Being able to manage a project well isn’t the same thing as caring about the outcome, being skilled at the principle technique, or knowing how to communicate about it.

If you’re a fantastic plumber, that doesn’t mean you know how to run a plumbing business. That’s a separate skill entirely. Doing the taxes effectively on that business is different than marketing well. Hiring more plumbers or choosing good suppliers – these are all separate.

The upshot: if you are incredibly passionate about feeding the homeless, that doesn’t mean you’re good at it.

It takes all kinds of people to make the world go ’round. Don’t make caring about the exact same stuff as you a prerequisite for an alliance. In fact, it’s dangerous – if you only ally with people exactly like you, then you risk having a company where everyone knows how to fix a leaky sink and no one knows how to take out an ad.

Someone says to you: “Oysters make me throw up.” You ask if they’re allergic or something, and they don’t know; it turns out, they threw up the first time they had oysters, so they made that association and stuck with it. They’ve never had an oyster since.

We do this all the time, and often with things far more important than just our preference for a particular food. We had our first job in finance and it burned us out and we had a terrible shark of a manager, so we decided “Finance is stressful and full of jerks,” and then we cut it off forever. And hey, maybe it is! But we don’t know; n=1.

Some people do that sort of dangerous association in an even more extreme manner: “I had my first job anywhere and it burned me out and I had a terrible shark of a manager, so jobs are stressful and full of jerks.”

You see how jumping to that conclusion might end up worsening that person’s overall life?

Some things are inherently a little stressful and a little hard to get right the first time. Working, dating, building something of value. That means you’re going to have initial struggles and setbacks – and if you let those things define the entire category, you’re going to miss many opportunities to achieve something meaningful.

Building social capital when you’re young is an incredibly underrated endeavor. Few things will pay off the same kinds of dividends as having plenty of people willing to do small favors for you.

Here are some simple ways to do it:

1. Ask questions, and respect the answers. If you ask someone how to do something, and then they answer you, try what they suggest. If they see you ignoring the advice you asked for, it will leave a sour taste in their mouth that will make them less likely to help you again.
2. Offer small favors, especially if they’re things you want to get known for doing. Other people asking you to work for free is often a bad sign, but offering to do the kind of work you love as a small favor lets you retain control while both promoting your skill set and endearing you to others. Win/win/win.
3. Work when it’s hopeless. If you quit working on a problem when you think it’s unsolvable, you will be quitting too early 95% of the time. More experienced people know the problem can still be solved, so they see you throwing in the towel early. Counteract this by developing a bias towards sticking it out just a few iterations longer. Very few people get joy out of doing something for you, but many people get joy out of doing something with you.

Master those habits in your early work, and you’ll build up a large “favor fund.” That will pay off dividends in your future!

Aim the arrow, fire the arrow, forget the arrow.

There are three steps to firing an arrow. All are vital, none can be skipped.

First, you must aim the arrow. If you don’t do this, the arrow will not strike what you want it to. You can get so good at aiming that it takes very little time or effort, but you must still do it. And if you do it for too long, your arms will grow weak and your mind will wander, and so too will you fail.

Second, you must fire the arrow. The moment of decision, the commitment to the act.

Third, you must forget about the arrow. From the moment it is loosed from your bow, there’s nothing more to be done. It will strike or it won’t, but if you’ve aimed carefully and fired with conviction, that’s all you can do to affect the arrow’s flight. Now is the time to look not to the target, but to the quiver. Before the arrow has struck or missed, you should be drawing your next.

Do not forget any part of the arrow’s journey – nor yours.

Sensory pleasures are easily fooled. This isn’t a bad thing, if you’re aware of it.

Is that really a wonderful steak you’re eating, or does it just have a good blend of spices on it? Who cares? There’s no deeper meaning behind indulgences like these. It’s just something for you to enjoy – so enjoy it, regardless of why.

In movies, you can often “trick” people into thinking a particular plotline was deep and meaningful by resolving it in slow motion with emotional music playing over it. But there’s no trick – the whole point was just to tug on your heartstrings a little, and if it did that, then mission accomplished.

The point is, you can dress up your life’s experiences however you want, and your enjoyment is your own, independent of anyone else’s evaluations. There is no “real” anything in this sphere. You just smile, or you don’t. So drown that steak in ketchup if you like it – even if I don’t. After all, who’s eating it?

My general demeanor is pretty minimalist as far as physical objects go. I don’t like to own a bunch of stuff. When I do own something, I like very much for it to be organized well, which leads me to often build little “kits” for things.

