We all have defense mechanisms.

Things that our minds do automatically in response to danger, real or perceived. When someone throws a rock at your head (which I hope isn’t a common occurrence), a whole lot of things happen at once without you consciously engaging them or in many cases even realizing them: You squint your eyes tightly shut in order to protect them; you duck away from the projectile; you throw your arms up to put them in the path of the incoming object; maybe you yell or make some other involuntary noise.

All of those things happen in many cases before you’re even aware of the nature of the danger. An object is hurtling towards your head – it could be a rock, a baseball, or just a soft stuffed bear your kid threw at you that couldn’t possibly hurt you. Doesn’t matter – the flinching is automatic. Your brain doesn’t waste time carefully evaluating the event before responding.

In terms of objects lobbed at your dome, that’s probably best. But we flinch in a lot of circumstances, not all of them flying-object-related. If you lose your job, you “flinch.” Suddenly you do a lot of things that you aren’t necessarily deliberating on; they’re reactions out of fear. You might take sudden and drastic measures, like immediately rushing back to a prior job that was a toxic environment for you or sell your car for quick cash even though you’ll definitely need it. If you get broken up with, you flinch too – maybe you engage in bad behavior or burn bridges.

We don’t like getting hurt. We flinch to avoid it.

We have a good long history of evolved responses to heavy objects flying at us, so our flinch responses are pretty well-tuned to protect us efficiently from that. We don’t, however, have any real evolutionary or in many cases even personal history tuning our flinch responses to not getting that promotion or having your car broken into. But the part of your brain that engages in response to danger and screams in your ear “don’t think, act!” goes into overdrive none the less. That part of your brain doesn’t know that it doesn’t actually have any good ideas – it’s never been its job to have them. Just to flinch.

So it’s worth examining our flinch responses. It’s absolutely worth looking at anything important to us and saying “what would I do if I lost this?” You don’t need a bullet-pointed emergency plan or anything, but if you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck and you’re very reliant on your job, it’s worth devoting some time to exploring the thought of losing it. The worst case scenario is you’re a little better prepared to calmly make good decisions if you do lose it; the best case scenario is you see actions you can take now to prevent the loss in the first place.

Reacting the wrong way to pain, danger and loss can often cause as much harm as the initial loss. Give a little thought now while you’re calm, or you might get two for flinching.

Which I totally didn’t know was a thing until today!

But it’s a great topic to write about, since I do indeed love books. I have five tattoos; all of them are book quotes. Books have always had a tremendous impact on me. I was every bit of the nerdy middle-schooler and angsty teenager that found a lot of solace in the written word. I’m going to share a few of my favorite books today, and why.

The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. My all-time favorite book. Simultaneously heartbreakingly bleak and endlessly hopeful in a way only Vonnegut could do. This book reminds me that your place in the universe is what you make it, and that’s a lesson we could all stand to learn.

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. One of the best love stories ever written. The characters are so tremendously raw and flawed and broken. The story is utterly devoid of any perfect or admirable characters, but you can feel each beating heart through the page. I’ve re-read this book dozens of times, and it’s amazing every time. Even more impressive when you read about the story of its author.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. This book changed my life. An absolutely incredible study of our cognitive biases and how they affect our lives – and what we can do about it. This book will hands-down make you a more effective thinker.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. This is the funniest book ever written. Hands down, no question. I’ve read it a hundred times, and I can still pick it up, turn to any page at random, and laugh hysterically. And like all good humorists, Adams also has a tremendous number of keen insights as well. (Note, I’m kind of blurring the line between the first book and the whole series, but the whole series is absolutely worth reading.)

Tunnel in the Sky, by Robert Heinlein. I’ve always loved mashups of the Sci-Fi and Western genres (Firefly was one of my favorite shows ever), and Tunnel in the Sky does it brilliantly. It’s also one of the best coming-of-age novels you could read, with lessons that stand the test of time.

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. This is the only book in my life that has truly terrified me. It’s the weirdest, most surreal book you’ll ever read. You’ll question your own sanity. You’ll get trapped by it. Don’t start reading it if you have to be somewhere. It’s perhaps the most original book I’ve ever read, and it’s a masterpiece. (By the way, you cannot e-read this one. You need a physical book. The author uses the book’s structure to reinforce the underlying themes of architectural horror in brilliant ways that preclude the use of an e-reader.)

Not a comprehensive list or anything, but those are just some of the books that have really stuck with me over the years. But no matter what you like to read, enjoy it – today and every day!

I don’t own any full-length mirrors.

That’s not a conscious, deliberate choice or anything. I don’t own lots of stuff. It’s just one of those things that never worked its way into my house.

But as a result of that, I’m usually pretty unfamiliar with how I look. I obviously have a bathroom mirror for shaving and combing my hair and such, so I don’t leave the house looking like a disheveled mess. But since my style of dress is very basic and utilitarian, I never need to check how an outfit looks or anything.

