This is an autumn of many changes. My family is shifting; my children are hitting meaningful aging milestones. My career is adding additional elements.

These are good changes, but all change comes with friction. There’s the stress of modifying schedules and expectations and the emotional burden of bittersweet transitions. But all things have their season, and that steadies my hand.

The end of one thing is always the beginning of another. We are wiser and stronger, and our adventures are better for it.

Understanding the motivations of others is a sure way to achieve your own ends. The world is full of potential win/win situations, but in order to discover them you need to be pretty good at finding out what other people are after.

The good news: people dramatically overcomplicate this process. It’s actually pretty simple. All you need to do is push the conversational slider all the way to the left.

Imagine that there’s a slider that controls your “conversational settings.” On the left side is “100% Absorption.” On the right-hand side is “100% Advocation.”

Most people keep that slider somewhere in the middle third of the range. In other words, most people tend to have some balance between paying attention to what information other people are trying to transmit and transmitting their own information. You want to hear their story, sure – but you really want to tell your story. And you want the other person or people to know how witty, charming, intelligent, or cool you are.

Most of us, in other words, use every second of conversation at least partially as a status-improving exercise, and this dramatically lowers our ability to learn anything.

So if you want to learn a lot about someone in a very short amount of time, simply set your conversational slider all the way to the left. Abandon entirely the idea of gaining any status yourself as part of this conversation – for ten minutes, just absorb. The other person will react almost immediately by setting their conversational slider all the way to the right, because they don’t have to jockey for it. You’re giving them the opening, and 99% of humans will take it every time.

And then what happens? Other people just talk and talk, and you get to learn.

You can find out all sorts of fascinating information this way. You can learn all sorts of facts and knowledge, but you’ll also get a keen understanding of the motivations and opinions of the speaker in extremely short order.

The other person might not walk away thinking you’re witty, charming, or cool – though they probably will think you’re kind and a good conversationalist – but you’ll walk away much, much smarter than you were.

Think about the people you spend a lot of time with – colleagues, clients, etc. What do they want? What motivates them? Most people can’t answer because they’ve never taken the ten minutes to do this, but doesn’t that seem silly? Isn’t this obviously beneficial information to have?

Give it a shot. Abandon status games for one conversation, say nothing about yourself, and do nothing but ask open-ended and general questions. Watch the information pour out.

No matter how well you’re doing, no matter how good things seem, don’t give up.

Seems like odd advice, but I think it’s more important than its more obvious counterpart. When you’re doing poorly, people might say “Don’t quit, no matter how badly you’re doing!” But I think that advice is less useful.

First, consider: some things you should quit. The sunk cost fallacy is real, and some things aren’t worth an additional helping of your finite time on this Earth. But second: when it’s really important, you don’t have the option to quit anyway.

The bigger danger for most people is giving up when they’re doing well. They get within sight of the finish line and they coast. They decide that they’ve got it on lock, or they decide that “close to the finish line” is good enough. In either case, they quit pushing – and then they lose.

It’s not a lock until you’re holding the money. Don’t quit, no matter how well you’re doing.

Sometimes the media does some pretty gross stuff. They’ll present stories (whether fiction or non-fiction) that are full of bias or presented in a biased way, they’ll promote negative stereotypes or narratives that falsely support an incorrect view, or any number of other misuses of their various platforms.

This is bad! And you’re wrong to expect better.

Look, “the media” isn’t some noble society of monks whose job is to promote truth and virtue. “The media” is a collection of companies whose only job is to sell people stuff. If they promote bias, it’s for the same reason that a burger joint makes burgers – because the customers want burgers.

Media is downstream from culture, not the other way around. If you don’t like burgers, then don’t eat them – but more importantly, if you don’t like burgers, then you need to recognize that the burger joints and the commercials for the burger joints aren’t for you. You won’t get them to stop selling burgers just by pointing out that you find burgers to be gross. If you don’t like burgers, then they don’t care about you, because you aren’t their customer.

It’s the same with the media. In 2016, the Chicago Tribune tweeted out: “Wife of a Bears’ lineman wins bronze medal today in Rio Olympics.” People were salty because the athlete, Corey Cogdell-Unrein, wasn’t even named. That’s gross, and it sucks! It’s super terrible! I’m not saying it’s not. I’m just saying that you’re wrong to expect better.

The Chicago Tribune did a simple calculation: “Do we have more Bears fans as readers, or people who care who Corey Cogdell-Unrein is?” And then they tweeted accordingly. And they’re not going to do anything different.

People who like burgers make money for burger joints. People who don’t like burgers don’t take money away. That’s the important thing to remember, here.

Stop looking to “the media” for your good behavior – you’ll never find it there. If you want virtue, it will – it must – always come from your own communities. You can hold your own community to a virtuous standard, because you can hold yourself to a virtuous standard. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have a “community” that includes news and movie studios that you’ll never visit staffed by people who you’ll never meet, and whose job is to sell garbage to the people who want to buy garbage.

