Whenever you stop yourself from doing something that you want to do because of fear, personalize it. Turn that voice into a person – imagine someone standing in front of you, demanding that you stop your attempt. Telling you that you’re not allowed. That he forbids it, in fact!

I’m not sure about you, but external people telling me I can’t do things tend to make me want to do those things a lot. So much that it’s probably a fault on its own, but hey – maybe I can turn it to some good here.

Because if I wouldn’t let Mr. Fear tell me that, why should I listen to the same words in my own head?

My first sales manager once explained to me a very poor sales technique that he would often see, as a way of warning me away from it. He said: “Never sell on rescission.”

“Rescission” is a fancy term for canceling a contract. Many states have laws requiring contracts above a certain amount to have a built-in period of time where the contract can be canceled at no penalty. Poor salespeople, eager to get the name on the dotted line, would use that as a selling technique. They’d basically say something like: “Don’t worry about signing right now; you have a three-day cancelation period so if you change your mind, you can always cancel it tomorrow.”

You can probably already see why that’s a bad sales technique. You’re practically asking someone to cancel on you, and you’re ignoring any reasonable objections they might have in the moment, when it’s possible that you could spend a little more time and find an actual solution that works for you and your client.

In any transaction, you have to not just sell the transaction itself. You have to sell the sale. You have to make the other party feel good about the deal they just made. Imagine you buy a cup of coffee for five bucks at a coffee shop. This is a pretty standard transaction, right? Okay, now imagine as soon as you handed over the money, the cashier yelled “No refunds! Hahahaha!” You’d probably not be enthusiastic about drinking the cup of coffee you’re about to get!

Perception matters. You should never make people feel like they just got taken – that’s not the way to get repeat business (or even to keep the business you just got). If you’re trying to build a strong foundation, you should make people feel thrilled to have made the deal with you. You should treat them even better after they’ve signed than you did before.

Unless, of course, you actually are scamming people. In which case… you know, don’t do that. But honest businesspeople can (and often do) shoot themselves in the foot because they don’t use basic sales techniques. In fact, the misconception that good sales professionalism is always shady is what keeps so many businesspeople from getting good at it, but really it’s just about savvy interactions that help all parties find what they’re looking for in mutually beneficial exchanges of maximum value.

And you get those by being good to people.

Sometimes you start a project of some kind and you don’t complete it. It happens. Do you remember “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle?” Let’s make a slogan for your old projects: “Revisit, Reclaim, Remember.”

Revisit: You can always come back to a project later! Just because it’s been a few days – or a few years – doesn’t mean the project can’t be picked up again. It’s right where you left it. Coming back to an old project can revitalize your creativity, even if you use that creativity differently now.

Reclaim: The bits and pieces of that project might become fodder for a new one. Started writing a book but never finished? Maybe the main character finds her way into the screenplay you’re working on. Our creativity is modular; use it where it needs to go.

Remember: You don’t owe anything to your past self. If you want to just remember – fondly! – the efforts of the past and the enjoyment spent on them, that’s fine. You don’t have to have finished something to have enjoyed it and gained something from it.

Don’t let the past weigh you down. If an old, lingering project feels like it’s tugging on you, figure out which of these three it’s asking you to do. Then do it – and be done!

You may occasionally find yourself being carried by circumstance. Something is happening and there isn’t much you can do to prevent it or even steer it. It happens – we can’t be in control all the time.

When you find yourself in this circumstance, I’ve often found the best thing to do is just take a nap. Some things can’t be helped! You got on the wrong train, maybe? Well guess what, it’s not turning around for you. Figure out when the next stop is, then rest your eyes. If you can plan a little, go ahead. But worrying wastes energy.

When you can do something well with minimal effort, go find the people for whom it’s the hardest.

Your inclination is often to “be around people who appreciate you,” and you think that means your peers. So if you’re good at gardening, you want to be around other gardeners. But if you’re really good at it and it’s low-effort for you to be that good, then you add the most value surrounded by people who can’t keep a cactus alive.

There is a cascade effect required for action to create change. A series of dominoes has to fall, and keep falling, for any lasting impact to be made. It’s the difference, in a way, between pushing a ball uphill and pushing it downhill; in the latter case, soon the ball will start rolling without you.

If you take an action that no one responds to, including yourself, change won’t result. But if you act, and someone else reacts, and then someone else reacts to that (and any of these people can be you, again and again) – that’s the formula for change.

It’s not just something happening. It’s a chain reaction. Sometimes you have to make a lot of things happen first – you have to rub those two sticks together for a long time before you get the spark that ignites the whole pile of wood. So keep at it.

Resources are generally good. If you have more food, money, time, etc. it’s generally better than if you have less of those things.

But there’s definitely such a thing as intangible “reverse resources;” boons that kick in specifically when you’re in need. We’ve all experienced the sudden surge of clarity and motivation that comes from being short on time. Predators get meaner and sharper when they’re hungry. We get careless when we have a lot of money, but a sharp frugality arises when we have little.

