Sometimes, there are huge things stopping us from moving forward, and we can’t see what they are. We think the way looks clear, and we’re confused when our forward momentum is halted – perhaps suddenly! Not only can the sudden stop be unpleasant because you thought you’d get to Point B and you didn’t, but in addition you might have even suffered some loss from the impact. Maybe you sank money into an investment and not only didn’t you get the return you wanted, you lost your stake. Maybe you thought things were going really well with the new person you’ve been seeing, and when it falls apart you’re not only left confused as to why, but you’ve also invested time and emotional effort that’s now lost.

There are some simple steps you can take that, while they can’t prevent this, can at least soften the blow. Don’t be too careless – if you charge ahead heedlessly, you can hit a wall you didn’t even know was there. Trust the opinions of a few others whose intelligence and insight you respect, and seek advice with some regularity. If you always go it alone, you only ever have one angle from which to view things, and maybe from another the wall wouldn’t have been quite so invisible. Don’t invest more than you’re willing to lose in any one endeavor; but remember, you can often bear greater losses than you think. You’ll earn back that money, and you have more emotional effort to give, and you’re not out of time yet.

And if, just if, you work in an office that has floor-to-ceiling glass paneling directly next to doorways, just… maybe watch where you’re going? Your face will hurt less.

I am extremely solutions-oriented. That can be both a strength and a weakness, and my goal is to make it less of the latter while retaining it as the former.

One of the “weakness” aspects of being solutions-oriented is you tend to view all problems as fundamentally “solvable” and thus approach them with that framework. That doesn’t always work out. Some situations are negative without necessarily having a solution, or perhaps the solution is just to support someone going through it.

I, on the other hand, have my sleeves permanently rolled up. I work. I’m not the “moral support” guy, I’m the fix-fix-fix guy. I’m aware of it, and so I’ve been trying for a few years now to get better at really actively listening and trying to judge when the other person or people need solutions or just need to bend an ear for a while. I’m proud to say I’ve actually been pretty successful, but I still have plenty of room for improvement.

I was talking to a truly brilliant co-worker of mine today, and she told me something that might seem obvious to people that aren’t me, but it was a radical departure from my standpoint. She said: “Don’t guess. Ask. Say, ‘I have some ideas for solutions that may work for you, but I want to make sure you need that first. Do you want to hear those or do you want to talk out your concerns a little more?’ No need to try to figure it out on your own.”

This is stellar advice! It’s a great communication tool even if, unlike me, you’re never wrong about whether or not someone wants solutions. Even if you can flawlessly figure that out for yourself, asking permission to offer solutions or ask more questions really helps the other person feel heard, understood, valid. It can help create a bridge between your intentions and their perception, which is always a good thing. And it can improve the quality of the solutions you offer!

This is such good advice for me that I’m legitimately excited for the next time I hear about someone else’s problem. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but hey – one problem at a time.

What tools do you use to understand yourself?

The study of the human mind is fascinating. One of the reasons is because it’s studied through so many different lenses – we look at the mind’s capabilities, what it will do in a business setting, how it impacts relationships, its health, its propensity to violence or addiction. People study broad trends and try to extract meaningful information about individuals from those averages.

What factors make someone a great leader? Prone to crime? A supportive spouse or awesome parent? Good at baseball? Terrible at appreciating art? A mathematical genius? An angry loner?

No one can know you as well as you know you, but there are two problems with considering yourself an expert on yourself:

1. You’re the closest to the subject matter, sure, but that’s not always good. There’s a lot to be said for clinical detachment when it comes to honestly evaluating something.
2. Just because you have the most intimate exposure to the subject matter, doesn’t mean you have the tools to evaluate what you should.

I can say “I know myself better than any psychiatrist!” but that’s obviously hubris. There are a million terms, trends, tools and techniques I’m completely ignorant about that would peel away layers of uncertainty.

So I look for tools I can use. I like personality tests, self-assessments, things like that. It might be dangerous to put too much stock in any one, but using many can give broad trends that smooth out the spikes. Anything to look “under the hood,” so to speak.

