When you want to do something, you need the talent to do it and the materials to do it with. If you want to build a house, you need wood, nails, and so on – but you also need your skills. If you want to write a song, you need a piano or guitar or whatever, maybe some paper or a recording device. But you can’t do it without the spark within you.

Raw materials can be left behind. A pile of wood or a piano can be inherited. But your talent dies with you. So while you’re here, spend more time using your talent than tracking down raw materials. The world can find more wood, but it can’t find more you once you’re gone.

People really forget what “average” means. “Not exceptional” isn’t an insult, and it certainly isn’t something to worry about.

It’s also not a benchmark. It’s the middle ground, which means about half of all examples are to the left of it. So if your kid doesn’t speak the average number of words by the average age – don’t worry about it. And if your report card is “above average,” don’t get a big head, either.

You have to define your own targets objectively, not just based on relativity to others. That way lies madness.

Did you know that you don’t have to do daunting tasks all at once? You can sneak up on them.

We’ve probably all heard the wisdom that you should break large tasks down into smaller chunks; it’s much more manageable to write in blocks, for example, than to try to crank out a hundred-page essay in one sitting (and the end result is usually better, too). But we tend to think that advice only applies to large projects. But with large projects, it’s obvious to the point of silliness – some projects are so big you couldn’t do otherwise.

But you can break small projects down, and that’s the real cheat code. If there are just three dishes in your sink, you don’t have to wash all of them at once. You can wash one dish every time you walk through the kitchen. You can wash one dish per hour. You can even “just wash one dish,” and then decide later when to wash the next one.

Seem absurd? Who cares? It’s your life, arrange things in the way that gets you to the destination you want, not in service of a path someone else thinks you should take to get there.

Improving your ability to do a particular kind of work doesn’t always come from doing the work itself. You need separate time to specifically focus on improvement.

When you’re doing the work, especially if you’re doing it because you have to, you often avoid the very behaviors that are most conducive to improving. For example, if your job is carpentry, you’re probably building things for your clients – so you’re not experimenting, taking extra time to try new techniques, and so on. You’re just building what you need to build.

So you might be getting faster and the work might be getting easier, but you’re not breaking new ground. You’re not “leveling up.”

If you want to do that, you need to do more than just the work itself. In fact, you specifically need to step away from the work. You need to spend some time in study and reflection. You need to spend some time just playing. You need to spend some time with other craftspeople. All of these things will improve your talent, even though they aren’t helping you get any work done in the immediate sense.

We can get so caught up in the work that we lose sight of this. When everything is deadlines and hustle we can easily forget about improving and learning. But where’s the fun in that?

It’s not that “what you say and do” matters more than “who you really are.” It’s that what you say and do is who you really are. They’re not separate. And the former informs the latter much more than the reverse.

It’s in some people’s nature to need to grind and hustle whenever there’s a problem. They can’t take five minutes to breathe as long as something is unsolved. For other people, any stress at all immediately leads to the need for a vacation.

I’ve tried both methods, and both methods stressed me out. So far, what’s worked for me is doing neither: just creating a rhythm of work/rest that ignores the extraneous levels of calm or chaos.

That’s the barrier against the storm – creating a system that ignores it.

I deeply fear confirmation bias. It feels like the easiest trick to fall for and I don’t like the idea that I probably fall for it all the time.

It’s not just singular confirmation bias that I fear. “Singular” as in “relating to a specific topic.” I fear a form of confirmation bias where I get into the habit of a particular style of thinking and never challenge whether it’s correct.

Sometimes I’ll consider some particular topic that someone’s brought up and I’ll reach a conclusion about it pretty quickly. Then I’ll catch myself – “Wait, am I pretty confident about this because I’m experienced and this topic closely relates to something I have expertise on, or did I just jump to a conclusion without foundation?”

Sometimes it’s the former! But probably not as often as I think. So I like to take the time to practice thinking the other way. I’ll defend positions I don’t hold, even if it’s just to myself for a while. It’s a good way to keep my brain limber.

At least, I’m pretty sure it is.

