“Some people don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.”

We have tolerances for pain and tolerances for damage. Fire will inflict pain before it inflicts damage to most people, most of the time – and mostly, that’s how we want it. If fire did damage to you before it hurt you, we’d have all burned up long ago.

But pain is a powerful motivator. So powerful, in fact, that we sometimes need to shut it down (or at least, lessen it) to do something which will damage us – but which must be done. I don’t want to be a slave to my “pain/damage” index if my child is in a burning building. I need to be able to take some damage to accomplish a goal.

That’s a button that can break easily. If we push our pain down below our damage too often, we can permanently cross the wires. This is especially true for non-physical pain. Sometimes something hurts us emotionally very badly, but we push past it to accomplish something. Maybe we do that one too many times, and we lose the sense to come in out of the rain.

Pain of all kinds is an early warning system. We need to push past it sometimes, but honestly we should listen to it more often. You can be out in the pain so long that you forget how to come back out of it.

Get a drill. Go spend good money – as much as you can afford – on a really good drill. Take good care of it, and it will pay for itself a hundred times over every year. Seriously, drills solve so many problems. You can fix ninety-eight out of every hundred problems you encounter with a drill.

Drills should be up there with fire and the wheel in terms of inventions that have benefitted humanity. This isn’t even just a home-owner thing. If you live in an apartment, on a boat, in your car – if you have room for a drill, get one. And if you don’t, throw something else away because very few things will be as useful to you as a drill would be.

Someday, I will be gone. Some part of why I maintain this blog is the idea that my children (or maybe even grandchildren) will someday look to this for the advice I can no longer give them in person. So I try to talk about how to think clearly, how to be a good person, and how to understand your fellow humans. But also sometimes, the best advice is just very, very down to Earth: get a drill.

You can learn to save humanity tomorrow. Today, fix the door.

If you ever want to kill me, just give me a clever and repetitive puzzle in a room with no clocks or windows. I’ll starve to death.

It’s a natural human impulse to have an opinion on everything. Everything requires your input, everything deserves a “take,” and you need to decide everything that comes within your reach. It’s so ingrained in us that we perceive its absence in others as rude! If you and a friend are going to dinner and you ask them where they’d like to eat, you get frustrated when they say “I don’t care.” You take them not caring about where they eat as if they meant they didn’t care about the entire encounter – including spending time with you.

This is absolutely an impulse worth fighting. Life becomes incredibly free and joyous if you just let most of it happen. You can’t control the flow of the river anyway, and trying to make too many active choices is like trying to get the river to take a new shape by splashing a few handfuls of water in new directions.

Make large decisions, when they matter. When things will kill you if you don’t pick A over B, go ahead and exert your control over the world. But letting all those little things go is a marvelous way to live. Embrace “I don’t care” as a valid – even stellar – response. We shouldn’t care about most things, so we can care deeply about the few things that matter.

There’s a trap you can fall into when you’re working really, really hard for something. Sometimes you’re striving so diligently for something in a specific way that you miss that it’s come to you in a different way entirely. You’ve focused on the task rather than the result, and you don’t even realize you’ve gotten the result!

As a general rule, any time you’re really intense about something, stop every day or so and make sure you say “I’m working this hard because I want XYZ to happen. What would it look like if that happened in another way?”

We focus so much on what’s going out, we sometimes miss what’s coming in.

Being comfortable with discomfort is a keen and convenient superpower.

Have you ever been really cold, maybe outside in a winter storm? You do all sorts of weird little things: your teeth chatter, you shiver and shake, maybe you even dance around a little.

You know what? None of that stuff makes you any warmer. In fact, some of it makes you colder!

(The best thing you can do if you’re stuck outside and it’s cold is to find a place that isn’t windy, and then just hold still. Your body will warm the air around you and it will become an insulator, but if you disrupt the warm air by bopping around, it’s less effective.)

A long time ago, I was stuck in that situation. I tried something new; I told myself to just “be cold.” As in, don’t try to fight it. I relaxed my body, purposefully letting my shoulder and neck muscles go slack. I let my jaw go loose so my teeth wouldn’t chatter. And you know what? I was cold. But that’s it. I was as cold as I was before, but I was significantly less disturbed by it. I wasn’t in pain or uncomfortable. I was just cold.

