I warn you in advance that this is going to be a weird post.

First question: What is a sandwich?

This has prompted a fair amount of debate! You might even find yourself, upon reviewing this chart, getting irrationally mad at up to 8 hypothetical groups of people. I’m going to give my answer, but I’m going to give it closer to the end of this post. Hold on to that thought for now!

Next, we have another question that raises some fair amount of debate: How much of something is a “heap” of that thing?

The tricky part of this thought follows basically this idea: If you have 10,000 pennies in one spot, that’s probably a “heap” of pennies (assuming they’re all just piled up and not organized in some other way). If you remove one penny, do you still have a heap? Sure. So that means that “A Heap of Pennies – One Penny = A Heap of Pennies,” which means literally one penny is a heap. Heck, it means zero pennies is a heap!

My solution to that fun little puzzle is that “heaps” aren’t things. They’re descriptors, and descriptors don’t have concrete definitions, even as nouns. They’re just words we use to transmit ideas but that don’t have Platonic Ideals.

A wolf exists. There is a specific kind of thing that is a wolf. We’ve categorized it pretty deeply; there’s a specific type of DNA that tells cells to grow into Canis lupus, and the resulting creature is distinct from other types of creatures. If I ask you “what is a wolf,” you can give me a pretty concrete answer that doesn’t depend on a lot of outside factors.

A “pet,” on the other hand, isn’t a distinct thing. It’s a descriptor. There’s no single definition of a “pet” that doesn’t rely on a relationship to an outside entity. Even though it’s a noun, it describes a thing more than defining it.

I think “heap” is like “pet,” not like “wolf.” It’s a word we use to describe something, and its relationship to other things. A heap describes a penny’s relationship to other pennies (nearby in large amounts!) and also to us (in a pile that’s too inconvenient to count!). There’s a Platonic ideal of a penny or a wolf, but not of a heap or a pet.

Or a Sandwich.

See, I told you I’d give my answer. On that chart above, I’m a “structure purist, ingredient rebel.” I think “sandwich” is a descriptor, and what it’s describing is how food is arranged, relative to other food and relative to the person eating it. I don’t think it matters what the sandwich is made of, in the same sense that a pet can be anything and you can have a heap of anything. But also, I wouldn’t call a flock of birds a “heap” just because there are many of them together, nor would I call a television a “pet” just because it stays in your house and makes noise. For descriptor nouns, form is important but substance isn’t. Therefore, a sandwich can be any food at all, but it must follow the form of something “sandwiched” between something else.

Was there a point to this post? Yes – I’ve now had this discussion at least 3 times, and I never want to have it again. So now I can just link this blog post. Also, I write whatever I want, that’s why!

While I’ve mentioned before that I rarely seek out arguments, sometimes arguments seek you out.

When that time comes, I’m not afraid of conflict. I think one of the most valuable skills you can have is the ability to confront an uncomfortable situation head-on. Many people would give away their lives by inches rather than face a potential few minutes of confrontation, and almost no one defends that as a great choice – it’s just the default for them.

I don’t want to diminish anyone’s social anxiety. I have plenty (PLENTY) of my own weird foibles and some people are genuinely terrified of uncomfortable situations like that. But even those people generally want to improve on that metric, and so I’m going to lay out my method for using visualization to get over that barrier.

Let’s say you have a small conflict that has been thrust upon you – your server at a restaurant has brought you the completely incorrect meal. Not a small mistake, but clearly they brought an order probably meant for another table. Some people would think nothing of telling their server, but I also know people who would just eat an entirely incorrect meal rather than bring that up.

(Incidentally, in many cases I would just eat the meal too – but that’s because I would probably view it as an opportunity to try new food! But I’m also the kind of guy to say “surprise me” to servers in restaurants all the time.)

Assuming that you’d really rather have the meal you actually ordered, try this visualization technique. Imagine you politely and considerately, though firmly, called the server over and explained that you’d received an incorrect order. Then imagine the most wild, disproportionate response you can.

