Today in the car, my oldest daughter told me that she broke her glasses during gym class.

“But you’re wearing your glasses now,” I replied.

“I know. I fixed them with the multi-tool you gave me.”

Someday, my daughter will win an Oscar or cure cancer or walk on Mars or something, and I will be very proud. But probably not as proud as I am today.

Am I being a diva right now? Am I a terrible parent? Am I bad at my job?

Probably not.

Self-awareness is tough. If you even have the inkling that you might be deficient in a particular category, then you’re already more self-aware about that category than about 90% of your fellow humans. Which means, statistically, you’re ranked well above average in the actual manifestation of that quality.

Bad parents don’t generally wonder if they’re bad parents. They just assume, without ever thinking about it, that they’re great ones. They lack the self-awareness to even question their behavior, so it doesn’t improve.

And this pattern generally holds. If you’re worried whether or not you’ve got some bad quality, then you also care whether or not you do. So you’re likely taking at least some steps to be better – and that’s more than most.

So don’t sweat that stuff. You can seek to improve without worrying that you’re currently bad. Even being aware of a scale likely puts you in the top half of it.

How realistic should you be?

Setting aside the fact that no one has a perfect grasp on the probabilities of the universe and so anyone’s personal view of “realistic” is naturally tempered by their own biases, I don’t even think it’s necessarily a benefit to be perfectly realistic all the time.

I think there’s absolutely such a thing as “having your head in the clouds,” and too much of that can hurt you. If you spend all your time wanting things that can’t happen, that’s a recipe for a lot of heartache and unfulfilled potential.

But the only things that are truly “realistic” are things that are already real. It’s realistic – neither optimistic nor pessimistic – for me to want a desk, because I already have one. Even the most mundane of ambitions, like “I want a new chair for this desk” might not manifest for a whole host of reasons, and even goals that seem ludicrous the first time you think of them (like “I should write a sci-fi RPG book and get it published by a gaming company that I love”) can turn out to actually happen at some point.

Your life becomes inoperable if you don’t spend most of it grounded on incremental, attainable goals. Lots of things about adult life just require daily maintenance “close to the action,” as it were.

But what is life without some dreams? We aren’t just calorie-processing machines, tunneling our way through our food like earthworms until the machinery breaks down. The very fact that we have the capacity to dream means we should, at least a little.

My oldest daughter, quite the artist, asked me to paint with her the other night. Painting isn’t one of my hobbies and I don’t find it more enjoyable than any particular other way to spend the time, but I readily agreed. Partially because I’ll almost always say yes to activity requests from my children, but also for another reason: my hands can paint, and my mind can think in pictures, and if I can do that, I should.

My body and my mind can make singing, dancing, painting, writing, dreaming. And so – at least on occasion – I should do all of those things. I should not spurn the gifts I have been given.

There will come a day when I cannot. When I can’t even dream anymore, let alone achieve the dreams I have. For that reason, I will let my head drift into the clouds, now and then.

I bought my oldest a new bike today. I got rid of the car seats for my two youngest, replaced by the next, lighter stage. I’ve now read Matilda to all three of my children (who all adored it equally as much).

Leaves fall, flowers bloom.

Tastes change. Pain moves around some, though its total quantity remains more or less constant. Your eyes soften a bit.

The steps are farther away. Yours and everyone else’s.

Today I’m going to teach you how to spot a certain kind of scam, and maybe even scam the scammers a little.

First, let’s talk about a nerdy economic term called “rent-seeking.” I won’t go into too much econ theory here, but basically rent-seeking is “bureaucratic parasitism.” It’s when a system is complex enough that you can make money off the complexity itself by taking advantage of how difficult it would be for the average person to recognize what you’re doing – notably without doing anything actually useful or valuable..

There’s more to it than just that (as I’ll explain), but let’s start with an example. There are some professions in which mistakes can be especially costly or dangerous, such as surgeons or airline pilots. For these professions, there are often lengthy certification or licensing processes to make sure that the people practicing these things have the proper skills and demeanor to do so safely. These institutions become a part of the background tapestry of our culture, and gradually people start to hear words like “unlicensed” or “uncertified” as very negative descriptions. You’d never willingly get operated on by an “unlicensed surgeon,” right? And this is true even though the average person has absolutely no idea what certification actually entails. It’s a rational decision for most people to outsource their evaluation of professionals doing a complex job to a complex system.

Okay, so that’s the system we have. Now let’s imagine our imaginary villain Joe. Joe figures out that the system of his society works this way and comes up with a scheme to extract value from that system without providing anything in return. Here’s the scheme: He starts a certification board for dog walkers.

Some people walk dogs for other people, either as a living or a side hustle. With all due respect to anyone who does this (and contra to situation comedies), it’s trivially easy. There is absolutely no need for anyone who does it to be licensed, certified, or have government oversight. Joe knows this. But he’s betting you don’t. He’s betting that he can scare people with terms like “unlicensed dog walker.” And he’s betting – critically – that anyone who initially recognizes this for what it is will have more to gain by playing along than by calling him out.

