The wind doesn’t always blow. It doesn’t always rain. The sun doesn’t always shine (at least, where you are). But these are powerful resources – how we harvest them is what matters.

Are you ready when the wind blows? Do you have your sails unfurled, ready to capture the wind when it comes?

Some people don’t know what to do with good luck when they get it. They get a sudden windfall and they scramble to do something with it, most of it slipping away before they can. Because when they didn’t have it, they didn’t prepare.

You have to prepare for good luck as much as you have to prepare for bad. Whether you end up needing a sail or a tent, you need canvas either way.

What would you do today with your good luck if you got it?

A few days ago, I was discussing a problem with someone. He predicted a bad outcome to the problem, but then apologized for “being a pessimist.”

I told him that pessimism was a non-factor, and not to worry about it. The universe will do what the universe will do, and pessimism doesn’t affect it at all. For the things we can affect, we need The Comprehensive View.

The Comprehensive View is how you solve problems. You have to simultaneously hold a few viewpoints in your mind that seem contradictory from an emotional standpoint, but aren’t. These viewpoints are:

1. Things are currently bad.
2. Things aren’t as bad as they could be.
3. Things might get worse.
4. Things can get better.

None of those are mutually exclusive, but they evoke different moods. “Things are currently bad” feels defeatist or “pessimistic,” but it’s just an observation. “Things aren’t as bad as they could be” seems optimistic while “Things might get worse” seems fearful – but all of these observations are just mapping the landscape. And you need to map the landscape in order to find a way through.

Things are currently bad – why? Things aren’t as bad as they could be – what should we prepare for? Things might get worse – what would we do if they did? Things can get better – how can we make that happen?

Forget pessimism or optimism – both of those are modes of thinking that yield agency to chance. Instead, map your terrain and solve your problems. That’s The Comprehensive View.

My mother turns 70 today.

There isn’t enough space in all this blog to tell about how amazing she is; I’d need as many days as she’s been alive.

There’s an interesting point that happens where you start to “catch up” to your parents. Of course you both age one day every day, but the ratios change. When you’re five years old, your parents might be anywhere from around five to eight times as old as you, on average. By the time you’re in your forties, they might not even be twice as old as you anymore. That ratio feels meaningful.

My mother cleared basically every hurdle of modern life – a long and fulfilling career with a solid “brass ring” retirement that she now enjoys; a 40+ year marriage; a loving and solid family, both immediate and extended; many life-long friends with countless memories of grand adventures; vibrant hobbies and life experiences. If I can say the same at 70, my life will be a clear success. I am inspired by her.

And to top it all off, she did all that while remaining the kindest, saintliest person you’d ever meet. She’s a blessing to us all, and she is a constant reminder to me that if you’re clever and diligent, you never have to be vicious.

Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you.

It is virtually impossible to “uncrumple” a piece of paper. Once you crumple it up, it’s going to have creases and bends pretty much forever.

You can still write on it, though.

Some things can’t be fixed. But that doesn’t mean the broken thing doesn’t have its uses, too.

Sometimes curiosity is a driving force. It propels you to explore and experiment, to seek answers to important questions. It pushes you to greater action.

But not always. Curiosity, as incredible as it is, can also be a sticky tar that traps you in place. If you’re curious about the future or the present, it’s often the former. But curiosity about the past can be the latter.

Backward-looking curiosity can cause you to over-analyze, to dwell, and to constantly second-guess yourself until you’re paralyzed. You can’t move forward because there’s still so much to discover about what’s already happened!

But here’s the thing: there always will be. You will never finally turn over that last stone or solve that final riddle that makes everything that came before make perfect sense. You’ll never reconcile the past that was with the past you wished for.

You can align the future of your dreams with the future that’s coming, though. And curiosity about the path will get you there. So let the burning desire for knowledge and insight rage in your heart! But make sure it’s powering a steam engine taking you into the future, not melting you down into immobile slag.