Say it out loud to whoever you’re eating with. Say, “I’ll call the server over and let them know that I ordered a chicken salad platter and they brought me shrimp scampi. First, the server will burst into tears, followed immediately by screaming. They’ll yell that I’m an abusive, horrible monster who hurled slanderous insults at them. The entire restaurant will start booing me and even throwing things at us, and the manager will be forced to eject us from the restaurant. They’ll call the police and claim that I assaulted the server physically, and the entire restaurant will back them up and claim they witnessed it. I’ll be arrested and the judge will be the server’s grandmother and she’ll throw the book at me. I’ll do 5 years in state prison for assault, and my cell mate will have been a server and they’ll hate me for what I did and I’ll die in prison.”

See if you can say it with a straight face.

By the time you’re done saying it, you’ll have overshot even your worst (actual) anxieties by a country mile. Compared to that ridiculous hypothetical, anything else will seem small and tame, and it’ll be much easier to just call the server over and ask for your chicken salad.

Try it next time you’re about to live a worse life because of fear of rocking the boat a little. At worst, you’ll give yourself a good laugh. But at best, you’ll see how much of a molehill that mountain really was, and step right over it.

Make it easy for people to help you.

Imagine a friend asks for a ride to work as a favor. They say, “Hey, you work near me, so could you give me a lift in tomorrow? Just swing by my house and knock on the door; when I hear you knock I’ll get up and get ready. I start 30 minutes after you, so you’ll probably be a little late because I don’t want to have to get up any earlier. And I’ll smoke in your car, cool?”

How likely are you to want to give that person a lift?

Now imagine they ask in a different way. They say, “Hey friend, since you work near me, could I grab a lift with you in the morning? I’ll walk over to your house and I’ll be there before you’re ready to leave; just let me know when and I’ll be there. And you don’t have to take me all the way; you drive right past 5th Street, so if you drop me off there it’s only a few blocks for me to walk so it won’t be out of your way. I’m making sandwiches for my lunch tomorrow; can I make you one?”

You’re probably much more likely to say yes to that very reasonable request! What’s the core difference?

It’s not just politeness. The person in the first scenario could have said “please” and “thank you” all day, but their request was still far less reasonable. The core difference is that in the second scenario the requester made it easy for you to help them.

Too many people miss this lesson. If you’re asking for a favor, make sure that the person you’re asking has to do the absolute minimum amount of work to complete the favor, and you’ll engender far more good will. If you don’t know how to perform some mechanical operation on your car’s engine, and you ask a mechanic buddy to take a look, don’t have him show up and you’re sitting in your house watching TV. Make sure the car is in the garage, the hood is up, there’s a flashlight nearby, you have any tools you own available, etc. Do everything you can right up to the point where you can’t before tagging in a favor.

Asking someone for a reference? Write it for them and ask if they’d be willing to send it. Or even just ask them if you can drop their name, and they don’t have to do anything. Want someone to bake you a cake? Make sure you’ve bought all the ingredients and have all the mixing bowls and pans ready.

Hopefully you get the idea.

This even applies to more passive activity that isn’t direct requests. Make it easy for people to find you, to learn about you, to engage with you. Live in your world and put information about yourself out there that will let people strike up conversations with you. Don’t hide from the world.

Sometimes I see people on social media complaining about their job search frustrations, saying “no one will give me a chance!” But when I dig deeper and try to learn more about them, they’re a ghost – except for every few weeks, a similar post with similar complaints. I have no way of learning more about them to see how I could help, or to promote them to other people. I want to help you – don’t make it hard for me.

Don’t make it hard for anyone.

No one belongs anywhere.

Every atom in the universe is in motion. Nothing ever truly rests, no matter how stable or permanent it might seem.

People grow and change. Objects rust and decay. The world spins.

Don’t chase a set of circumstances as if you can hold onto them. You can’t. You’ll run and run and run. Enjoy the moments that are there to be enjoyed, and cultivate a pattern of them. Cultivate the ability to find more, and to be okay with their passing.