Step one is to get a few dog walkers on board, probably with some cheap or even free “courses.” These courses won’t provide any information at all, of course – but they’ll let the pros who take them call themselves “certified dog-walking professionals” or put CDWP after their name on LinkedIn or whatever. That, in turn, will let them command higher prices from customers who would rather pay a little extra to make sure their precious Labradoodle isn’t in the hands of some uncertified maniac, some loose cannon just out here doing God knows what with these dogs.

Maybe some noble dog walker recognizes this as a sham, but what’s he going to do? Say no? Joe even offers him “professional credit,” using his existing experience as a dog walker to automatically qualify for the certification. This guy can get CDWP for free, or he can raise a big stink and refuse it. But for what? So future employers who put “CDWP Required” on job descriptions will pass him over? It’s easier just to go along with it, and that’s part of why the scam works.

Once people start to realize that they can get higher wages as a dog walker by having this certification, it becomes worth money. Now Joe can start charging people to get certified, and they’ll pay it! They’ll pay it even though they know it’s bullshit. They’ll sit in those classes while some teacher pretends to teach them how to walk a dog. They know it’s bogus, but they also know that their customers don’t, and that getting this piece of paper is basically a ticket to increased future earnings indefinitely, so it’s worth rolling your eyes but holding your tongue.

So now Joe has created a little value-extraction machine that provides exactly zero benefit to society. He gets paid to certify dog walkers even though that process does nothing to make society better, and he artificially shifts wages away from some dog walkers (the ones that can’t afford the time or money for the certification) towards those willing (and able) to “play ball.” In every way, society is worse off – but Joe pockets the money.

Over time, this can become so embedded that people start forgetting they’re scamming people. The teachers at Joe’s “school” start to think they’re actually providing some benefit and that people who don’t attend their classes genuinely can’t walk dogs properly. The students believe it too. The classes get more arcane and complicated over time, because “arcane and complicated” is a great way of hiding the fact that it’s all bullshit to begin with.

If Joe is really successful at his scam, he can get the government to pass a law actually requiring dog walkers to be certified. Not everyone pulling this scam is this successful, but believe me, they’ll all try. After all, once it gets enshrined into law it becomes almost impossible for society to shift to any alternatives even if some disruptors see behind the curtain.

So that’s the scam. That’s “rent-seeking.” People like Joe take advantage of the way a system is structured to become a leech on the society supported by that system.

Now let’s introduce our unlikely heroine, Maya. Let’s say Maya is a young woman who wants to walk dogs in her neighborhood as a way of supporting herself. By this point, the “Certified Dog-Walking Professional” courses are thousands of dollars and take months to obtain, but people won’t hire a dog walker without CDWP behind their name. But Maya is a smart critical thinker with a nose for bullshit. She reviews the course lists and talks to a few other dog walkers and quickly figures out that absolutely nothing of value is taught in those classes. She recognizes a truth that has become an unthinkable taboo in her society: She knows perfectly damned well how to walk a dog.

This isn’t a matter of hubris; she’s not “too good for the rules.” She isn’t a dangerous maverick, putting society at risk by hopping into the cockpit of a passenger jet with no training. This is just someone who’s seen the trap before she got caught in it.

So what does Maya do? She figures she can scam the scammers in the same way. She can use the very nature of the scam to beat it.

How? She just… puts CDWP after her name. That’s it. She lists herself as a “Certified Dog-Walking Professional.”

How is this using the nature of the scam? Well, remember – this scam can only exist in the first place because people will outsource their evaluation of their professional service providers to a third party because that evaluation is too complicated to do on your own. Which means she knows that exactly zero of her customers are ever going to request to see her certification. She’s breaking the rules, but the rules were a massive, immoral scam to begin with.

Is Maya going to take down all the villains with this plan? Probably not. Even if she turns out to be the best dog walker in the world and wins the Nobel Prize for Canine Exercise and Transportation then dramatically reveals to the world that she did it all without official certification, she’d probably just be seen as an exception by most and as a cheater to a few.

Sadly, the Joes of the world are always going to exist. Which is all the more reason why you should be like Maya as often as you can. Sniff out the bullshit and opt out whenever you can. You can’t destroy every trap, but you don’t have to be like all the other insane people willingly walking into it, either.

This requires a level of personal responsibility. It’s not immoral to lie about being a “certified dog walker.” It is immoral to lie about being a licensed heart surgeon. Where’s the line? There isn’t one clear, bright one. Which is why the scam works in the first place; people don’t like having to take personal responsibility both for determining what they can do and for determining what others can do. They’d rather outsource all of that critical thinking, even if it means opening up a massive vulnerability to guys like Joe.

So the scam is always going to exist, and there will always be victims of it. But you don’t have to be one of them. If you can walk a dog and you want to, do it – you’d have to be certifiable not to.

“I can’t believe he gave it all up to go live on a farm!”

Really? You can’t?

