Sometimes, not knowing something is itself a clue to what you don’t know.

Consider: your significant other is mad at you, and you have no idea why. Sure, forthright communication would be best – but remember, you have to meet halfway there. The fact that you don’t know why they’re upset might be why they’re upset.

Confusing and frustrating? Sure. But not less true.

Consider leading a team in business. All of your people are constantly about to quit, because people outgrow jobs. Do you know why they’re going to quit, specifically? Do you know if they’re frustrated by the work, getting better offers, or have a problem with a colleague?

If you don’t know, then that’s the reason. It’s important that you know, and not knowing is a sign that you aren’t holding up your end of the relationship. That’s the tie that binds, and you need to be aware of it.

Many, many things have a tendency to fill the available space provided for them. The way gas will always expand to fill all the available space, many conceptual things do the same. It’s a constant struggle for many that their expenditures constantly expand to fill all the available money they have – no matter how much they make, they always seem to spend it all and have none left over. Tasks often take as long as we allot them; if you give yourself 2 hours to clean your house it will take 2 hours, but if you give yourself 8 hours the same task will mysteriously take all that time.

Another feature that seems to always remain constant regardless of the space for it is “overthinking.”

If you take a group of five smart people and give them three days to work on a very important problem, you’ll see a certain level of activity. Good brainstorming, engineering of solutions, detail-oriented thinking mixed with big-picture focus. It will feel like a good approach to the relevance of the issue.

But if you take those same five smart people and give them the same three days, but give them a tiny, inconsequential matter to work on and you will see all the exact level of energy, work, and effort.

What you won’t see is those five people saying “This thing really doesn’t matter much, because we’re deciding what color to paint the back door of the post office, so let’s all just phone it in.” That almost never occurs to people. That’s the task at hand, so its “importance” will expand to fill the space their minds and schedules have provided it.

The lesson here: it’s easy to fall into the trap of letting other people set your scope for you, and for you to believe it. Be careful. The macro view is valuable, even if it means you have to look beyond what you’re actually working on. Keep the effort where it will do the most good.

I once heard: “Only a fool troubles his sleep with his worries. In the morning his worries are still there, but now he’s tired.”

This is good advice. I rarely worry in general, but especially not when I’m about to sleep. I have enough trouble sleeping without adding worry to the mix.

Do what you can the evening before, and do what you can in the morning hours. But the night is yours, always. Keep it and treasure it. Don’t give it to demons like worry.

Sometimes, people look at a problem and waste time thinking about solutions that are unavailable to them. Here is a superpower: not doing that.

If you need to get downtown quickly and your car has a flat tire, you could lament the fact that you can’t fly. Heck, you could lament the fact that you have a flat tire! You could dream of easier solutions. This and a dollar get you a cup of coffee, as they say.

My son, who is 5, is folding his laundry. One of the difficult parts of this chore for him is turning his shirts right-side in; his physical dexterity (though fine) isn’t great enough to make this a quick and effortless gesture. He did not complain once about that. In fact, he didn’t even try it a second time. He tried the “normal way” once, decided it wasn’t the best method, and has now been putting on each clean shirt individually and pulling it back off – right-side in. Takes about 5-10 seconds per shirt.

There is always a solution that will work. The shortest way to that solution, I promise you, does not pass through lament about the solutions that won’t.

There isn’t room for everything to be amazing. You wouldn’t want it to be! No matter what experience you’re seeking in the moment, there are multiple versions of it to pursue. Want to watch a movie? Thousands to choose from. Hungry? So many ways to satisfy!

If everything is a “Ten Out of Ten” then there’s no room for the gentle gradient of momentary preferences. And, importantly, that means that less-than-perfect things have plenty of utility.

We’re bad, as humans, at stating that. If we rate something a 7.2/10, that often sounds like we’re insulting it – especially to someone who rates it higher or (gasp) is responsible for creating it. If you write a book and it gets 4.5 stars out of five, your first thought might be “why not 5?”

But faint praise isn’t damning! We don’t want a binary meter for our likes and dislikes, where everything is either perfectly amazing or horrible to the point of disgust, with nothing in between.

Get comfortable knowing what your own personal scale of preferences means, and being confident in your evaluations of things. Let them have their place, and engage with them in their seasons.

This might not be the best advice you’ll ever get… but that’s okay. It has its place.

Most people don’t actually say “no” to things. They don’t have to.

Strangers especially. They say “yes” or they don’t say anything. This was one of the first fundamental lessons I learned in sales: some people will agree to a sale and then you make money, and the rest will remain as they are and you won’t make money. But none of them take money from you.

This means your risk factor is near zero for just about every interaction.

Get over your embarrassment! Ask one hundred people if they’d like to join you for a cup of coffee. Some of them will and the rest won’t. The ones that agree will be boons – you’ll learn from them, enjoy your time, maybe find a new business partner, friend, or paramour. The ones that don’t join you will simply vanish back into the population from whence they came, costing you nothing.