Our reactions to negative stimuli aren’t always counters to those stimuli. We think they are, because we never really stop to question their effectiveness. But frequently we just do stuff when we’re tired, angry, lonely, hungry, upset, etc., and that stuff isn’t doing anything except making us more uncomfortable.

Sometimes the thing to do is just be cold until it passes. At worst, you don’t waste effort and add to your own discomfort. At best, you think more clearly and find an actual solution to your problem – which is always better than being left in the cold.

You’ll do many things to benefit yourself. Some of those things truly are “for yourself” – purely to enrich your own existence. If you watch a beautiful sunset or enjoy a stunning piece of music, you are enriched. If you eat a little healthier and feel better as a result, that’s an improvement. Such things can truly be for you and you alone.

Other things don’t actually improve you much if other people don’t know about them. If you want to learn a new skill for the purpose of achieving more success in your career, then just learning the skill isn’t enough. Other people need to know about it, too. If become one of a handful of people in the whole world who knows a particular programming language, that doesn’t help me much if I keep it a secret!

Humans mess this up a lot – in both directions.

Many humans (not all, obviously) tend to over-signal the stuff that should be for the self, and under-signal the stuff that should be a part of their public brand. They seek validation because of the music they listen to or the food they eat, but then don’t appropriately broadcast their skills and abilities that they’ve learned specifically to help others!

I get it. Things like our aesthetic habits can be a way to find community – and if you’re doing that, great. But if you’re just sharing pictures of a salad to share them… well, take some time and try to be comfortable in your own presence for a while. And take that same impulse to share and direct it towards the things you feel less confident about. You don’t want to share that you’re learning something because that’s a level of vulnerability that isn’t carried by a picture from your jog. But that’s why you should do it.

Align the right patterns of self and signal. Those being out of whack is a cause of a great deal of ennui.

The little secret treats are better than the bigger, obvious ones. It’s the seeking that makes it good, not the having.

Some problems aren’t the kind you can solve yourself – they’re the kind created by, and therefore only solvable through bureaucracy.

These are the worst kinds of problems. But there are some secrets to solving them efficiently.

First, the most important skill you can master is how to identify people who cannot help you at all. This is most of them. 100% of the time, the first person you talk to will not be able to help you, even if they wanted to, which they do not. What you must do is quickly identify these people and then be incredibly nice to them. You have to hide your contempt for their position and remember that ultimately they are people who aren’t out to get you, specifically. They’re just part of a horrible system.

Remember though, while they absolutely cannot help you, they certainly can hinder you. And they will definitely do everything they can to do so if you’re not nice. Powerless people trapped in a soulless system often take any opportunity they can to become petty tyrants, so don’t give them a reason. Be an absolute sweetheart, every second. Your goal is just to get past them as quickly as possible, and being nice is the best way to do that. Believe me, you may feel the urge to let your frustration out, but that’s just pouring concrete around your own feet. You can’t bully these people. You can’t “customer is always right” them. Consequences be damned, it’s just too satisfying for people in their position to squash a miserable complainer, so don’t be one.

Be nice. As nice as you’ve ever been. And quickly move inward until you meet someone who actually has the combination of authority and/or intelligence to help you.

And then be nice to them, too! It’s good to be nice to everyone, but I’m telling you this because in this situation you will not want to be nice. You’re only here because you’re frustrated and irritated and you’ve wasted your afternoon trying to solve this stupid problem that wouldn’t even BE a problem except for these very people. It’s natural to want to scowl.

Do not scowl.

Be as kind as you’ve ever been in your life. You have absolutely no way to destroy this bureaucracy. You can’t “teach these people a lesson.” You can’t even make them care, even for a second. Their system won’t let them care, even if they’re the kind of people who naturally would. So don’t try to win any moral victories through self-righteous posturing.

Just be nice, nice, nice until you get what you want.

Then get out, and try to make it a long time before you have to do it again.