Just because you drive the car every day doesn’t mean you know how the engine works, but at the same time you do have information a mechanic can’t have; you know all the subtleties of exactly when the weird noise happens or under what conditions the gear slips. You know the symptoms better, even if you don’t possess the tools needed to diagnose the actual problem.

It’s worth seeking out those tools, but don’t ever forget that you’re driving. The best approach is a blended one – evaluate yourself as carefully and critically as you can, and seek outside tools and expertise when you reach the limit of your own evaluation. How else can you improve?

Where do you do your best work?

For as long as I’ve lived on my own, I’ve always maintained a dedicated office space of some kind. When I was young, my father ran a business out of the home and had converted one of the first-floor bedrooms into an office for his work, and to this day that room in that house is still his “office.” He’s long since retired, but he still has a room configured that way. It looks exactly the way you think it would look, being the home office of a man who spent his entire career working with audio/visual equipment and electronics.

Mine were always significantly neater (I’m far more of a minimalist than my father), but I also always kept a space like that. I didn’t have my own business like my dad did, but at many points in my career I did various freelance things, and even between them I’ve always liked having a specific space for writing and other projects.

When people make decisions about their careers, they’re often motivated by things other than (or in addition to) salary and job description. The “side perks” are often equally important, like commute time or office culture. One of these perks that is more and more desired and sought-after is the ability to work remotely at least some of the time. That was never high on my list of priorities – I didn’t have strong feelings either way about it. Despite this, I’ve found myself in roles where I work 99% remotely for the past half a decade.

Since I already had a home office (I always do), and didn’t really seek out remote work for that reason, I haven’t given a lot of thought to my work environment. I just worked where I was. But in those five years a lot has changed. My number of children tripled, and the amount of stuff they have has increased by a factor of approximately 100. The amount of noise they make has increased to a level incomprehensible by man.

So for these and other reasons, I’ve decided to try out a co-working space. I’m sitting here right now! I found a great little one less than ten minutes from my house, with a very reasonable price point and all the amenities I need for my work and other projects. In fact, I came here late last night and had some of the most productive few hours of work I’ve had in a while (it’s available 24/7, a huge selling point for me).

The additional benefit was not only high-productivity work hours, but when I got back home I just… didn’t work any more. A historically difficult thing for me. But I just didn’t unpack my laptop.

The problem you run into when you don’t make deliberate decisions about things is that those decisions get made anyway, they just get made in fuzzy default ways by the universe. So me just sort of sliding into “working from home” as my default without taking the time to really establish what that means, especially in the face of a growing family, meant that there were a lot of negatives. The lines between when I was working and when I wasn’t became less clear. I was both always working (bad for the home life) and always available for my family (bad for work productivity). So in many ways I got the worst of both worlds.

Now I’m aiming for a “best of both worlds” situation instead. A co-working space means I can put clear bright lines between my work time and my home time, but the fact that I still technically work remotely means I still have 100% flexibility to be available to either as I need. If one of the kids has a doctor’s appointment or something, I don’t need to be “in the office,” but it being otherwise available to me means I can be at work when I’m at work and home when I’m home.

December is going to be intense on both the work and the home fronts, so a little structure sounds wonderful. What environment do you craft for yourself to maximize your sanity?

I tend to keep my schedule very full. My day-to-day activities are usually pretty meticulously planned out, with dedicated time slots for writing, exercise, work, this blog, etc.

But of course, special projects and opportunities happen all the time, and I like to make sure that I have the ability to take advantage of those opportunities when they arise. Since I can’t imagine just leaving hours of time listed as “TBD” on my calendar each day, it’s important to have a framework for deciding what to de-prioritize when the time comes.

