If you have people that mean a lot to you, wonderful. Those people may do things that are unique or interesting to them, and they’ll share them with you. Those activities will become part of the shape of your relationship to that person. It’s not just you and them; it’s all those things in between, too.

Someday, that person will leave this world. But when they do, those things don’t leave with them – they’re part of the world. They can feel unattached, like one half of a suspension bridge. So we look for other places to attach them.

We share them. We teach others those things, as a way of passing memories about the person we lost. And so that person continues to shape the world in which we live, forever changing how we live our lives, as we build their memory and their presence into our daily existence.

And then, that thing becomes something unique and interesting to us, that someone else perceives as a fundamental part of their relationship to us. We are important to them as they are important to us, and our traditions build a space around us. We make a warm and fun and interesting quilt of all these strange little quirks, and we can see the shapes of ghosts and angels in the pattern.

We will miss you, but you aren’t gone from us. How can you be, when you shape the very world we live in? We will add to that world and pass it on, and while we’re here we will play and sing and laugh and carry the joys that you taught us.

Why is it that when we’re young the prospect of sleeping anywhere but your own bed is so exciting?

As an adult, I don’t even like sleeping on the other side of my own bed. But my kids think sleeping on the couch in the living room is like a five-star vacation getaway.

Are kids just so excited to be away from what they perceive as a constraint – the routine, the location? Is sleeping on the floor in your big sister’s room just so novel that you’re excited about it, even though it’s objectively less comfortable?

Maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe novelty is harder to capture as an adult – enough experiences were “novel but bad” that we’ve adapted to a safe routine. Maybe it’s good to sleep on the floor now and then, just to remember that wherever you rest your head, you’re the one in charge.

When you successfully call your shot and it lands, talk about it. Being able to predict things – even the results of your own actions – is a difficult skill! It’s valuable to be able to be right about the future. It lets you win bets, for one. But it also helps you earn a positive reputation.

You don’t have to brag, necessarily. But there are lots of positive ways you can share the fact that you were right about something. You can use that knowledge to help others. And if you do that, you get the credit for being right in the first place.

You are your own first, best, and often last advocate. Don’t forget to put up the score when you win.

When something is hard to do, and you do it, admit that it was hard. Don’t force out a statement like “it was nothing” or undersell what you did.

For one, you deserve the rewards of your work. But even beyond that – don’t trap yourself.

Let’s say you sweat and grind and claw your way to success on something and it takes everything you had. Other people see the end result but not the effort, so you downplay the effort. But now they “want to see what you can really do when you put your whole back into it!”

Uh oh.

Look, if something was hard then you don’t get extra credit by pretending it wasn’t. The opposite is true, too – don’t make it seem harder than it was. But be honest with others – and with yourself – about exactly how hard it truly was.

It’ll be a little easier next time, after all.

When power over you is exercised with the same trappings for a long time, you start to fear and obey the trappings, wherever they appear.

If I put on a police uniform and start bossing you around, you’ll instinctively obey, even though I’m not a police officer. Statistically, it’ll be way more likely that I can get you to do all sorts of stuff you don’t want to do in that uniform. But I don’t even have to go that far – if I just dress and look like an off-duty cop, speak in an authoritative tone, that will work, too.

If someone’s job title is higher than yours, you’ll defer to them even if you don’t work for the same company. Even to your own detriment.

This behavior is natural. It’s understandable. We live in social hierarchies and we learn to size them up, and then we defer to them. It’s natural that you should be more instinctively deferential to someone who reminds you of your strict teacher, your strict parents, your strict boss.

It’s natural, and you must fight it.

Like many instincts, the purpose of this one is to keep you safe. But your instincts know that the safest route is the most cowardly, the most supplicant. The safest way to live is in deference to authority. So many of your instincts are tuned to that because a huge portion of your brain is just dedicated to pushing you in the direction of staying alive until tomorrow.

Staying alive is no way to live.

Fight the instincts that keep you safe.

It’s fine to not know something. But once you know, you need to act on it. You can’t ignore truth.

If you always feel sick, you aren’t at fault for not realizing that you’re lactose intolerant and that dairy products are making you ill. But once you do know, it’s on you. If you still drown your corn flakes in whole milk, you have no one to blame but yourself.

We seek information to make better decisions. What’s the point of information that you don’t use to inform better choices – to live a better life?

Not next month. Not next week. Now. You know the right thing – so do it.

I have now been a father of three children for exactly five years.

My youngest kid turned 5 today, and he’s more than just a great kid. He represents more than just one of three wonderful children; he also represents a family that is greater than the sum of its parts. He adores his sisters, and they adore him in return; they get into legitimate adventures together. They’re a trio of courageous, fun characters who support and love each other, and raising them as a group has been much more joyous than simply adding together the joy I feel about them individually would indicate.

I’m very proud of my son. Not just on his birthday, but every day – he strives hard to be a good man. He cares about duty and kindness, he looks out for those smaller than he is (and often bigger, too), and he is a friend to all. He is as creative as he is ravenous. He is affectionate and he is brave and I love him so.

