It’s natural to equate whatever your situation looks like to the overall health of the system you’re in. Whatever job you do, you think it’s vital to the company – and that the company not prioritizing that job means that they company is making bad decisions. If you paint, then if people like your paintings you say that the art community as a whole is thriving and healthy, whereas if your paintings are unpopular you think art has gotten too commercial and nobody respects true creativity anymore.

“What’s the world coming to?” laments the last beeper salesman or video rental store or horse-drawn carriage maker.

You can’t stand against the tide of the world. You can stay in one place, sure. But the tide moves regardless. If you want what the world offers, give the world what it wants. There’s fun stuff to do everywhere. Don’t get so committed to your thing that you’re doing right this second that you let it drown you.

The point of a goal isn’t always to reach it. Sometimes, the point is to orient yourself in a positive direction. In some circumstances, it’s quite positive to set a goal you know is unattainable, simply because striving for it every day is exactly what you need.

If you suddenly received a million-dollar windfall, what’s one thing you do now that you would stop?

What’s one thing you don’t do that you would start?

The answers to those two questions say a lot about you – and where you should put your energy. Most of those things don’t take a million dollars, they just take a belief in our own freedom, and we think that a huge check will come with that belief attached to it.

Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But you probably won’t get a million dollars tomorrow.

You could get that belief, though.

What would you do if you got really bad news – that was very delayed?

If you found out that a comet was going to strike the Earth in ten years, how would you react? Ten years is too far out to panic; even if I wanted to, I couldn’t sustain panic for that long. Knowing that the end was coming in ten years makes things seem… well, I don’t know. Giving up seems like the wong answer. I can have a lot of fun in ten years! And heck, I can’t even be certain that I’ll have ten years, comet or no. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, right?

Statistically, even on the day of the comet strike there will be people who die some other way. Certainty about one bad thing doesn’t remove all the other uncertainty about all the other things, good and bad.

And there’s always that outside chance, however small, that the comet misses. Maybe another comet hits it at the last second. Maybe humans invent an anti-comet rocket defense system within ten years. Who knows? It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Don’t let bad news about a distant day rob you of the close ones.

Most people react too quickly to problems.

I’ll use parenting as an example, but this is far beyond just a problem parents have. Let’s say you’re watching your young kid play in the backyard. You’re enjoying a book and some lemonade and they’re running around being a kid. Over the course of about an hour, that kid will do maybe 70 or 80 things that will look like they might turn into a disaster. They’ll pick up a rock, and some part of your brain will yell at you: “They’re going to throw that rock through a window! They’re going to try to eat it! They’re going to stab themselves in the eye with it! TELL THEM TO PUT IT DOWN!”

And of course, they aren’t going to do any of that stuff. They might put it in their pocket or use it to dig up other rocks, but it’s not going to be a disaster. If you wait 3 more seconds, you’ll see it. If you react immediately, you’ll not only give your kid a complex, but you’ll end up never reading that book and stressing yourself out and just going absolutely nuts.

This is most people, with most problems. An email comes in with a question about a project proposal you submitted. You freak out, your brain saying: “Did I forget to include that info? Did I do a bad job? Do I need to cover and scramble and come up with an excuse? Do I need to frantically drop whatever I’m working on right now and address this?” But if you wait, maybe 5 minutes later here comes the email: “Never mind, found the info on the next slide. Thanks!”

Very few situations will resolve any differently if you wait half an hour to address them instead of reacting immediately, but a large number will resolve themselves in that time. This is like the way animals do threat assessment: if you panic at the first sight of any predator, you waste so many calories running when you don’t have to that you’ll drop dead before any predator gets near you. Likewise, if you react immediately to every problem you’ll never live your life and you’ll end up creating more problems anyway.

Practice taking a calm measure of new information. Absorb, consider, then act. Reacting is an automatic response; it means the problem is controlling you, instead of the reverse.

All things are changing their shape over time. There is no such thing as static, no permanence. Nothing can be held. You can grow in the shape that matches the things you like, and you can nudge those things a little in your direction, too.