I’ll pick a container and a space, and then try to make as complete of a set of useful things as I can within that tiny space. I prize efficiency. I want to just be able to grab my “fix it kit” and know I’ve got most of the bases covered, for example. When I go camping, I have my “camping kit” and don’t want to own more.

To that end, even within my minimalism, I can be something of a completionist. I don’t want to own more than I have to, so I want the things I do own to be versatile, efficient, and high-quality. I don’t want to have to get some new object for some ultra-specific purpose that will only appear in my life a handful of times.

The lure of “collect more of this thing because this thing exists to be collected” is there, but I try to avoid it. So should you, my friend.

The smaller the scope, the more good you can do.

Big problems exist, at least in part, because of operational hurdles, coordination problems, and even certain parties being invested in the problem remaining. But no one is stopping you from picking up the trash at your local park or buying a meal for a person in need in your neighborhood.

Sometimes big, systemic overhauls are needed, and good people need to work together on them. But that’s often a lot of effort that could have just made a thousand smaller changes with almost no resistance, and those add up to a better life.

Don’t ignore the small stuff. If you want big changes to environmental policy but you won’t pick up a piece of litter and throw it out while you’re walking across a parking lot, then your values are aligned to the wrong scale. Good is good, no matter how small.

If you start pouring concrete before you’ve built a wooden frame to shape it, you’re going to end up with a big blob. Once the concrete starts pouring, it’s pretty much impossible to build the scaffolding; the concrete comes too fast and is too heavy.

Any new project or endeavor works like that, too. Let’s say, for example, that you have a baby. Imagine coming home from the hospital with the baby as the first step – and only then deciding to look into things like a crib, diapers, baby-proofing, etc. You can see what a disaster that would be! The baby is the pouring concrete; in order for it to pour into the shape you want (in this case, a happy home with a thriving and healthy child), you have to build the wooden frame first. You needed to already have a crib, diapers, formula, an accommodating schedule, family support, etc.

Whether it’s having a baby, taking on a new job, or anything at all that uses your resources, remember – by default, it will not only fill every inch of available space in your life, but it will do so with disastrous results. You prevent that by deciding in advance what shape you want that thing to take in your life, and then building a box for it in that shape.

So before you take on any new responsibility, take a little time and write out what shape you want it to be. Where are its clearly-defined borders? What does it look like inside those borders? Then do a little shopping and a little communicating, and build that frame. Because the concrete pours from day one, so anything past that is too late.

If you were to describe someone as “in shape” or “athletic,” you could be describing a number of different qualities. Maybe that person is very fast. Maybe they have great hand-eye coordination. Maybe they’re super strong, or an awesome jumper, or win a lot of wrestling matches. You wouldn’t necessarily assume they were all of those things, though.

Maybe because so much of that is assessable visually, we don’t tend to think that, by default, a very strong weight lifter is necessarily going to be a very fast runner or be able to accurately throw a ball. We recognize those as different skills, even if they fall under a broader category of “athleticism.”

We definitely don’t do that with intelligence, though. When it comes to brainpower, we tend to assume that if someone is “smart” then they’re smart on all possible metrics. If there is a quality that we associate with being smart, then we assume all smart people have that quality.

But “smart” can mean a lot of things, too! It can mean you have a good memory, or it can mean you’re good at puzzles, or it can mean you’re good at visualization, or it can mean you’re quick to understand concepts, etc. It absolutely doesn’t automatically mean all of those things.

In the scientific sense, there’s a lot about the brain we don’t know. But even in the everyday social sense, there’s a lot about how we treat intelligence that we get wrong. The important takeaway is this: if you observe someone with an unusual mental trait, don’t assume any others. That just wouldn’t be smart.

If you talk to enough people about the choices they’ve made in their lives, you’ll start to notice that there are two very different definitions of “easy” out there.

Some people use the word “easy” to mean “did not require much effort.”

And other people use the word “easy” to mean “did not require many choices.”

I’ve talked to people who took incredibly laborious, gruelingly difficult paths through life because – in their own words – it was “just easier” to take that path than to choose a different one.

Neither definition is wrong, of course. Labor is hard, but making a ton of decisions and plans can also be taxing. But you shouldn’t kid yourself that you’re doing these things because they’re easy – rather, you’re choosing one form of difficulty over another. Once you realize that, you may also realize that there’s an optimal balance between the two kinds that would work better than minimizing one value to maximize the other.

You must plan, and you must labor. How much of each is up to you. Find what works, not just what feels “easy” – because believe me, “Easy Street” is a long hard road indeed.