So every once in a while I’ll walk by something reflective enough to get a full-body glimpse of myself (or maybe I’ll see a rare picture of myself taken by someone else) and sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. I’ve been losing a lot of weight for health reasons, but a nice side effect is looking better. But since I don’t make a big habit of looking at myself a lot, when I catch that glimpse it’s a nice surprise.

That happens in other ways, too. If you try to stay relentless about self-improvement (and I do), but you also are doing it for the sake of genuine mental health and not vanity, you might not spend a lot of time looking at the results. You can catch a glimpse sometimes, and be surprised.

When I hit 100 posts on this blog, that was a glimpse. I wasn’t counting before that, and I only knew because the site sent me a little notification saying “congrats!” I was just writing to write – to think better. But suddenly here was this nice side effect of a decent backlog of posts I could look at.

This is a good technique, I think. Goals come slowly, over time. So if you look at them every day – well, a watched pot never boils, right? You can get discouraged because on a day-to-day basis, nothing visible might have changed. If I weighed myself today and then again tomorrow, I’d weigh the same even if I felt like I’d done a lot of work, so that’s discouraging. Instead, I only weigh myself every other week or so, because then I know there will have been a change as long as I’ve been staying disciplined about the action goals.

Sometimes someone will pay you a compliment about your work, and you’ll suddenly realize, “wow, I am actually good at my job – all the work I’ve put in is paying off.” Or you’ll see a smile on someone’s face that’s been going through a rough time while you’ve supported them, and you’ll realize that you really did make a difference after all the tears. Sometimes you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in the good you put into the world and into yourself, and when that happens, treasure it.

All the rules are made up.

If you were to sit down, over the course of hours or days or weeks, and make an exhaustive list of all the things you can’t do, you’d probably be wrong about 90% of it.

There are things you can’t do because of the laws of physics. You probably can’t lift a bus or make gold appear in your hand. But when people say, “Oh, I can’t do that,” they’re almost never talking about shooting lasers out of their eyes. They’re talking about goals they think are beyond their reach.

But those walls are made of smoke. You can walk right through them.

There is almost never a hard “can’t.”

I know a friend that loves brain teasers and puzzles, like mazes or crosswords or Sudoku. She’ll spend hours on one, loving every second of the mental exercise. She feels deep satisfaction when she completes one, but she also truly enjoys the process. Then I watched this same person slam her laptop shut in frustration after a mere five minutes of job-hunting. I asked her about the disconnect – why could she spend so long engaged in puzzles happily, but get so frustrated in five minutes of a task like applying for work?

Her answer was enlightening: “Because with the puzzles, I know there’s an answer. I know the solution is there, I just have to find the way to get to it. With ‘real life’ stuff, I don’t know that.”

How true that is! When we know we can do something, how difficult it is doesn’t seem to matter. How much we have to endure to get there isn’t a consequence as long as victory is assured. It’s the prospect that we’ll put in all this effort and time and pain and not get what we’re after that’s demoralizing.

So know this, my dear friend: You can absolutely succeed. I promise it. Just like with Sudoku and jigsaw puzzles, the solution absolutely exists. The puzzles are more complex, but the solution exists. You can know you can succeed – you just have to find the way to get there.

You can.

The path from where you are now to where you want to be is a lot like a maze. We’d like it to be a straight line, but that won’t always happen. But on the other end of the spectrum, we often think it’s just a dead-end wall, but that isn’t true either. The reality is that it’s just like a maze, with twists and turns sometimes, but with a definite path that leads where you want to go.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you see a job you’d really love to have and you think you could do well. But it lists requirements that you don’t meet. So many people will say “I can’t get this job.” That’s you thinking there’s a wall! You didn’t see a straight-line path, so you assumed it was a dead-end when in reality it was just a left turn. There are many paths that can lead to that job. If you don’t meet the requirements they’ve listed, but you still think you could do the job, then you must have a reason for thinking that! Write it down and turn it into a cover letter, and send it to the employer! Take that path down the maze.

You know what’s true about those “requirements?” I alluded to this in the beginning – they’re made up.

Here’s a peek behind the scenes at how these “requirements” get written: Someone in a company decides they have a need for a new employee in a particular role. There is only one true job requirement: “Be good at this job, please.” In an ideal world, they’d love to write a description of what the job is, and then say “Please apply if you would be good at this and make us more money than you cost, thanks.” But in an effort to not read ten thousand applications, they try to filter that down by adding requirements.

Here is a dirty secret: They’re guessing.

