Think of someone you admire. Someone close to you. Now imagine asking them, “What should I do today to be a better person?”

Do one of those things each day, big or small. Try not to do anything they’d be mad at you for. Work your way down the list.

There’s not enough goodbye in the world. I wish I could say it until you didn’t have to leave.

Whatever keeps you above water for a few extra minutes increases the odds that you’ll find a permanent solution. Grab whatever you can.

Let’s imagine someone has a problem that’s costing them a thousand bucks. You have a solution that will fix the problem, and you sell that solution for a hundred bucks. Shockingly, they don’t want to buy your solution. You’re frustrated because it seemed like a pretty clear win/win situation. Don’t be frustrated! Instead, let’s look at the reasons this happens:

1. Certainty. How certain are they that this solution will actually fix their problem? Even you aren’t 100% certain, so they’re significantly less so. If they think your solution only has a 5% chance of fixing their problem, then the solution is only worth 50 dollars to them – less than what you’re selling it for.
2. Problem Misidentification. They might not actually agree that their problem is costing them a thousand bucks. Maybe they think it’s less severe. Not every problem has an easy price tag. Someone with bad advertising for their business might not agree on what it’s costing them to not fix it.
3. Source Misidentification. Maybe they do agree on the cost of the problem, but they disagree about the root cause, and whatever they think the root cause is won’t be affected by your solution. Their water bill might be a thousand bucks a month, and you’re selling a plumbing service to fix the leaks for a hundred. That’s a great deal, but if they think that the high water bill is actually caused by their children showing for too long, then your solution doesn’t address that.
4. Alternatives. Even in the scenario where they agree on the source of the problem, the cost of the problem, and the likelihood of your solution fixing it, they still may not feel like your solution is the best one. Maybe someone else out there can fix it for 80 bucks.
5. Immediacy. Budgets are real. Spending a hundred bucks to save a thousand is a no-brainer, but if the spend is a hundred thousand to save a million? Even if you agree on the solution itself, you might just not have a hundred thousand bucks laying around. Even if you do, it might be going toward solving problems that are costing even more than a million bucks.
6. Trust. Of course, all of the above questions have to get filtered through the lens of belief. Your solution could directly address the root cause of the most important and expensive problem they have with a high likelihood of success and with no better alternatives, but do they believe that?

So you set out, essentially, to sell someone a thousand dollars for the low price of a hundred dollars. They turned you down. If every one of the above points was addressed, then a “no” would be insane. So, how do you address every point?

Solve certainty with statistics. If this solution worked for this problem in 95% of prior cases like yours, then that’s close to a 95% likelihood that it will solve yours, too. Solve for problem and source misidentification with data and discovery. Show them how to identify and label their problem and make sure they get to the same conclusion before you do anything else. Solve for alternatives by being easy and effective. Remember, finding an alternative doesn’t mean that alternative is better, even if it’s cheaper. And the cost of searching is non-negligible when you have a costly problem right now! Be easy to work with, offering low-stakes contracts or easy revisions if they find something else, and they’ll rarely look. Solve for immediacy by making sure they can see the return on investment quickly – if you can solve a thousand-dollar problem for a hundred bucks, can you solve 200 dollars of their problem for 20 to get started? That frees up operating capital and lowers risk, if there’s some version of that you can do.

And you solve for trust by doing all of those other things. You don’t ask for trust until you’ve shown that you deserve it.

So the next time you try to solve a problem, remember what they need to get there. The win/win isn’t always visible from both sides at first. And it’s your responsibility to get it there.

We have a hierarchy of needs that we require from our jobs or careers. These needs must be met in order; we can’t care about higher-order things until the basics are covered.

The very base of the pyramid is the job itself. We need to have some sort of source of income, our employment. Until that need is met, it’s hard to think about things like pursuing a passion or deeper purpose.

The next level up is Steadiness. We need to feel like the money is coming in predictably, that our employment is reasonably secure, and that we aren’t one errant sneeze away from losing our job. If we’re in that kind of fear state, we can’t think higher.

Once those two levels are covered, now we can start thinking about a team. We want good coworkers, pleasant managers, etc. To some extent this level affects the level below it, but until we’re generally not going to be picky about our colleagues until we’re sure we can be without threatening the basic employment. (But this is why you can’t win people over with a pizza party if they’re worried about steady employment – they’re too low on the pyramid for them to care about team-building yet!)

If we have steady employment with a good team, the next level is caring about advancement. Once we feel like the job is safe and has good people in it, we want to start growing and building. We want to put down roots and get promoted. We want to build that team, not just be on it.

The highest level of the pyramid is passion for the work. The other rewards have to be met before most people can really dedicate themselves here. It’s hard to be passionate about work, even work you love, if you can’t pay your rent and your boss is a jerk. Asking people to care about “the mission” under those circumstances rings hollow.

Understand where people are in the pyramid of job/career needs, and you’ll understand how to help them and motivate them.

The big block of ice will melt faster if you break it into smaller pieces. Increased surface area. So it is with big tasks – simply sub-dividing them is progress. Things start moving on their own.

The larger the task or more frequently you perform it, the greater the impact of finding ways to automate as much of it as you can.

If you do one load of laundry every two weeks, then the benefit of any improvements in efficiency is pretty small. You’re probably fine doing it the way you’re doing it. But if you do four loads of laundry per day because you have a particularly large and messy family, then it’s absolutely worth it to find ways to improve that system.

“Automate” can mean a lot of things. It can mean finding ways to save labor via technology, but it can also mean delegation or outsourcing. For instance, if you actually were doing four loads of laundry per day, it would almost certainly be worthwhile to hire a laundry service and then do something more productive with the enormous amount of time you’d save.

Your own mental and physical effort can only stretch so far, and you can’t make more hours in the day. If you want to scale, automation is the key that unlocks your cage. Invest the time to look for solutions.

This Too Shall Pass, he said. Like Vonnegut; So It Goes. And it will. It will.

It will.

When you have a non-Newtonian fluid, like oobleck, the harder you hit it the more resistance it gives back. You can crack it with a hammer, but you can also slowly push your finger into it with almost no resistance. Go faster, and it sticks.

Sometimes life feels non-Newtonian. You can’t go faster, you can’t push harder. Tiny and slow.

There is no pain.

You are receding.

A distant ship.

Smoke on the horizon.