Make sure you’re happy in motion.

If the FDA is too lenient with its testing or approves a drug too early, dozens or maybe even hundreds of people could die. It would be a national scandal, and if you heard about it you’d likely be at least a little upset. If the FDA is too conservative with its testing or approves a drug too late, many times that number – tens of thousands – could die because of the lack of the drug, but you’d never even notice.

If we take as a given that the FDA attempts to be neither too lenient nor too conservative, but also take as a given that no one is perfect nor has perfect information and sometimes you have to make your best educated guess, which direction do you think the FDA is more likely to lean over time?

This is the concept behind the famous “broken window fallacy.” The fallacy is that breaking a window is actually a good thing for the economy, because look! The store owner has to replace that window, so he spends money! And then the glass-maker gets a new order, so he has more money to spend on tools! And the tool-maker gets a new order, so he has more money to spend on shoes! And so on. The problem is that while it’s easy to see the money spent on the window, it’s very hard to “see” that same money not being spent on whatever it would have been spent on in the absence of a broken window. That money still would have been spent, and still would have created a similar chain of economic activity, just in a different direction. But we never see that happen, so it’s hard to be emotionally affected by it.

In statistics, there are what are called Type I Errors and Type II Errors. A Type I Error is when you have a “false positive” – when you believe something to be true and act accordingly, but it wasn’t. A Type II Error is the reverse, a “false negative” – when you believe something to be false and act accordingly but it was true.

Even though they’re two sides of the same coin, there’s a HUGE difference between them. Did you know that people used to think tomatoes were poisonous? So folks didn’t eat them for a long time. Let’s take a look at two scenarios:

1. People think a particular food is perfectly fine to eat. They’re wrong; it’s poisonous. Someone eats it and gets sick, maybe even dies – but then the belief is immediately corrected, and no one eats that again.
2. People think a particular food is poisonous to eat. They’re wrong; it’s perfectly fine. No one eats it, so no one ever shows that it’s fine, and the belief persists.

That’s the difference between Type I Errors and Type II Errors. Type II Errors are Invisible Problems. Now, you might be thinking “okay, so no one eats that food, so what?” But let me expand on scenario 2 a little: What if the food that everyone thinks is poisonous isn’t just fine, it’s actually an incredibly healthy super-food that would double your lifespan if you ate it regularly? It would cut away fat, build muscle, and improve memory. But no one eats it, because they think it’s poisonous. No one ever even thinks to challenge this belief.

Why? Because the belief never challenges you. Falsely believing a poisonous fruit is okay to eat will have a pretty immediate impact on your life. But you could go your whole life and never even realize you’d made a mistake in the other direction.

Invisible Problems.

If you take a bad drug that the FDA approved and get sick, you’ll be pretty mad at the FDA. But if you just get sick from something else, you’ll never think to blame the FDA for holding back a drug you aren’t even aware exists.

Thus we have the second dilemma caused by Invisible Problems. Not only are we losing tremendous personal and societal benefit every day from these kinds of issues, but we’re also forcing each other – and ourselves! – into incentive structures that reward making the problems worse.

If you try something new and it sucks, you’ll be sad. If you don’t try something new that would have been awesome, you won’t even notice – that’s just the status quo. So most people naturally push themselves into a life where they’re way more concerned about avoiding Type I Errors than Type II Errors, even though the reverse might make your life much, much better.

And then we do it not only to ourselves, but to others. The FDA makes decisions that affect lives. Being too lenient might cost dozens of lives; being too conservative likely costs thousands every year. Despite this, they lean in the direction of being too conservative, because no one is going to yell at them for the thousands lost to that strategy, but people will get mad about the dozens that would be lost to the other strategy.

There are invisible problems everywhere. Sometimes there are ways to reveal them, almost always because of an outside perspective that may be less emotionally tied to the risks involved and thus more objective. Seek out those people. Let others examine your choices and live out loud.