Now, these are often educated guesses. But guesses none the less. Theories. They’re looking at their existing team in that role and trying to set requirements that look similar to what their existing team has. If it’s a new role, they’re trying to look at other job listings with the hope that those are accurate (they’re not). They’re adding “safe bets” like a college degree requirement, even though no one could tell you exactly how that’s supposed to improve your performance for half the jobs out there. They’ll put “3-5 years’ experience” even though they have no data to support whether someone with that exact amount of experience is the best fit.

It’s all made up, and you don’t have to treat it like iron laws of physics. I talk a lot about employment examples because that’s my world, but this applies to anything – not asking someone out because they’re “out of your league” or not pursuing a hobby because you don’t think you have the background for it, anything.

Everything in the world that says “you can’t” is a rule made up by someone else, and they haven’t got any more brains than you have. There will be a great many things you want to do where the first option, the straight path, doesn’t work for you. But that’s just the first option! To think that means you can’t do it at all just because you can’t do it the most obvious way – well: says who?

Your first loyalty must always be to yourself.

You must love yourself before you love others. You must value yourself before you love others. You must care for yourself before you care for others. Dancing is optional, but encouraged.

This isn’t selfishness. It’s critical. Even if you are a truly altruistic person who wants to help the world, you have a limited set of tools and resources to do that with, all wrapped up in this thing we call “you.”

If you aren’t keeping your tools in working order, you can’t build a house. If you haven’t learned to read, you can’t write for others. If you want to sacrifice for others, you need something to sacrifice.

You can’t be somebody’s rock if you’re a wreck. You can’t be someone’s mentor if you’re barely keeping your head above water. You can – and should! – do small good deeds no matter what your situation is, but in order to make a real and lasting impact you need to have your own house in order. That should always be your priority.

If you have $100 and you want to do the most social good with it that you can, giving it away is a bad step. Turning it into more money is much better. That’s true of your energy, your time, your heart, your mind. You can keep giving pieces of yourself away because you want to help others, whether they’re your family, friends, strangers, society. But eventually you’ll have nothing left.

Instead, make sure you’re self-sustaining first. Make sure you can give while still growing.

The key to almost all inter-personal success is to improve yourself first. Instead of trying to get a date, work on becoming date-able. Instead of looking for a job, work on becoming someone people would want to employ. Instead of helping society, become the kind of person that society is better off for having. Once you do that, you’ll find the other things – dates, jobs, societal impact, etc. – all just come naturally. They follow from the work you put in on yourself.

Sharpen your tools, improve your mind, be healthy and happy, make yourself a person you love. No matter what your goals are in life, you need to be your best “you” to accomplish them.

I absolutely love a good analogy.

Probably to the point of over-using them, to be honest, but I can’t help it. I like looking at things from more than one angle, more than one point of view. Finding a good analogy for a situation helps me do that.

“Spatial reasoning” is the ability to envision objects in three dimensions, even when you can’t see the whole object. So if you can look at a two-dimensional picture of a three-dimensional object and rotate it in your mind and correctly imagine what it looks like from all sides, you’re good at spatial reasoning. (Curious about this, by the way? Have a test!)

Analogies are like that, but for ideas. When presented with a situation, especially one that I’m trying to explain to someone else, I like to see if I can turn it around in three dimensions. Find a way of looking at it that unlocks different comparisons, because then new solutions might present themselves.

No situation is perfectly, 100% analogous to another. But especially if you’re feeling stuck, finding a different way to describe the situation can be a great spark for creativity. You might not know how to solve your original problem, but if you can compare it to a very similar problem and solve that, you might be able to turn that solution into something similar to your original issue.

Analogies can also be a great way to remove excess emotional bias from the equation. Sometimes we can’t find solutions because we’re too close to a problem, or we’re too emotionally invested in a particular way of looking at it. Creating an analogy that features the same fundamental problem but is “emotionally neutral” can help you realize that you knew the right answer all along, but it was difficult to admit.

Looking at my problems in three dimensions helps me solve them. It might not work for everyone, but I think anything that gives you a wider view of the world is a good idea!

I am very easily distracted.

I hear about this thing that lots of other people apparently do, which is “put the television on in the background for noise.” This utterly baffles me. I don’t have the ability. If I wander through a room where a screen is showing something, I’m either immediately utterly engrossed in it, or sometimes I manage to tune it out to the point where I don’t even register it was there. There’s no middle ground.

I can’t “half-watch” something. If I want to watch a movie, that’s what’s happening. If you say something to me while I’m watching the movie, I won’t remember what you said. If it’s important, you have to pause the movie and let me mentally switch gears in order to retain what you tell me.

If I try to listen to a podcast or an audiobook while driving, I won’t crash or anything, but I will absolutely miss turns and exits. I can only do those things when I’m on long drives where I won’t have to make any active decisions for the duration.