Whatever you want in life, some percentage of the population has the ability to help you get it. The rest have no power to prevent you. So ask until you reach the right number. There are only two answers you can get: yes or nothing.

Whenever something bad happens to us, it’s natural to examine it. To pick the event apart, dissect the circumstances, dwell on the implications. But there are two ways to do this, and only one is healthy.

People who examine their failures fall into one of two camps: people who are looking to change the past, and people who are looking to change the future.

Some people examine their failures down to the molecule, but they’re not looking for wisdom. They’re looking for some way to make the failure not a failure. They want to find some piece of evidence, some context, or some hidden agenda that changes the nature of the disaster from one where they fell short to one where it wasn’t their fault. They’re trying to change the past.

The other camp is full of people who examine their failures trying to change their future. They’re not looking to alter what happened in the past, they’re trying to make sure it never happens again. They accept what happened as the first step to understanding why it happened, and understanding why can lead them to doing better in the future.

Everything you’ve ever done happened in the past, and it’s natural to draw on experiences. So you’ll “think about the past” with some frequency. Are you doing it to learn from it, to try to change your future? Or are you trying, against all hope and reason, to hew a new shape from stone already cast?

You can’t edit the history books. But you can read them, and write the ones yet to come.

People back themselves into corners all the time. They don’t want to be there, but they’ve painted themselves into a situation where getting out would cost them more in social capital than they want to spend. This can be a problem for you, if you’re trying to get something from someone who’s done that to themselves – and if that person has painted themselves into a corner that prevents you from getting it.

Want an example? Let’s say you have a co-worker who’s taken on a big project that is upstream from your work. That project is required for you to do your next major project, but it rapidly becomes apparent that this co-worker has bitten off more than they can chew. They talked a big game about being able to do the work, but now it’s behind schedule and impacting you.

Think about what this person has done. They’ve put themselves into a situation where asking for help – even though it’s the sensible thing to do – will make them lose social capital. They’ll look bad in front of their peers. That alone will make them act irrationally; they might scoff at the idea of help and make excuses, they might start shifting blame, all sorts of things can happen. Even if all you want to do is genuinely help, your offer of assistance is as likely to get lashed out at as accepted.

So what to do? You need to offer this person a “social escape hatch.” You need to engineer the situation a little in such a way that allows them to accept the help without losing face.

If they can’t admit that they need help, then don’t offer help – ask for it. Tell them you want to learn how to do projects like that, and ask if you can “ride along” with them. Now you’ll be helping anyway, but they save face. Or maybe let them know you’re struggling with a different project, and maybe it would make sense to combine efforts and work on both together.

There are many options – too many to discuss in one post. But once you understand the core idea, it’s easier to navigate.

Everyone has their personal needs, and if you try to wrestle with someone’s ego, you’ll almost always lose. But the ego will happily yield to practical reality if it doesn’t have to get hurt in the process. So figure out how to let the ego out the back door and you can get anything you want.

My father had a saying he employed whenever I was looking for something and failed to find it, despite it being right under my nose or otherwise obvious: “If it was a snake, it would’ve bit ya.”

My father had a lot of sayings.

This is a good one; it’s apt and funny without being mean. I use it with my own kids and it gets a laugh (or at least a smiling eye-roll).

We are shaped and we shape. Everything from enormous values and culture to the tiny little jokes we make. We look for these things, but they’re right in front of us.

Humans will complain. It’s in our nature. From birth, we learn that we should pretty much always at least attempt to manipulate our surroundings through language because sometimes it results in us getting a cookie. As long as we don’t overdo it, there’s rarely a negative consequence for complaining – so we do it all the time.

The upshot of this is that whether or not someone complains isn’t a good measure of their well-being, and whether or not people as a whole complain a lot isn’t a good measure of society’s well-being. If an individual or a group is doing amazingly, they’ll still gripe.

What is a good measure of a person or group’s overall prosperity is the content of those complaints.

If a person’s complaint is that they might not have enough food to keep their kids from dying of starvation this week – that person has a genuinely rough life! If a group’s complaint is that a portion of their population is being carried off by wolves in the night, that group is in a tough spot!

But if a person’s complaint is that their iced cappuccino didn’t come with as much whipped cream as they normally get or a group’s complaint is that their grocery store has too many options for hummus so it’s hard to choose, then hey, guess what? Their life is amazing!

If anything, the number of complaints usually runs counter to prosperity. The better off you are, the more stuff is in your life – so the more little things you could find to complain about if you want to. But people will front-load the worst complaints they can; whatever someone says first is usually the worst thing in their mind. So if someone’s worst thing is that the climate-control system in their house required minor repairs, then congratulate them! Their life is good!

The news is filled with complaints, and every day they grow more absurd. There are problems, and I won’t pretend that there aren’t. But it’s also absurd to pretend that things aren’t wildly, amazingly better than they used to be, and getting better all the time. You can tell just from what people complain about.