One of the features of being an adult is that you can find that you don’t have as much time as you’d like for hobbies or other kinds of “pointless fun.” (I put that in quotes because it’s obviously not pointless, but I mean fun unconnected to productivity in other ways; working out is fun but it serves some other purpose too, while board games are just fun for fun’s sake.)

It’s just how it is, and there’s nothing wrong with discharging your other responsibilities before letting loose. But firstly, a little reframing: Don’t live your life just to have those few moments of fun. Most of your life should be fun, and if it isn’t, then you need to either do different things or think different thoughts. If you find your day-to-day responsibilities to your career, family, etc. absolutely onerous then that’s a problem that needs to be addressed, and not by simply running to the golf course the very instant you can.

But let’s assume away all of that for a moment. Let’s assume you’re like me and you find your work and family responsibilities to be sources of comfort and satisfaction and you don’t use hobbies to escape them, but rather as additional sources of additional kinds of enjoyment. It’s still true that you will often not have as much time as you want for them. When that happens, how do your organize?

You see, my “big rocks” like family, career, home maintenance, writing, etc. organize themselves pretty easily by their nature. But if I have a free Saturday, how do I prioritize whether I want to go to a movie, go camping, play a game, or read a book?

My nature is to create systems. It’s borderline compulsive, in fact. But I don’t want to have my fun hobbies systematized to the point where they’re additional chores. My father once told me that the surest way to make yourself hate a hobby was to turn it into a job. I want my hobbies to be carefree but at the same time, I want to make sure they happen.

“If you have to ‘make sure’ they happen, then do you really want to do them?” I hear you, but there’s more than one of me at work here. Sometimes you have to fight against parts of your nature, even to do things that (most of you) wants to do. My natural inclination might be to spend my limited free time being a lump on the couch, but I won’t be happy I did that after.

Anyway, I’m going to see friends tonight. And when all is said and done, I’m always glad for that.

Let’s look at a two-step process with different levels of effectiveness at each step, and then do some math.

What’s this about? It could be anything, but let’s start with something like “marketing” and “demo” – a two-step process for making a sale. (Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, but we’re doing theory here.)

Let’s imagine a world where 80% of your marketing efforts result in you getting a demo, and 20% of your demos land the sale. Which should you work on improving?

First, gotta plug in some sample numbers. We’ll say 100 initial outreaches, which means 80 demos. Of those 80 demos, you get 16 sales, using the 80%/20% rates from above.

If you improve your marketing effectiveness to 85%, you get 85 demos, and thus you get 17 sales if you maintain a 20% close rate on your demos. But if you improve your demo close rate to 25% while maintaining an 80% marketing effectiveness rate, you get 20 sales!

Okay, now for the counter-intuitive conclusions. There are a lot of reasons to improve the thing you’re worst at in any process. First, it’s often easier; in the example here, it’s probably much easier to bring a bad close rate up a few points than it is to improve something you’re already pretty great at. And second, we just saw via the math that your end outcomes improve more rapidly up to a certain point when you do that.

But I’m going to advocate for a different strategy – one you should use whenever you’re able. You should eliminate the step you’re worse at.

In the analogy above, the salesperson shouldn’t do their own closing! They should sell active demo appointments to someone who is good at closing (and maybe not so good at marketing). Instead of getting 16, 17, or 20 sales out of every total 100 marketing attempts, they’d get 80 sales out of every 100 marketing attempts – by changing what they’re actually selling!

This is the assembly line of effectiveness. Don’t weigh yourself down with things you’re not as good at when there are deals to be made and alliances to be forged. After all, every good two-step has a partner.

Make it easy to communicate and interact with you.

You can take a hard line on many issues, you can set many boundaries. You don’t have to compromise on important values. That’s not what I mean by “easy.” I mean it quite literally: make it easy to talk to you.

How? Simple. State your terms. Be clear about what the ground rules are for interacting with you, and be clear about what you mean by things that you say. Don’t be cagey; there’s no need.

The more candid you are about what it takes to interact with you, the more at ease people will be in doing so. No one wants to walk on eggshells or risk offense. If you make it clear, early and often, that you’re someone who doesn’t play conversational games or take someone’s accidental faux pas uncharitably, then you will find more people – and more honest people – will interact with you meaningfully.