I really want to stretch the analogy, I think we’re not even sure where they are? I like that, even if I got the science muddled.)

The point is, you have nothing to fear. Everyone will either support you or ignore you. Haters are rare, far, and safely ignored. Be positive!

So often the greatest ideas languish in the minds of their creators for want of a second voice to echo the thought, modify it and amplify it. We fear not only the rejection of the idea, but the noisy push-back. Not only will this person reject my idea, we think, but they’ll reject it so vehemently that their own voice will drown out mine, and all we’ll have is more chaos and noise than we would have if I had just stayed silent.

If there is one tactic I soundly reject in virtually all its forms, it’s “shouting down.” Dismissing an idea or argument simply by being louder in your disagreement. Doing more than disagreeing – mocking, belittling, and attacking.

It’s terrible for the person who offered you the gift of their idea – and their respect, in showing it to you. But it’s terrible for you too, if you do it. “Shouting down” is loud, and others hear it – that’s the point – and it doesn’t take long before you find yourself bereft of new ideas because no one wants to share them with you. This is how echo chambers form.

Some ideas, even at their core, are abhorrent. But shouting down someone who shared an abhorrent idea with you doesn’t eliminate that evil – it hides it, forces it into other channels, and hardens the heart of the person who carries it. That hardened heart becomes armor against others who might try to win over that person with the power of better ideas. If you shout someone down, you just add a brick to their fortress. You can’t bully someone into goodness.

Listen to those ideas. Understand the people that have them, and why those ideas found root in that person’s heart. Only from that position can you influence.

I will listen, if you’ll let me. Anyone, everyone. I won’t shout you down. I encourage everyone to do the same.

I think many problems are fundamentally unsolvable. But I don’t think that means there’s no way around them.

The reason I think many problems are unsolvable is because solving a problem takes time and effort and thought and those are all finite things. It’s possible that a problem might be solved on an infinite time scale, but we don’t have that. And what often happens before solve a problem (either as individuals or as a society) is we outgrow it.

For instance, allow me to engage in wild speculation for a moment. Take all this with an enormous grain of salt – I’m not an expert here in any sense, so this is just me musing about the unforeseen. That being said, here’s my prediction: we won’t ever solve any of the problems relating to renewable resource use on Earth. We won’t ‘solve’ climate change, non-renewable resources, etc. Because long before we get to the point where we would solve those problems, we’ll just figure out how to live in space and on other planets instead.

Someday all of Earth will be a preserved, historic park. Tourists will come here and take pictures of the “birthplace of civilization.”

Today a private company brought humans to the International Space Station for the first time in history.

We’re going to be okay.

Here’s how I made up a recipe for campfire hash browns. It was a nice day, the kids wanted to do outside stuff, and I wanted to cook.

Step 1: Get a big piece of tinfoil, and put a big pile of potatoes, onions, corn, cheese, and bacon on it. Put a half a stick of butter in the middle and put some paprika and whatever other spices you happen to like on there.

Step 2: Wrap it up, then do that two more times.

Step 3: Put it on a fire that your three kids help you build. If you don’t have three kids, just get any kids to help, they all want to build fires anyway:

Step 4: Move them around so they only burn a little and not all the way. Keep moving them around on occasion for maybe half an hour? Whatever:

Step 5: Open those bad boys up and scrape out the delicious heart attack you’re going to eat along with a can of beans you cooked hobo-style in the can and some hot dogs your kids gleefully set on fire and then ate:

This was so ridiculously good.

What? You want a deeper lesson or something here? Okay, it’s this: learn the basic principles of a category of knowledge (such as the basic principle “butter + potatoes + pretty much anything else will probably be good”) and then experiment. Involve your kids if you have them, or just anyone you like, because learning together is fun. You’ll burn the edges a little, but you can always scrape that off, and there will be something delicious in there. And if that’s not an analogy for all of life, I don’t know what is.

Be wary of people who tell you that you need to “live in reality” whenever you propose change.

