When I was 19 years old, I lived in a stable. That’s a true thing! In eleven stalls of this 12-stall stable there were horses; the 12th stall had shoddy plywood walls and the bare elements to convert it into a sort of apartment. It didn’t have a bathroom in it, but there was one at the far end of the stable that I could use. In addition to living there, I also worked there as a stable hand – one was the reason for the other, in fact. For 19-year-old me it was a sweet deal. I worked from 6 AM to 10 AM taking care of the horses and cleaning the stables, and then the rest of the day was mine. In exchange for this, I received a very minor living stipend, but paid no rent or utilities. A place of my own and a small income just for taking care of some horses for a few hours every day? It was fantastic.

It didn’t interfere with anything else I wanted to do. I was free to work other jobs and pursue other interests at my discretion – as long as I fed the horses every day.

Now, I’ve said it before plenty of times, and I’ll say it again – 19-year-old me wasn’t super bright. I made plenty of mistakes. And I’ve also mentioned that I was kind of a “city-slicker;” a pejorative moniker that I wanted to be rid of, which was at least part of my reason for taking the stable hand job. I say this only as background so that you kind of understand how this next mistake came to be.

Christmas Eve, I’d driven back to my parent’s house – not far from the stable, but maybe an hour or so out of the rural area and into the suburbs. That night I’d stayed over, in order to have a pleasant Christmas morning with my parents and sister, as had been our tradition my entire life.

Which prompted a call from my boss/landlady, who was (understandably in retrospect) quite upset at my absence. I had, in my teenage ignorance, simply assumed that as an employee I’d be off work for Christmas. I worked every other day – holidays, weekends, etc. But Christmas seemed so fundamental, that one day when everything is closed, that I just went home without even thinking about it. In fact, I was actually flabbergasted – offended, even! – that she’d be calling me. I said, “What do you mean, ‘where am I?’ It’s Christmas.”

She said: “You still have to feed the horses every day. They don’t know it’s Christmas.”

Now, that landlady was a miserable and wretched person for a whole host of reasons, I would later discover (not the first of which was that she lived in a farmhouse directly next to the stable and could have just fed the horses herself for one stinkin’ day, but I digress), but she wasn’t wrong then – I was.

There are days that will mark themselves as extraordinary; days which weigh heavier in the balance of your soul than others. Maybe Christmas, maybe a different holiday. Maybe a particular anniversary or your own birthday or someone else’s. These days may carry more significance to you, and it can be good to honor them with the spirit of their passing, whatever that may be.

But don’t let them become excuses for losing sight of who you work every ordinary day to become. You have a responsibility to your future self, commitments you’ve made to the person you want to become. You’ve committed to reach certain goals, whether they’re financial, spiritual, health or personal. Don’t forget those goals, even in the big moments.

I was tempted to just write a quick “Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal” for today’s post. It’s Christmas, after all – who’d blame me? But while I don’t mind short posts, my commitment is to try to write something that will make you think every day. So even though it’s Christmas, and even though I did all the things I wanted to on this day, I’m still here. Feeding the horses, every day.

There are two ways of looking at the world. One way is to view the world as essentially flat and predetermined; you’ll never be surprised, even though you might often be disappointed. The other way is to look at the world as a place where truly magical things can and frequently do happen.

This isn’t binary, of course – this view is a spectrum. You can be more, or much more, to one side or the other, but sometimes have spikes where you slide around a little. Your position certainly changes with age. It might change with other circumstances, how happy you are, or if you’re in love.

The views aren’t scientific. Optimism and pessimism aren’t strictly correlated with how good you are at prediction. An optimist and a pessimist might predict the same event with the same degree of accuracy, but still view it as a dark, ever-encroaching tide or as an opportunity for something wondrous to happen.

You have more conscious control over that view for yourself than you think, though habits are hard to break. You have to sustain your efforts to look for wonder over time. Thankfully, it’s often self-fulfilling – look for wonder and you’ll find it, and that will make it easier to stay to that side of the scale.

But you also have a great deal of control over where someone else might fall on this scale. So much wonder and magic is other people’s actions, and you can take those actions. You can be the magic you want to see in the world.

Do something that is both nice and strange. Let people catch a glimpse of a hidden world beyond the grey one that they know, and let them believe, even for a moment, that it’s beautiful. It’s easy to do with children, but it isn’t hard to do even with adults.

Show kindness and be weird about it. Make the world more wondrous.