Don’t just question your beliefs. Question what you don’t believe, what you haven’t even considered. You may catch a glimpse of an invisible problem, and if you can solve it, there’s tremendous value to be gained.

I find that I talk less and less as I’ve gotten older.

From pretty much the moment I could talk, you couldn’t shut me up. As a child, teenager and young adult, talking a lot was something I was known very well for. Fortunately I got pretty good at it; I was a story teller, and in a lot of contexts it worked to my advantage.

I had an easy time making friends, was the life of parties, and never had a hard time in social situations in general. It wasn’t long before the inevitable conversation happened where someone suggested I could make a career out of my gift of gab, and I did. My early years in the sales world were very successful. From there, I’ve transitioned into other things, but communication with other people has always been a fundamental part of my career track. Some of my best career highlights were enjoyable speaking engagements – I have the exact opposite of fear of public speaking. I find it exhilarating.

That’s still my career track to this day, but outside of work I find myself talking less and less these days. I’m more likely to be quiet in a group, observing the flow of the conversation without much active participation. I don’t start as many conversations with strangers just for the sake of it like I used to.

A lot of that comes from a place of growth, I think. I’m more deliberate with my speaking. More thoughtful about what I choose to let past the filters. I try to listen a lot more than I speak unless in that moment speaking is what’s expected of me.

I spent a long time honing my verbal communication skills, and I have no intention of letting them get rusty. But the hardest lesson to learn sometimes is when to shut up, and I think I’m getting better at it.

I do a lot more deliberate thinking these days, and I think that’s a contributing factor as well. More writing, too. Maybe when you do more of those things you have less time for talking, but maybe it’s because talking was, at least for me, a way to relieve the pressure building in my brain of all these thoughts and ideas that would never quiet. Now that I have a few more outlets for those things, the storm is a little calmer – or at least, I’m weathering it better.

I voice fewer opinions on things; I don’t like to argue and in more cases than you think that’s the only reason to make your opinion known. It’s good practice and worth the effort to get good at spotting conversations that are likely to become arguments and not engaging early.

Even though I think a standard policy of “talk less, listen more” is healthy, there have been some drawbacks to adopting it. When you’re known as a talkative person for so long, becoming more reticent can give people the impression that something is wrong, or that you’re upset with them or something. Unfortunately, once someone has this idea there’s virtually no way to shake them of it, but such is life.

I haven’t stopped communicating, and I never will. I love a good conversation, those gems of connection with another mind. I love swaying the hearts and minds of a crowd with the power of persuasion. I love hearing the laughter when I’ve told a good story. And I absolutely adore the wide-eyed wonder on my children’s faces when I tell them some interesting tidbit about their world.

But in between those moments, it’s worth closing my mouth, sitting back, and letting the rest of the world have its say. I learn more that way.

I was speaking with one of my clients today, and she said something absolutely amazing. We were discussing a particular niche celebrity that we both like, in particular because this celebrity works in a space that my client is pursuing as well. So I made some comment along the lines of, “Oh, so you want to be the next…”

Her response was as immediate as it was powerful: “No, I don’t. I want to be me.”

She’s not living in anyone’s shadow. She’s not trying to follow a trail someone else has blazed. She might work in that space and she might not, but she’s absolutely right – her life, in whatever form it takes, will look nothing like anyone else’s.

We can take our cues from those we respect, and model behavior after those we admire. But we are amalgamations; if we’re diligent, we take the best of many and combine it in our own way. No one is an island and we are influenced by our environment, but we should never strive to model ourselves 100% after one person. We shouldn’t even model sections of our lives (our careers, our love lives, our parenting styles, etc.) after someone amazing in that sphere. We should strive to draw our inspiration from a myriad, to get the best of them and leave the worst behind. Mix in a healthy dose of original thought and we might get somewhere worth going.