In fact, forget “wary.” Tell those people to go jump in a lake.

By its very nature, change requires a vision of a world that does not exist. A fantasy, a dream. If you’re trying to change anything at all, you’re “not living in the real world.” So that’s a foolish complaint for someone to levy against you just for proposing an idea that doesn’t yet exist.

Whenever someone tells you to “live in the real world,” they’re always proposing a reactionary, grueling endurance of life’s woes. Your job sucks, and you want to start your own company? “Live in the real world,” says some jerk, by which they mean “go to your job that you hate and be miserable every day.”

Create a reality without that jerk. And once you’ve made that improvement, keep right on going.

You will always have problems to solve. But there’s a funny thing about problems – good ones tend to crowd out bad ones.

“Too much work to do,” is a problem, but it often crowds out the “not enough money” problem. It certainly crowds out the “I’m bored” problem.

“It’s tough to find time to work out” is a problem, but it tends to push away the “I’m overweight and have heart disease” problem.

Even if you’re a pessimist and a cynic who thinks that your life will be nothing but problems – hey, at least you can pick the ones you like.

When I was a boy, I once attempted to emulate one of my many namesakes and buried a few apples in the back, untamed area of a relative’s property. I was eager to reap the literal fruits of my labor and give my cousins and I some delicious apples in the future.

And sure enough, something sprouted in only a few short days! What fortune! Within a week it was quite a large plant and I proudly told all my cousins about the bounty we would soon receive due to my efforts. Based on the rate of growth, we’d have apples before the month was out! My cousins, similar in age to me, were quite impressed and eventually the adults discovered why.

They laughed for an hour before pulling up the weeds that were growing in the spot where I’d buried the apples.

Here was the problem I had as a kid, and it’s the same problem many adults have today – I didn’t understand the concept of the counterfactual.

See, I had a reasonable (if incomplete) understanding of how seeds and plants work – seeds go in ground, plants come up. I knew, to borrow a phrase, just enough to be dangerous. And I had reasonable (to me) evidence that my theory was correct – after all, I’d put a seed in the ground and a plant had started to grow! That’s exactly what I wanted and expected to happen, so why shouldn’t I assume I was successful?

Of course, it was the counterfactual that I had never even considered: yes, a tree might grow if I plant a seed. But that doesn’t mean a plant won’t grow if I don’t – which means I can’t be sure that this plant is from my seed without more information (such as, and this is just a start, how an apple tree might differ from a weed in both appearance and growth rate).

Adults continue to make this mistake all the time.

Watch it happen: “Yes, my kid is doing very well in kindergarten. It’s all because of that expensive pre-school we paid for.”

Watch again: “I owe all of my success to my time at college. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without it.”

Watch once more: “My business is successful because of my decision to invest in this new technology. If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be doing nearly as well.”

Here’s the pattern: you take a reasonable-sounding, plausible but simple theory of how the world works. Then you run exactly one experiment with zero control groups. If you get the result you wanted, you declare your theory correct. Bad science, easy rationalization. You say, “It makes intuitive sense that a good preschool would give my kid an advantage in K-12, and my kid is doing well in kindergarten, so I must be right.” What you’ll never get to know is whether your kid would have done equally well in kindergarten without the preschool. Maybe they’d have done better!

“It makes intuitive sense that if I plant an apple, an apple tree will grow. Something is growing, so it must be an apple tree.”

The lesson here isn’t to never try things. Send your kid to preschool if you want, go to college if you enjoy it, invest in a new technology that seems cool. But be careful not to turn one anecdote, no matter how appealing, into an iron-clad life lesson that you try to impart to others. “Sales guru” shysters have been doing this forever – they succeed in one specific way, then capitalize much further than is reasonable on that success by selling their one-time anecdote as a “road map to success” or some other kind of fool-proof blueprint. That’s just not how it works.

In the garden of true knowledge, those are the weeds. Pull them and work hard on the real trees; that’s the only secret.