I like to signal boost. I think it can be very worthwhile to amplify voices, especially if I’m directing them to a new audience. I like making connections, especially weird ones. Sometimes I hear or see something that I find valuable or interesting, and I’m struck with the idea that because it’s unusual for me, it’s likely also unusual for my peer group. By nature, we’ll tend to have our immediate “signal range” mostly consist of people in our fields and circles – that means my “signal range” has a lot of entrepreneurs, startup people, HR people, and social scientists in it. It doesn’t have a lot of mycologists, so if I see a cool thing about mushrooms, I’m apt to share it.

I’m actually less apt to share things that directly relate to my own tight interests. I tend to be pickier about what I share when it relates to my own sphere. I like being right, especially when it matters, so I carefully examine things where I have the expertise to do so before sharing, since sharing something also sort of amounts to an implicit “vouching for” that thing, unless you explicitly state otherwise.

So when it comes to things I hear and see, I like to be very broad. I like to absorb a lot of information on a lot of different topics. Surface-level stuff to be sure, but still, it keeps me as aware as I can be of just how large and awesome the world is. On the other hand, I try to make sure that the things people hear and see from me are much more specific and vetted. I don’t mind talking about topics where I don’t have expert knowledge, but I try to make it super clear when that’s the case so I can leave my ego at the door, and other people can see it. If people see that you don’t have a vested interest in defending any particular piece of information as gospel, they’re more likely to engage with you as a teacher, and I love that.

Recently someone told me that they shared certain posts from this blog with friends of theirs. In addition to feeling overwhelmingly flattered at this, it also gave me a strong sense of responsibility all of a sudden. When I’m just writing this for myself, pretty much my only criteria is that I’m honest. I don’t have to be wise, or inspiring, or funny. Just honest.

When other people read it, I figure, that’s okay too. I hope they get something out of it, but you can look at stuff and not necessarily endorse or even enjoy it. I could read Mein Kampf without embracing it.

But as soon as I hand Mein Kampf to someone else and say “here, you should read this,” suddenly we’re in a whole new world. Now I’m spreading that knowledge. I’m boosting the signal. Implicitly endorsing it, unless I’m going out of my way to say, “you should read this for the sake of seeing the totally worst way to think about stuff.” (I hope that’s not what the person who shared this blog did, but the possibility exists.)

So the fact that I’ve apparently crossed over that threshold from my own personal journal into something people actually share as a possible source of valuable information means… I should start charging! Ha, I kid. But it does mean I should be aware of it.

I don’t know that much else would change. I’m already honest and I don’t intend to not be. I don’t intend to change the nature of what I write about; the primary audience for this blog will always be me. But it might mean that I pay more attention to making this archive accessible – maybe start using tags more for ease of people finding the thing they like best. Maybe I’ll even put together a sort of index in the new year – sounds like a good New Month’s Resolution for January.

One of the biggest changes I’ll make is this – I’ll actually ask you to share. I’ll accept that maybe, just maybe, there’s something in here worth reading and that someone beyond my own signal range could stand to read it. I’ll ask anyone who reads to be as critical as I am when it comes to what you share, and share only the things you think are worth the boost. But share away if it meets the criteria – and always share new things with me, because I always want to read them.

A simple mathematical truth: the confluence of two things is always more rare than either of the two things independently.

For instance, how many people right this second are both A.) in yellow cars and B.) listening to Taylor Swift? While it might be tough to get a good estimate of that, we can know with certainty that the number is smaller than both the total number of people in yellow cars and the total number of people listening to Tay-Tay.

The weirder the particular overlap, the fewer instances there will be of that “Category C: Both.” For instance, let’s say you’ve got these three categories:

A. Americans who watched the Super Bowl last year.
B. Americans who drank at least one beer in the last year.
C. Americans who did both.

Sure, by simple math, (C) has to be a smaller number than both (A) and (B). But it might not be all that much smaller, since huge numbers of people do both of those things, AND because those things are often culturally coordinated. Now consider the following categories:

A. People who attended a bird-watching convention in the last year.
B. People who launched their own software development company last year.
C. People who did both.

Not only are the absolute numbers of (A) and (B) smaller in this instance, but those two things don’t have any obvious correlation to one another. You’d expect a decent number of people who watch the Super Bowl to drink beer, and honestly vice versa. But you wouldn’t meet someone who talked about launching their own software company and say, “Oh, then you must have attended BirdCon San Diego, right?”

Here’s why I’m bringing this up: Virtually nothing you do is unique by itself. No matter how niche or weird or unusual a particular hobby, skill or pastime you have is, there are other people who share it. But the combination of those things? That’s where you can truly find a place where you shine.

Imagine aliens invaded the earth tomorrow and said that they’d destroy our planet unless we could beat them in contests of archery, opera singing, heart surgery and Mario Kart. We’d scour our planet for the best in each of those categories and send them up.