My brain just can’t seem to process multiple sources of information at once. My family jokes about it – even simple questions like “what do you want from the pizza place,” I’m incapable of answering if they ask while the TV is on, even if I’m not the one watching it. Either my full attention is being paid to the information source, or my full attention is being used to ignore it.

The information processing part of my brain is apparently a one-lane highway.

The benefit of that is that when I focus on something, I focus on it. I’m a laser when I’m in the zone on a particular task. The downside is that my house burned down while I was working on something else I’m not sure I’d notice.

It’s definitely a shame. I’d love to listen to more podcasts, and I audiobooks are often suggested to me when I say I’d like to read more, but I’ve just never learned how to do those things while doing something else. I once tried to put a podcast on while I was fixing something, and when I was done I realized that the podcast had ended and I couldn’t remember a single word.

This might just be one of my (many) flaws that has no fix, but I’m open to suggestions if anyone has good tips for either when to listen to these things (like activities I might be doing on auto-pilot that I don’t realize are good opportunities) or just techniques for focusing on more than one thing at a time in a way that actually allows the absorption of information. Give me your secrets, TV-on-in-the-background people!

A bit more than a month ago, I had the idea to just sit in a public space one day, and offer career advice to anyone that wanted it.

I was absolutely not sure how I was going to make it happen, or what the format would look like, or which of a million possible things would go wrong, but I didn’t really dwell on it. I just picked an arbitrary Saturday a half-dozen weeks in the future and announced that I would be doing it, and called it “Coffee Coach” (since I’m a pretty big caffeine addict, and also because I didn’t want to waste too much time thinking of a name).

I committed first. I could figure everything else out later.

The idea came from two pieces of information that were rattling around in my brain. One, the system by which people are matched with jobs is horribly, horribly broken. And two, I was actually pretty good at navigating that broken system. As bad as it is, it’s bad in certain predictable ways that I’ve had a lot of experience with. So I actually have some expertise that could help people.

In an ideal world, people wouldn’t need that help. In an ideal world, transaction costs would be minimal to the point of being negligible and potential employers would have good ways of correctly evaluating real skills and traits in people, instead of both parties having to maneuver through a byzantine and ever-growing system of proxies, guesswork and sometimes outright lies in order to get good people into good jobs.

We do not live in that world.

Until we do, I’ll keep doing my best to help people find the way through the thicket. Today I sat in a beautiful park in Philadelphia and did that.

It wasn’t a huge crowd. In fact, it was three people. But each of those three people came to me with worries, concerns, and problems. They felt stressed or stuck or anxious, and they were all struggling with some part of a system that is a huge part of almost all of our lives, yet that we’re mostly woefully unprepared for. And I helped them prepare.

They each left a little lighter. One of them had an interview coming up for a big opportunity, and she was worried she wasn’t good enough; we practiced and shared tips until she felt way more confident. Another has some circumstances that made it very difficult for her to find work, and was looking for advice on how to even look for things that could fit her specific situation; we talked strategy, brainstormed and found multiple ideas that could work. And the third was a recent graduate with no clear career path ahead of her who felt demoralized and intimidated by life; I listened, we talked, and we worked through a whole new way of looking at the world that left her energized and ready to try new things.

In the grand scheme of things, this might be small. But I got what I was after. I put out some positive energy into the world. I helped a small number of people in a small way. But those little bits add up. I’m happy.

We live in a big, big world.

Often people’s ambitions are too broad to start. They want to sell a product or service to a demographic that is way too large. I think a lot of the motivation behind this is the belief that if you don’t cast a wide net, you won’t have enough of a market to sustain yourself.

Let’s say you have a product or service aimed at people who work in education. Well, that’s a broad market, both in terms of your potential customers and in terms of your competition. There are lots of products and services aimed at people in education. You get easily lost in a crowd, it’s hard to get traction, and you can drop off easily.

Now imagine narrowing your focus. Instead of all education professionals, stick to just teachers. And instead of just teachers, aim your product at kindergarten teachers only.

Guess what? In the US, that’s still 160,000 people – because our world is so big that even very narrow niches have lots of people in them. But more importantly, owning a niche lets you become THE person in that niche.

“Is there any good organization software for education professionals?” Yeah, tons. “Is there a good organization program for specifically kindergarten teachers?” Yeah, it’s called KinderManage and it’s custom-made for exactly you! That’s a much easier sell.

I’m far more likely to engage with a product or service that feels directly tailored to my demographic than buy from a much larger company where it feels like I’m the one who has to change myself to fit them instead of the other way around.

Getting good at your niche lets you be the big fish in a custom-made small pond. You can pick your clients, you have way less competition, and you can become a major name. If you want to grow from there, it’s easy – because you established your reputation.

This isn’t just advice for entrepreneurs, either. Even if you’re looking for companies to work for, remember that smaller niches have less competition for jobs, too.

Don’t be afraid of specialization!