If you find something you haven’t paid attention to in a long time, its shape may be unrecognizable to you now. That doesn’t mean it can’t fit in the tableau of your life, but it may have to fit in a different spot. Or maybe there’s no gap that quite allows it, and nothing you’d prefer to shift to make it so. Sometimes this is just how things happen.

That too, is growth.

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. It’s very natural at my age for people to get into the “everything new is bad” mentality. Old movies were great, new ones are awesome! Old music was great, new music is terrible!

Look, here’s the reality: some stuff is great, and some stuff is terrible. It’s mostly evenly distributed across time, because it’s mostly evenly distributed across people who create it and people are creating stuff all the time.

If you love all old stuff and hate all new stuff, then you love a lot of terrible stuff and you hate a lot of great stuff. It’s easy to find examples that support your confirmation bias. Some old stuff IS great! Some new stuff IS terrible! But your “new” will be someone else’s “old” when they’re a cranky and nostalgic old coot.

Learn to let go of the worst of your artifacts, and make room for some rad new stuff.

Teaching people is a tricky thing. It requires a lot of faith and trust – not in the teacher, but in the student.

People who teach for a living in any capacity can shoot themselves in the foot by not starting with that faith. One of the most basic elements you need to trust is that the student wants to be there. This isn’t always a safe assumption, of course – if you’re a middle-school teacher, most of your learners are emphatically there against their will and you have to basically force them to learn. Of course, this is a clear case of the rules of the system actually hurting the learning process – if teachers were allowed to ignore the students who didn’t want to be there, they’d be much more effective at teaching the ones who did.

Most training professions that focus on teaching adults, whether college professors, corporate trainers, sports coaches, or anything like that should absolutely begin with the assumption that their students want to learn, though. You can’t care more than they do about their learning outcome. If you do, you’ll undercut their entire learning process. They’ll become passive and maybe 20% of what you teach will stick. Learning for a grade is radically different than learning for a skill.

The other major factor you have to trust, at any age level, is the existing skill set of your learners. It’s not just an incredible waste of time to try to teach things that your learners already know, it actively hurts the process of teaching them things that they don’t. If you start teaching a class of learners what they already know, they shut you out completely. They write you off, confident that they don’t need you. It also kills the rapport you need to build – nobody likes being talked down to.

When you teach, start with faith. Ask questions and be open, ready to hear before you start trying to dump your brain out into theirs. Use what you learn to target your teaching to the most direct, desired, and needed areas. Watch the learning bloom.

You can be the captain of a tiny rowboat, you can be first mate on a sailboat, or you can be part of the crew on a yacht. Which thing matters to you?

There’s not really a right or wrong answer here, but it IS important that you know what question you’re asking. Because some people don’t want to be “just crew,” even when their actual goal is getting to the destination quickly and safely.

I’ve seen this happen plenty of times, professionally. Someone is currently a VP at their company, and they’ve been offered a role as a mid-level manager at a different company. They balk, almost insulted. Nevermind the fact that the new company is a hundred times the size of their current boutique firm and the salary is double what they’re making now. No, gotta have that title.

Titles have their value, of course. But that value translates exactly two ways:

1. As a way of broadcasting the value of your contributions so you get more opportunities to do increasingly important/valuable work for increasing rewards.
2. Status games.

People get so hung up on Number 2 that they forget why it matters in the first place. Titles are a ladder. And you don’t climb a ladder just to stand on the higher rungs. You climb a ladder to reach something. If that thing is within reach, the ladder has done its job! Get the thing, don’t keep climbing right on past it.

You want to be captain of a tiny rowboat when it’s important that you demonstrate to others that you can competently captain a ship of any size… so that you can eventually captain larger ones. If you’re just trying to get to the opposite shore, get on the best boat, no matter what they call you.

(And yes, there’s absolutely value in “going your own way” and some people would rather take the rowboat for that reason… but if you’re going your own way, that’s not really about what you’re called, is it? You can call yourself Emperor Poseidon of The Seven Seas at that point!)