You can’t make “half an attempt.” If you attempted it, you attempted it.

Maybe you could do better! But that’s true even of your best efforts – there’s always room for improvement. So don’t be down on yourself about “half a try.” You got in there, you put numbers on the board. That’s effort. Anything off the couch is effort.

Do it again tomorrow.

I was reading a book to my children tonight, and one of the characters told another something that the second character didn’t believe (even though it was true). The second character, incredulous, called the statement “ridiculous.”

My middle child, aged 7, said: “Just because something is ridiculous doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.“

I felt that was worth memorializing. It’s solid wisdom.

Certainty sells.

One of the best ways to sound certain and maintain the illusion is to make claims that can’t be disproven. You see it in any opinion that catches on – a certain claim that you can’t really falsify. Much of religion works this way, along with things like the healing powers of crystals and stuff like that.

But here’s the thing: I like a lot of things with strong claims attached, even if I don’t believe the claims.

My middle child collects rocks and crystals and just about any little trinket she can get her hands on. She tells me their stories and their special powers, and she’s no less certain than the people who say that those crystals can align your chakras or whatever. But it makes me smile. It makes me happy to hear those stories.

I can put a “healing oil” in my house because it smells nice and I like it. It doesn’t need to be more than that. We make the claims not because we’re selling the thing, but because we’re selling the certainty. People don’t really care if you get the crystals, they care that they be seen as someone who knows things. Someone who’s certain.

But some things just smell nice, and that’s okay.

Sharing hurt is a real bond, necessary at times. So is taking the hurt for someone else, so that they can heal. Awful tragedies can happen in life – and when they happen to someone you love, you hurt with them. You let them pass their hurt to you, because that’s what it means to love them. You carry it farther away from them, release it where it doesn’t harm them further, like a wild animal far from civilization. Then you return to carry more.

We’re not very good at guessing, we humans. We’re confident when we shouldn’t be and have no inherent statistical sense. We make up stories instead of leaving room for skepticism. And we think ourselves prescient.

There’s no way to defeat this problem permanently, though there are some tactics you can employ. One way I’ve thought to try to defeat the ever-present hunch is to limit my exposure to the (useless) information that gives me hunches.

Here’s an example: job interviews are worthless. Everyone – everyone – will argue with me here, but the science isn’t even close to controversial on this: there is absolutely zero correlation between performance in a job interview and performance on the job. Even if “job interview skills” translated into “job skills,” humans simply can’t make effective judgments of those skills in an interview setting. In practice, a job interview is a total hunch farm. If you whittle down a candidate list to a top 5 based on things like their resume, credentials, and/or trial projects, then you might as well pick one of those 5 at random. You have as good (if not better) of a chance of picking the top candidate as you do by interviewing them and deciding, and it’s faster and cheaper.

Of course, no CEO will take this information and use it to make cheaper, faster, and better decisions about hiring by eliminating job interviews at their company. Because even if it were true, that would be scary in its own right. People don’t like knowing the truth, which is that virtually no one can predict things well – stock picks are voodoo, political punditry is street theater, and job interviews are people flexing for the future ability to claim great business savvy when they’re accidentally right once in a while.

So for me, I’d rather just not get the hunch-producing information in the first place. In the surprisingly frequent circumstance where additional information just causes me to think I know more than I do, why bother?

There’s an old Robert Heinlein book that I love called Tunnel In The Sky. There’s a scene where a young man about to go on a classic “big space adventure” asks his older sister, a veteran Big Space Adventurer, what kind of gun he should bring. She tells him: none. Most space monsters, she says, can’t be killed by guns at all – but a gun gives you false confidence and you get killed because of it. But if you have no gun at all you’ll be terrified all the time, and that will keep you alive.

This feels like that – I don’t want something giving me false confidence. I want to be confused and uncertain when I should be, which is most of the time. Because then I’ll have to think as critically as I can just to make it through the day.

I would rather be uncertain than wrong, as long as I can be.