That’s not to say that you should put your back to the wall constantly in order to maximize your “reverse resources.” After all, those things kick in specifically to help us obtain the very resources we’re lacking – the predator’s senses don’t sharpen so it can go rock-climbing. The hunger rage kicks in so it can get food.

But we’re not wild predators. We have some conscious control, which means we can manipulate the balance a little. We can give ourselves these boosts if we’re careful. We can do it for fun – try taking a day trip with only cash, no phone or credit cards, and you’ll find the experience quite different. But we can also do it because we need to.

When we need to.

An old parable: A huge factory that produces millions of dollars worth of output a day has ground to a halt. Somewhere in the many hundreds of thousands of square feet of machinery is a malfunction, and until it gets fixed the factory is frozen. An engineer – a specialist – is brought in to figure out the problem. He walks into the factory, strolls over to one box out of thousands, opens it up, and turns one screw a quarter-turn. The whole factory immediately roars back to life. The engineer charges the factory owners ten thousand dollars. They’re flabbergasted! Ten thousand dollars to turn one screw? The engineer explains, no – ten thousand dollars to know which screw to turn.

In the beginning of your career, you don’t know anything. You don’t have any specialized skills. (And by the way, no you don’t, don’t pretend otherwise – if you think that your degree with zero work experience has made you an exception to this rule, then you’re going to find the first few years of your career extremely frustrating.) So the only thing you have to offer as value is your hustle – your willingness to work. You get, keep, and advance in jobs on the back of how much you’re willing to do.

Along the way, you learn skills. And at some point, you become the engineer. When you cross over that line, the way you manage your career should totally change. You no longer sell yourself based on how hard you’ll work, but on how much value you’ll create. Of course, your hard work in the beginning was creating value, too – but not nearly as much, and not nearly as certainly. Several employers may have had to take chances on you, and for some, that chance might not have paid off.

The thing is, many people don’t realize when they’ve crossed that line They’ve become experts while still thinking they need to break their backs to impress. People aren’t generally in a rush to tell someone they’re paying that they should be paying more, so you really need to advocate for yourself. And that means having an accurate assessment of what side of that line you’re on.

Talk to people. As often as you can, talk to professional peers who don’t have a direct relationship to you. Mentor some people, and be mentored by others. Know the lay of the land.

And when you cross that line, act like it.

Why is our favorite toy always gravity?

Think of all the different things kids – and adults, for that matter – do that basically boil down to playing with gravity. Swings. Sledding. Roller coasters. Jumping off of stuff into piles of other stuff. Slides. It’s all just different ways of falling down in a fun way!

Adults go skydiving, even. Bungee jumping. We never give up on gravity just being fun to mess around with.

People say that mankind has always wanted to fly, that we were jealous of gods and birds alike and that’s why we invented planes and space shuttles. I don’t think that’s right. Flying is fine, but I don’t think that’s what we were after, in our heart of hearts.

We were always just looking for cooler ways to fall.

I’m not saying this is a hard rule, but I’ve never met someone who didn’t draw their satisfaction from one of three sources: their family, their community, and/or their profession.

We’re social creatures. We want the respect and esteem of people we value. That can be your family, of course. It can be your professional peers. And it can be many forms of “community” – your neighborhood, the community surrounding your hobbies, etc.

But it always comes down to people, and it always comes down to adding value personally to one or more of those groups of people.

The sorts of deeply unhappy or unsatisfied people I know tend to be people who either don’t invest in at least one of those three groups or have mistakenly attached themselves to a “false group.” If you don’t have any close family, any communities you care about, and don’t have a profession you take pride in, then chances are you aren’t very happy. But you can also be unhappy if you think you have one of those things when you actually don’t.

People who don’t have one of those groups can find false, parasitical ones in lots of places. In the same way that a healthy two-person relationship involves both parties sharing an accurate view of the context of that relationship and equal effort towards maintaining it, a healthy involvement in a group involves the flow of respect going both ways. Admiration is valuable if it’s from people we admire. Your family is a source of comfort and satisfaction if you all love each other, but if they’re all rotten to you then being with them won’t fill your cup.

So people can easily find themselves in communities that they think care about them, but in fact, do nothing but take, take, take. It’s especially easy online. These people then find themselves unhappy, but like many people, try to solve that unhappiness by investing more in their social groups. Except these social groups are parasitical, and so it’s a terrible spiral.

If you’re unhappy in a deep and enduring way, ask yourself these (probably difficult) questions. What social groups do you care the most about? And if you disappeared off the face of the Earth today, would anyone in that group even know? Would they care? Would they sing songs of you, toast your successes? Would value in that group be diminished?

I know a lot of people who would get “no” as an honest answer, but they don’t realize it. They can’t figure out why they feel unfulfilled, but it’s because a false community has taken the place where a real community should go. They’ve attached their self-worth to political movements or celebrities or fandoms or whatever else, and those things have made it difficult or even impossible to fill the space in their life with the real connection that humans just inherently need.

The world is full of traps we can lay for ourselves. People – real people – are who pull you out.