I’m taking that lesson from her, and I’m happy to have learned it. It humbled me a little, put me in my place. And now I have a little of that mixed into my own journey, and I’m stronger for it.

Some updates on writing a book:

So far, so good! I’m maintaining a pace of a little over 1,000 (very, very raw) words per day. I am absolutely not one of those people that spins straw into gold on the first pass. My first drafts tend to be very scattered and rambling, and benefit tremendously from editing. At the same time, if I try to edit as I go, paying attention to flow and structure, I cut my output down by 80% or more. So it’s definitely better for me to just power through it all and edit (or, better still, have someone else edit) it later.

Usually I end up happy with most of what I write, it just needs dramatically different structure than it naturally takes as it falls out of my brain onto the page. My thoughts aren’t always well-organized in their natural state.

Speaking of organized thoughts: I don’t know how I lived without Evernote. I’ve always been someone who created elaborate organization systems for any project I’m working on, but the actual format has changed on a case-by-case basis. I’ve used everything from Google docs to files & folders on my PC and so on. Evernote has replaced them all, and the versatility is incredible.

I think now that the path of this book is starting to look like this:

1. Get all the raw words written. That’s the clay from which I’ll sculpt everything else, and nothing else will matter until that exists. At my current pace, that should be within 2 months.
2. Deep dive on research. As I’ve been writing, I’ve been making notes of sections where I feel my existing knowledge is more limited. When the raw work is done, that will leave me with a very directed research list of things to dive into. I’m not sure how long that will take; that’s a good topic to ask my writing mentor (to give myself additional accountability and access to expertise, I’ve employed the services of a great writing mentor to go along on this trip with me – something I highly recommend for things you’re doing for the first time).
3. Re-write or add to sections based on new knowledge. Once I have my weak spots strengthened a bit, I want to make sure those sections are adequately updated.
4. First big editing pass, self-directed. At this point, I want to just sit down and look at the book I’ve written so far, from the perspective of an eventual reader. I’m sure there will be big things I want to move around, and I want to tackle the big, obvious pieces myself.
5. After that, it’s off to the process of handing it off to other professionals! I think that’s likely to be in February-ish of next year, but since this is very much my first rodeo, I’m aware that might change.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the progress so far, both in terms of the actual project and in terms of the personal value I’m extracting from this process. I’m enjoying it as I go, and learning new things. That’s the best part.

A few days ago I tweeted the following:

Due to it being re-Tweeted by someone with WAY more followers than I have, I received a pretty fun response. As a result, I’ve realized what I missed! A few true classics have to be included. Some of this may be controversial, but at the end of this post I’ll put my full top 10 list.

Since I have somewhat more than 280 characters available to me here, I’ll define my terms a little more. Truly great comedies aren’t just funny. They’re the kind of movies you cheer for and actually get you excited for the story. Stand-up comedy may have you rolling in the aisles, but it’s not a hero’s journey. A true comedy is enjoyable even when you aren’t laughing at a direct joke.

That being said, the truly great comedies waste very little time and squeeze solid humor into almost every frame.

The other impact though is on your life when the movie ends. If you’re repeating the jokes to your friends, incorporating them into your own humor, and seeing their effect on cultural trends for decades to come, then it fits this bill.

The Simpsons was like that. It wasn’t just funny – you were funnier because you watched it, and the country was funnier because it incorporated that humor into our culture.

Okay, here’s the list! Once again, these aren’t ranked – how can you compare such masterpieces? Just watch them all!

1. Animal House
2. Blazing Saddles
3. Clerks
4. Super Troopers
5. Office Space
6. Airplane!
7. Anchorman
8. Caddyshack
9. Spaceballs
10. Monty Python and The Holy Grail

This is certainly not the list of the only ten funny movies. There are many greats that will split your sides. I think a few, like Dumb & Dumber, just barely missed the list. Others are cut mostly because they’re brilliant, but better works by the same people are on the list already. Whatever, I don’t need to justify my choices – go watch whatever you want!