This is important for a few reasons. First, if you don’t have a system in place to help you decide what things to put on the back burner, you’ll just end up being scattered and stressed and doing less of everything. It’s totally okay to say that you’re going to take a break from your painting classes because you’re in a marathon soon and you really want to train hard for it. If you don’t do that, you’ll just end up being stressed at painting class because you’ll be thinking about how you’re not training for the marathon and then on marathon day you’ll do horribly because you didn’t train. If you chase two rabbits…

The other reason is that having a formal system for back-burner-ing certain tasks makes it far more likely that your temporary hiatus won’t turn into a permanent one. If you let yourself get stressed to the breaking point, you’ll throw up your hands in frustration and say “ugh, I just can’t do painting at all right now, maybe I’ll pick it back up again when things are calmer,” and then even after the marathon, things won’t ever be “calmer” and those brushes will gather dust and guilt alike.

If you instead just accept yourself as a vessel with a limited volume for rocks, you can be okay with planning the ebb and flow of your activities. You can say, “Okay, the marathon is on June 8th, so I’m going to officially sign out of painting classes until then. The next class after that is June 12th, so I’m pre-registering for that one now in order to keep myself on track. And I let my class know I’m in the marathon so they can cheer me on!”

I’ve taken on a lot of special projects in the last few weeks. Most of these will be done by the end of the year, but before then they all represent a pretty intense time commitment (did I also mention I just accepted a promotion at work, because I’m a crazy person?), so there are definitely some things that have to get de-prioritized for the next month.

As much as I’m enjoying my new higher reading levels, it’s not a short-term essential, so for December I’m going to take it off the “to-do” list. Same with my daily workouts. Both of those things are long-term important to me, but neither will kill me to take a month off as long as I’m active about planning when I’ll pick them back up. And neither will fall off completely – I enjoy doing both so I’ll still lift both weights and books in whatever spare minutes I find, but I’m going to prioritize my overall mental health by allowing myself to say that these other projects are both just as enjoyable and more short-term beneficial.

It feels strange, especially to me, to say that an active part of healthy goal-setting is taking certain goals off the table for a time. But I’m not superman, and I have to stop pretending that it’s a failure if I can’t spin twenty plates at the same time. Neither are you, so keep your goals healthy and achievable. And thus, may you achieve them!

A good idea and a dollar fifty will get you a cup of coffee.

The world is absolutely dripping with good ideas. They’re mostly useless. No matter how good they are, they’re ephemeral – they don’t do anything. It takes a tremendous outpouring of work to make anything real of them.

But good ideas aren’t actually necessary to make work worthwhile. You can avoid ever having a single moment of epiphany but still be very successful and happy with hard work, diligence, and prudence. Brilliance is not required.

Work is not only what turns ideas into value, it’s also the crucible in which ideas are tested. Ideas always seem brilliant when viewed in your own mind, but only exposure to the hard light of day can tell you for sure. Even telling a few other people takes some work – figuring out how to explain things, taking the time to do so, etc. And 90% of ideas won’t pass even that basic test.

Of course, even if ever single “good idea” was truly as good as its originator assumed, you still couldn’t act on them all. Ideas are infinite; juice is finite. All humans, whether the originators of ideas or not, need some criteria to decide what ideas (our own or others’!) to put our work towards.

One of the best ways to make your idea stand out is to work on it yourself. Think of ideas like single snowflakes – infinite in variation and possibly beautiful, but fragile, weightless, and lacking in any appreciable impact. A million of them gathered together might have some weight, but on their own they do little. But starting with a single snowflake, you can start to pack more and more snow around them, gathering momentum and weight; that’s the work you put in. Soon, that snow can be shaped into anything – and the bigger it gets, the more people will notice. If the thing you’re building appeals to them, they’ll want to help.

You can build a fine house without ever having a brilliant innovation in carpentry. But a brilliant architectural thought is meaningless without work. Cultivate the habits of work, then – don’t just sit around thinking. Do. The ideas, if they’re truly good, will come as they come.

Had quite the adventure today; while heading towards Pittsburgh and about 100 miles from home, my two youngest kids simultaneously got sick all over the car. And while it might have been possible to power through it, we were much closer to home than to our destination and the possibility of them being more than just carsick (which they’ve never been before) caused us to decide to turn around. Perhaps I was too cautious, but I don’t want to have two of my kids be sick over a long weekend hundreds of miles from home. Personally I’d rather have them not be sick at all, but if it has to happen, I want it to happen in my own fortress. You do you.