But imagine that the rules stipulated that we could only send one person? We’d have to find someone who was great at all four of those things, which is so weird that it might be a handful of people at best. In seven billion or more humans, I’d actually wager that we could find one person who was awesome at all of those, but they probably wouldn’t be the best at any one.

But you don’t have to be! In fact, it’s better to find that niche in the overlap. Now forget about alien invasions and just think about your job, your career. You can do more than one thing! You have more than one talent and skill. But if you’re defining yourself narrowly according to only one of them, you’re avoiding the best possible place for yourself. In the overlap.

Let’s say you’re a web designer. Okay, but there are tons of web designers, and some of them are super good, so that’s a big field to compete in. But let’s say that you also happen to know a lot about organic dairy farming, maybe because that was your family’s business before you ran off to learn web design. Or maybe that’s what you did while teaching yourself the other skills. Or any number of reasons, doesn’t matter. The point is – sure, there are a lot of web designers. There might be a lot of organic dairy farmers. How many people are both, though?

So, you find your niche that way. Organic dairy farms need websites, too! And they might appreciate talking with someone who “knows their language,” so to speak. You’d be better equipped to deal with their unique struggles, even if you weren’t actually the overall best web designer in the world.

So not only is that a place where you can command a lot of value, it’s also a place where you can find a lot of direction. Lots of people get themselves into a career that’s super broad like web design and then don’t know where to go. There are so many options that they never know which direction to take. Narrowing your field down by combining it with your other qualities can give you a clear path – once you know you want to be the premier web designer for the organic dairy industry, that presents a lot more actionable steps than “I want to be a good web designer, I guess.”

Find your overlap. Find the things that don’t seem to connect, but are both things you’re reasonably good at. Maybe more than two! Maybe it’s one skill + one hobby. Maybe it’s one reputation + one credential. Maybe it’s a crazy mix of multiple things. But that’s where you’ll find incredible value to give to the world – in the overlap.

In my daughter’s class, they apparently had an assignment this week where they drew a classmate’s name out of a hat and then had to write something nice about them. A perfectly fine exercise, in my opinion – looking not only for the good in others, but the deeper good that goes beyond them being “nice” as an adherent to social convention is a good trait to cultivate.

All of the notes were written on pieces of paper shaped like Christmas lights and hung up around the room, to show how each kid “lights up” the classroom. Awww.

But then as a nice bonus, each kid got to take home not the thing they wrote, but the thing written about them. Which means I got to have a little glimpse of how my daughter is viewed in the eyes of others.

Here is what a classmate wrote about my Beansprout:

“[Beansprout] lights up our classroom by helping when someone is hurt. You are the first one to notice and help them.”

I am so, so proud of her. She’s so amazing. This isn’t isolated – at a recent birthday party at a skating rink, my daughter (a decently accomplished skater) went considerably slower than her abilities allowed in order to stay holding hands with a younger classmate who was less steady on her feet. When a bully at the beginning of the school year picked on a young kindergartner in her presence, she immediately leaped into the fray and frightened the (older and larger!) bully off and then unilaterally declared the picked-on kid as “her friend,” despite having never met him before.

She is more marvelous than I could ever have hoped. She’s a protector. I’ve always tried to be that way; I think she’s done a better job of it in seven years than I’ve done in five times that amount. I think it’s more likely that she gets it from her grandfather than from me, but wherever she gets it from, I’m so thankful for it.

Please, please, be kind. Our world is wondrous and magical and exciting and interesting, but it is also a big, wild place where it’s easy to get lost for a while. It’s easy to be alone. And those few small gestures of kindness when someone is hurt can change their life. Be kind as if you are the last person on Earth who will be. Be the first to help, because you never know if you’re someone’s last chance.

Interesting observation I had today. My oldest kid is 7. She’s amazing; I often hear comments that she’s particularly mature or responsible for her age. She certainly seems that way to me. Important note, she’s the oldest of three.

I know a decent number of other seven-year-old girls. My nieces, my daughter’s friends, kids of acquaintances. Some are very mature, others aren’t; they’re seven, so that’s not a value judgement or anything. You’re definitely allowed to be immature at seven!

But you know what I notice is the common thread? I can tell after about 60 seconds of talking to one of them where they fall in the birth order. Despite identical ages, there’s a world of difference between a 7-year-old who’s the youngest of three versus the oldest of three.

I have this one co-worker who is particularly accomplished and savvy as compared to her age cohort – in fact, she was featured in one of those “25 under 25” lists in a Chicago magazine, so this isn’t just me saying that. In fact, she was the youngest on that list! You know what? Oldest of 6 kids, though.