Build a virtuous community by first caring about people who care about you. And waste no time paying attention to the behavior of people who don’t.

If you have never gotten into major trouble, then something is missing from your life. In the same way that never making a mistake at work probably means you’re being too risk-averse, the same is true of life.

We all want different things in life. But whatever thing you’re trying to get out of life, you probably stand a better chance of getting it with more experimentation, more challenge and change, more risk. That means, sometimes, you’ll end up a hooligan.

You’ll misstep. You’ll make an enemy, or break a bone. You’ll zig when you should have zagged and go sideways. Your boat will sink or someone will leave your life. These things happen to hooligans.

But you’ll also have stories. Lessons of the mayhem. Wisdom that can’t be found anywhere else. These things will feed back into your life greater victories than the defeats that gave them to you.

Befriend the hooligans. Those are stories worth hearing.

There is an art to not slamming doors.

Sometimes you leave! A room, a house, a building. Sometimes there are emotions that go with the departure, and sometimes the departure is necessary. But that doesn’t mean you have to do damage on the way out.

Because if you do, I promise you – it’ll be damage to you, not them.

My two youngest children got a little toy, a simple trinket – a little hoop and ball with a ramp leading up to the hoop. It made a little game: Try to roll the ball across the floor so it goes up the ramp and into the hoop. Simple.

My son tried it once, and missed. He then immediately started pulling out other toys – blocks and things – and built an extended barrier-and-ramp leading the hoop such that if he rolled the ball with sufficient force, he couldn’t miss.

This wasn’t cheating. For one, the task was “get the ball in the hoop.” Some may do that with manual dexterity, and others may do it with engineering. But it gets done. And second, it wasn’t cheating because the game is what we make it. Now he and his sister are competing to see who can build the more ridiculous Rube Goldberg contraption that still gets the ball in the hoop.

Decide what you want to do, and then do it the way you decide. Learn this, and life is yours.

People tend to over-consolidate. We all have needs, and those needs fall into different categories. We need money, we need nutrition, we need companionship, etc. What humans often do is consolidate their fulfillment of those needs into a single source.

For a huge number of people, all of their income comes from a single source, for example. They have one “job” and that’s the only thing that gives them money. Some people also try to use this one job to give them a sense of purpose, fulfillment, respect, status…

It’s too much.

We have social needs too. Too often people get married and then abandon basically all other relationships in their life, trying to make their spouse into their therapist, best friend, parental figure, confidant, training coach…

It’s too much.

Unbundle your life. If you have a need, find multiple sources of fulfillment. That creates stability and lets you get the best of everything you bring into your life. Sometimes putting things together makes sense, but far less often than we default to.

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” This is genuinely good advice, and worth remembering. At least for myself, I often forget it – I’m a dreamer, and I’ve gotten caught losing the sure thing because of the better longshot more than once in my life.

But that got me thinking. It’s good advice… for values 1 & 2. But I don’t think the formula can be extrapolated linearly.

Here’s what I mean: At certain values, increased upside is better than certainty because the certain option may not be enough no matter what.

Imagine you have until 5 PM today to buy a car at auction or it’s going to someone else, and you really want that car. You need 10,000 more to buy it. If someone offers you $5,000 cash or the ability to flip a coin for either $0 or $10,000, which would you take?

Normally – take the five grand! It’s the certain option, and the expected value of the coin flip is five grand anyway (the average between the two possible options). But in this case, $5k doesn’t get you what you actually want – the car – so you might as well take the only option where you might get it.

Also, the folksy truism assumes that it’s always X in the hand, 2X in the bush. But what if it were 5x? 10x? How many birds in the bush are worth one in the hand? Would you rather take a guaranteed thousand dollars or a coin flip for zero or a hundred thousand?

And here’s the caveat to the caveat: At a certain value, marginal utility diminishes. If you offered me a choice between [A: $1,000] or [B: Flip a coin for either $0 or $100,000], I’d absolutely choose B. The expected value is much higher (being $50,000), and I don’t *need* a thousand dollars to where the certainty is more important than the upside. But! If you offer me a choice between [A: $10,000,000] or [B: Flip a coin for either $0 or $1,000,000,000], I would choose A, hands down. Sure, the upside of B is way higher. But A – with no chance involved – would completely change my life. Ten million dollars would represent such a radically different change in my available resources that I’d be crazy to gamble that on the chance for more, even if it were a lot more.

And consider still that I’ve been talking about coin flips – 50/50 odds. But in real life, it could be 60/40, or 15/85, or whatever.

So here’s the deal, then: Whether or not a bird in the hand is worth some in the bush depends a lot on how badly you need one bird, how much good just one bird will do you, how many birds are in that bush, and how likely you are to catch them.

Start with the truism, sure. But consider carefully.