But despite the setback, we’re still thankful for a lot. I’m happy that despite the troubles, we have the capabilities to address them. Right now all my kids are in their beds, and for the moment appear not to be vomiting. That alone is worth celebrating, but the reality is even in the face of disaster we’re a capable bunch and we endure. Hard times give way to easier ones soon enough. Don’t forget as you come upon difficulties in difficult times, like when your kids get sick on a holiday road trip and your phone gets run over by a passing truck as you try to help them (yup), that there’s still something else to be thankful for, somewhere, even if it’s not what others expect. After all, it’s your gratitude to offer and your life to live. You do you.

Immanuel Kant says that we need to always treat people as an end in themselves, and not just a means to an end. I think that’s extremely true, but I also think that will often mean violating the ol’ Golden Rule – “treat people as you’d like to be treated.”

First, I’ve never liked the Golden Rule. I think it should be “treat people as they’d like to be treated,” because I’ve discovered that treating people the way I’d like to be treated often makes them very upset. I’m weird and I don’t like a lot of the same interaction patterns as other people, so imposing that on others doesn’t seem very kind. But I’m all for treating people the way they’d prefer.

Except, of course, that lots of people would prefer to be treated as means to and end rather than as the ends themselves – even if they don’t know it.

Imagine a young man who spends a disproportionate amount of his income on a flashy car in the hopes of attracting mates. He doesn’t want to be seen as an end in himself; he wants to be seen as a means to wealth and status and prestige for the people he’s attracted to. Or a less negative example: A doctor doesn’t want everyone to treat him only as an end; they probably wouldn’t pay him very well for that. For at least some people (his patients), he wants to be treated as a means to better health – and he, in turn, wants to treat patients as sources of income, not as dear friends.

Being treated as an end in ourselves means that we have to accept that the buck stops with us. We aren’t conduits towards something better for the people who choose to share parts of their lives with us. We don’t add value to them because we make them richer, or healthier, or wiser – we simply are. Take us or leave us.

Sometimes when you look at someone as an end, that end is found wanting. We can easily find ourselves frustrated or upset because the end isn’t what we want it to be.

If you have to put a nail into wood and you pick up a wrench by mistake, it’s natural to say “this wrench isn’t very good at pushing nails into wood.” But it makes no sense to be upset with the wrench for not being a hammer. It never was a hammer – it never could have been, and it can’t become one now.

So you either love it as a wrench or you get frustrated. But what does it mean to “love it as a wrench?”

We are the sum of our actions, and we work every day to meet our needs and desires, and of those around us. We need means for that. If people are deserving of love and respect simply because they’re people (and I believe they are), then that must naturally apply to all people – all the many billions of them. That doesn’t then help you much when deciding which of those people you’ll go to in order to get your car or your kidney fixed. You can be a phenomenal wrench, but that doesn’t mean I have any bolts that need tightening.

Maybe Kant just meant that we should never reduce someone to only being a means; even if that’s the role they play for a day or a year in our lives, we should always remember that there’s a person of intrinsic value behind the white lab coat or flashy car. We should take a moment with every cup of coffee we buy or phone call we make to reflect on the real, breathing, complex person on the other end of that interaction. And treat them as they’d like to be treated.

Travel and exploration for the sake of travel and exploration is a good thing.

That old canard about only using 10% of our brains isn’t true. But we definitely use less than 10% of our environment. Whole streets we never drive down, whole stores we never go into. Whole forests we never smell, whole lakes we never cross.

Go get lost. Flip coins to see which way to turn at an old country road. Disable your GPS and look around.

This isn’t just for the sublime beauty of it. It’s also because your environment is useful. There’s all sorts of cool stuff out there that can make your life better, and it’s worth it to take a look around and see where it is. It’s worth it to see what fits with what.

Go wander.