Keep up the good work, boy-o. Daddy thinks the world of you.

The world is eternally changing, and it’s always a possibility that your best value-add to the world will have a limited shelf life. You may discover that you have some bright, brilliant thing you can do – for a limited time.

Athletes, musicians, actors, celebrities of all stripes, inventors of specific devices, a certain type of entrepreneur: all of these kinds of people might find their candle burning ten times as brightly – and burning out ten times as quickly. A very, very small percentage of these people end up as Mick Jagger or something, with a 50+ year career in their highly specific niche. The remaining majority do not. And then it can go one of two ways.

Some percentage of the people who were really good at their narrow thing realized that the window for it was just as narrow. So while they were rich and famous, they hedged. They started other projects, made other bets. Look at Shaquille O’Neal. A 19-year career playing basketball (and 19 years is a long time to play basketball), but now he’s also a serial entrepreneur with a ton of successful business ventures outside of the ability to dunk a ball. He’ll never step professionally on the court again, but he parlayed that career while it was hot and now he’s set.

Everyone else ends up “washed up.”

The central lesson is this: things being good now doesn’t mean they’ll be good tomorrow, and things being amazing now almost certainly means they won’t be amazing tomorrow. Regression to the mean is a real thing. When you’re on top, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking it’ll always be like that – but there are far more washed-up players than Shaqs. And it’s not just athletes – for every Mick Jagger or Gary Oldman there are a thousand actors and musicians who were flash-in-the-pan, for every Warren Buffet or Elon Musk there’s an investor or inventor that couldn’t keep the Blackberry or Nokia on top.

When things are good, use those resources to hedge against future storms! When you have a lot of resources, that means you can do a lot of hedging, even without affecting your current lifestyle much. You just have to put aside the ego.

Somewhat topical post today: the subject is AI Art. Specifically, one complaint/controversy which seems to hang over it. Apparently one of the complaints about AI art as a concept is that the AI was “trained” using a huge amount of art created by human artists, and those artists weren’t compensated or even consulted before this happened.

If you’re not sure what I mean, think of it like this: if you Google “paintings of flowers” you’ll get a bunch of, well, paintings of flowers. AI art-bots are trained using that data to know what a “painting of a flower” looks like in the aggregate and then is able to produce a painting of a flower that draws on those elements even though it isn’t an actual copy of any of those paintings.

And this is my objection to the objection. When my daughter was learning how to paint flowers, she also Googled a bunch of paintings of flowers, and that’s how she learned to do the exact same thing – make paintings of flowers that weren’t copies of any specific piece, but that contained many of their elements.

She didn’t email those artists to ask their permission. She didn’t pay them. She just looked at their art.

That’s how everyone learns everything.

I learned how to write by reading. I didn’t pay those authors for teaching me. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and all art is partially inspired by art that comes before.

I suspect that people who object to AI art aren’t really objecting to that facet – that’s just a convenient proxy for their greater complaint, which is the age-old complaint of technology taking away our jobs that has pervaded throughout all time. People said this stuff about Photoshop… and about cameras, for that matter. But just like with all those things (and all the ones that came before and will come hence), the complaint is without merit. Technology advances, and it certainly changes art – but there will always be artists. Some will use those tools and some won’t, and that choice is also part of art. Some people play a guitar and some people use an entire sound studio full of effects and auto-tune and synthesized sounds, but the end result of both methods is still music.

And that music, however you make it, trains the next generation of musicians. And they don’t ask your permission.

In some types of work, your successes and accomplishments are very visible. In others, they’re almost totally invisible. Knowing which is which changes the ideal strategy when it comes to benefitting from those wins.

What do the professions of sales and landscaping have in common? Being good at them is highly visible. When a sales professional is good at their job, everyone sees it – from “ringing the bell” to leaderboards to just the fact that a bunch of money is coming in the door. When a landscaper is good at their job, people stop and stare, ask for cards, and admire the whole area. In both cases, being good at your job alone is a source of advertisement for your skill.

Not every profession is like that! Take IT, for example. Most people who aren’t in IT have zero idea what the IT people do. To everyone else, their successes just look like “everything is as it should be.” Nothing is broken. And of course, if there’s so much as one small problem, it’s because of “those incompetents down in the IT department,” isn’t it?

That’s a problem in human nature, but you can’t solve that. What you can do is be aware of it and plan for it. And that means if you work in a field where the successes don’t advertise themselves, it’s on YOU to advertise them. If you’re in one of those fields, just “being good at your job” isn’t enough. You need to do three things:

1. Explain what your “being good at your job” looks like, and how you can prove it to an outsider.
2. Explain how that proof provides value to another person, especially someone who doesn’t work in the same profession.
3. Capture that proof consistently and share it with your broader network.

This isn’t easy! But it’s definitely possible. Creating your own “visible success” is a matter of consistent documentation and understanding what other people are looking for. Often you have to look at what would happen if you weren’t good at your job in order to figure out how being good at it is valuable to a broader team or organization. But once you understand how other people perceive the value of what you do, you can consistently track and communicate that value.