I can’t wrap my head around people who don’t. I recently read a story about a high-level, long-tenured (more than two decades), and well-compensated executive at a major tech company who quit and became a goose farmer. There were all these shocked statements from industry colleagues who couldn’t believe he’d walk away from a high-paying, high-status job to do that.

But… really? You can’t?

Look, whatever your version of “goose farmer” is, that’s the goal. Not the thing you’d do if you were rich, but the thing you’d do if you didn’t have to care about money. Because those are very different thresholds! Long before you’re rich, you’ll reach a point where if you’re careful and wise, you can stop worrying about money anymore. At that point, whatever you do for work becomes a conscious choice in a way that’s fundamentally different from when your survival depended on your income potential.

Getting to that point might take a long time. And if we’re being truthful, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get to it. It requires some luck, a lot of determination, a good strategy, and time. Enough time, in fact, that some people lose the thread. They forget why they were grinding in the first place, and they blow right past the finish line and never see it. They keep making more money and gaining more status until they die.

If that makes you happy, then do it. But I don’t think it does. I strongly suspect that people who could have long ago become goose farmers and have instead stayed in their command centers have something fundamentally wrong with them. I’ve seen the seed of that wrongness take root in me, sometimes.

Video games – old school video games, like from the 80s – had two ways they could end. You could die, or you could “beat the game.” Either way, the game was over. You weren’t supposed to play it forever. That’s what modern life is like. The goal of this life is to stop. And there are only two ways out: you can die, or you can beat the game. Either way, it ends eventually.

One way is better. On that farm or boat or mountain or non-profit or stage is who you really are. They’re waiting for you, with some geese. Don’t let them wait too long.

There’s a critical lesson in decision-making: patterns and rules are almost always better than human judgment.

(For an example, think about the book/movie Moneyball.)

Basically, if you create a list of criteria that determines what kinds of decisions get made, following that rule will almost always be better than trying to judge individual cases. People don’t like that, but it’s true. We don’t like being “impersonal.” Everyone thinks they’re the exception, or that they can spot exceptions, or whatever. But the measures work better.

But then again, here’s the caveat to that – the measures are written by people. And those people might be just as bad at writing the initial rule as they are at following it.

Let’s say I’m trying to predict which horses are going to win the Kentucky Derby. I know it would be a bad idea for me to just look at the horses and try to “get a feel” for which ones look lucky or fast. So instead I create a rule: I’ll sort all the horse names alphabetically, assigning a value of 1 for A-names, 2 for B-names, etc. Then I’ll do the same for the jockey’s last name. I’ll total the values and bet on the highest one.

That rule will definitely keep me from trying to make snap judgments if I follow it. But the rule is dumb!

So there’s the rub – you have to be sure that the measure isn’t, you know, terrible. And you can only get there by testing. So sure, use rules – they help cool your emotional bias, if nothing else. And they help you get actionable data that has some element of consistency to it.

But measures aren’t magic, and don’t forget it.

Remember the Serenity Prayer? “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.“

That “wisdom to know the difference” part is pretty important, but I mostly see it applied in one direction – as advice to people who are constantly railing against the immutable aspects of the universe. Sometimes it rains, and you can’t do a thing about it – so quit complaining.

But lately I’ve noticed that more often than we’d like to admit, we humans make our mistakes in the opposite direction. We turn things that are very much under our control into immutable facts of the universe in our heads. We often do it in order to escape the shame we feel about the choices we’ve made.

But as long as we keep doing that, we’re going to keep making those same choices. We don’t leave ourselves any alternative as long as don’t even accept that we’re making a choice to begin with.

It’s painful to admit, of course. But it’s absolutely necessary. Don’t hang your head and say “I have to go to work today.” You don’t have to! You choose to, because you’re choosing one set of consequences (being miserable but making money) over another (not being miserable but not making any money). But you’ll never be able to explore alternatives as long as you hide from yourself the fact that you’re making an active decision about your life. As long as you use tricks of language and willful ignorance to disguise the fact that you own the agency over these outcomes, they’ll never change.

That’s the first step. No matter how miserable the action is, accept that you’re choosing it. When your friend asks if you want to go on a road trip or your partner asks if you want to spend a romantic evening at home, don’t say “I can’t – I have to go to work.”

Instead, say: “I do want to, but I’m choosing to go to work instead. I value time with you, but I value my continued employment more.”

You will not like saying that. But it will be true – until it isn’t, and you change.

When your brain doesn’t want to do something, it will look for any possible escape route. Prisoners want to escape prison, too – but they can’t just walk out the front door. If they want to escape, they have to disguise the fact that they’re doing so. They can’t just dig a tunnel in the yard; they have to hide it behind a Rita Hayworth poster.

Your brain will do that, too. Your subconscious brain won’t say “I really don’t want to work out today because I’m lazy and unmotivated.” Instead, it will try to distract you. It will hide the escape tunnel inside things like “better organize these pillows” and “you know, you aren’t feeling so well today, you should lie down.”

We are not a unified being. We have many voices, often at war. The crafty ones try to slip past the more vigilant ones.

Recognize the escape tunnel for what it is, and get to work.