Maybe there’s a formula you could work out. Maybe someone’s “mental age” is their own age plus some percentage of the ages of their younger siblings. I don’t think being the youngest detracts; I think it’s more that having younger siblings is itself a life experience that gives you more maturity more rapidly.

That made me think of broader applicability of this topic. Having younger siblings as a kid is often a thankless task. You didn’t choose them, for one – depending on the age gap you might not even have been aware they were coming. You don’t get a lot of authority over them but you often end up sharing at least some percentage of the responsibility for them: “Watch your sister!” or “Keep your brother out of the cabinet!” are often heard in our house. (Though, to our credit, we actually do invest our oldest with a fair amount of authority – each new sibling brought with them an explicit “promotion” for our oldest, where we gave her additional perks like later bedtime or more allowance tied specifically to her role as the “Big Sister.”)

As adults, we don’t often seek out new ways to add burdens to ourselves without much benefit. In fact, we usually try to minimize our burdens. But maybe that’s not the best thing to do.

In the same way that a kid’s “mental age” is some combination of the years they’ve been alive and the years they’ve been a big brother or big sister, maybe an adult’s “mental age” is the combination of their years at each major life task. Maybe if the only thing you hold any responsibility towards is your job by age 30, you’re 30 years old in your head. But if you also taught yourself piano for 5 of those years, you’re older than that. If you raised a family, older. Traveled the world, older.

Sure, some of this is me just saying “having experiences makes you experienced,” duh. But it’s more than that. It’s more than just the experience of moments. It’s sustained experiences, that come with duties, compounded over time. That’s what truly adds value to your life.

Consider: You see the typical job ad that says “5 Years’ Experience Required.” If someone has worked a job in that field for five years, then they meet that requirement. But if someone has hustled their butt off and sacrificed nights and weekends to work two full-time jobs in that field simultaneously for the past three years, they’re clearly qualified as well – they actually have more experience than the first person. Even though they’ve only been in the field 3 years (and perhaps even better, since their early skills have had less time to atrophy and become irrelevant)!

How you fill your years is more important than how many years you have. It’s like a person claiming they have more water because they have more buckets, but their buckets are only a quarter full. Someone else with fewer, fuller buckets is probably doing better.

Fill your years. The years themselves will be better for you having lived them as fully as you could, and you’ll be better prepared for those years yet to come.

Let’s say you’re currently employed as a pizza delivery driver. But you want to be an astronaut.

This can feel, on the surface, like a daunting dream. You don’t know how to apply to go into space, so you feel like your goal is impossible. You can’t get there.

Well… not exactly. You can’t get there from here. But you also don’t have to stay “here,” wherever that is!

People become daunted because they skip steps. They want to do/become/achieve X, but they don’t know what the path is from where they are to that point. The ladder up from pizza delivery driver doesn’t seem to lead to astronaut.

So don’t start with where you are. Start with where you want to go and work backwards.

Find out who is currently doing the thing you want to do, and make a list of them. Whether it’s astronauts, CEOs, or or anything else, just put together a list. Line up their names down the side of your page, and in the next column over, write down what each of them is currently doing. Be a little more specific than “astronaut,” because that’s what they’d all say if you made a list of astronauts. But list what program they’re part of, or what their specialty is, etc.

Then, in the next column over from that, write down the thing they did just before that. This takes time, but surprisingly less effort than you’d think with a little Google-fu. Were they Air Force pilots? Research scientists? Engineers? Put it down.

Rinse, repeat. Keep back-trailing them until you have a column that’s just a list of what each of them was doing at the very start of their careers. You can get there from here.

Don’t worry if their lives looked different than yours. Sure, be realistic – I hate to tell you this, but if you’re 75 years old you’re not becoming an astronaut. But don’t be afraid to have dreams and ambitions. Besides, this applies to anything, not just astronauts – so no matter what your list was, start with the idea you can do it.

Once you have a list of “starting points,” look for common themes, or starting points that you could go take action on today. There will be steps between where you are now and your eventual dream, but if you aren’t prepared for and willing to endure that, then it wasn’t much of a dream.

If you really want to be an astronaut and every single astronaut started by being in the Air Force at some point, then guess what? Time to put down the pizza and go sign up. It’s either that, or freeze yourself for 1,000 years and hope for the best.

When is the envelope as important as the letter?

When it has the address on it.

Or, to put it another way: your method of delivery and how effectively you reach your audience carries as much weight as your message. Moderately good advice that reaches a million people does more good for the world than really great advice falling on only one set of ears. Or eyes, or whatever.

In a conversation I had today, I mentioned that I believe we primarily exist as relationships to other people. “No one is an island,” as they say. That means that no matter how brilliant your work is, you have to find a way for other people to see and hear it for it to really matter. It honestly pains me to think that sitting out there somewhere is the greatest novel I’ve never read, languishing on someone’s hard drive for lack of the marketing knowledge to get it to me.

My work is closely related to this. In pretty much all of my professional channels I try to lower the barriers between the people who would be really great at something if only they could communicate that fact a little better with the people who need to hear the message. I’m happy to say that I’ve brought down many a wall in that category.

I’m less happy to say that I don’t often take my own advice. This blog is a prime example. I have plenty of reasons for writing this, but first and foremost my audience was myself. I wanted to organize my own thinking, have a catalog of my ideas that I could reference for myself. I thought I’d start with just posting for the sake of posting, and then figure it out from there.

Well, that was over two hundred and fifty posts ago. I think I can legitimately start taking steps to promote this without feeling like I’m all fluff and no substance; there’s substance a-plenty in these archives.

So this is essentially an announcement that I’m going to be taking steps to make this blog a little more visible, and you’ll probably see them. But at the same time, I wanted to make sure I was still talking about something of substance, even in this kind of post. So take that advice to heart: you’re allowed to (and should!) promote yourself. Be honest, but be loud. If you fail in life, let it be because you tried your hardest and fell short; there’s honor in that, value to your soul and to the future lives of others. Don’t let it be because you actually succeeded and no one knew about it.

Today while driving, I saw that the car in front of me was following the car in front of them extremely closely. Tailgating, riding the bumper, etc. In case you didn’t know, this is dangerous and stupid – it’s rude to the driver you’re following, but it puts you in danger as well.

While today’s scenario didn’t end in disaster, it did end in humorous inconvenience for the rude driver: the person in front needed to make a left turn, and the rude driver was following so closely that they were forced to wait, unable to maneuver around the front car despite ample shoulder room (which the rest of us in line, following at a respectable distance, were easily able to use). Instead, they had to sit there while the front driver waited for all opposing traffic to pass so they could turn left.

Now, I could just share that story so you could share in a little schadenfreude with me, but since I always like to look for lessons and metaphors in everyday occurrences, I’m going to take this a bit further.

“Following Too Closely” is something a lot of us do in life. Maybe we don’t do it to be rude, but perhaps out of eagerness to get to our destination. Regardless, we attach ourselves to certain leaders, inspirational figures, or role models and follow so closely in their footsteps that we can’t anticipate the potential dangers of doing so. We’re so close up their butts that we can’t see in front of them. Even great people make mistakes, so if you want the maximum benefit from taking inspiration or leadership from someone else, give them room to make them without you crashing into the back of them. If someone attempts something risky, you can wait and see how it turns out before you follow. Absorb the benefits of their trailblazing by letting them figure out where the trail goes.

Or, blaze your own. And if you do, make sure that those following you know that they should give you a little space as well. Blind dedication is rarely good for anyone. Give everyone a little extra space.

What do you do in the last minute?

Despite our best efforts in planning, sometimes you’re just up against the buzzer. Maybe you lost track of time, maybe emergencies came up, or maybe you just didn’t plan as well as you thought. But no matter the cause, in those cases you still have to ship something.

What are your techniques for minimizing the damage to your abilities that comes from the pressure and lack of resources?

To start, focus on your “minimum viable product.” Something presentable is better than nothing at all, so ignore the theoretically perfect and go for whatever works. The world is full of second chances, so I guarantee you’ll have time to come back and polish your efforts later if it’s necessary. Many times, it won’t be.

Next, draw on the well of temporary energy. There are best practices for sustainable effort without burnout, but when it’s crunch time, borrowing against future energy is a good play. Crank up your motivation playlist, drink some coffee, and maybe sacrifice a daily activity like working out (unless that actually gives you a burst, as it does with some people). I believe that it’s actually good to pull an all-nighter every once in a while, even if just to remind yourself that you can.

Lastly, don’t second-guess yourself. Get to the flow state as soon as you can, and when you get there, let it ride. The work you produce in that state can be surprisingly good, but once your burst of high energy runs out and the fatigue starts to set back in, you’re not in a good position to judge your own efforts. If you can outsource a second set of eyes in the eleventh hour, great; but if you can’t, just ship. You’re just as likely to turn a correct answer into a wrong one as you are to make some small marginal improvement.

And of course, when it’s all done and you’ve rested, examine the situation that led you here. It’s good to be able to do this when necessary, because a few instances are unavoidable in life. But it’s also good to minimize them, and that means learning from your past mistakes.

There’s always a new clock tomorrow.