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.

People constantly generate self-fulfilling prophecies. You do it whether you want to or not, so you might as well harness this for good.

If you meet someone that says “People, as a rule, are selfish jerks,” then that person will be proven right again and again. But they’re creating the conditions for this; their belief affects their demeanor, their demeanor affects their choices, and their choices affect how people interact with them – and even which people are around to do so. In other words, they’re callous and mean, so the people around them become that way, too.

If you say “People, as a rule, are kind and thoughtful,” then you’ll act accordingly. You’ll make it easy for people to be nice to you, and you’ll generally end up surrounding yourself with kind and thoughtful folks.

The world is full of people of all stripes, so no statement about them can be universal. But it can be true of your world if you make it so.

So, decide for yourself what you want to be true, and then act as if it was. Even if it only nudges the world in that direction, that’s better than the reverse.

When you’re truly done with a project or experience, are you satisfied or forlorn? Contented or hungry for more?

There is health in both. Balance is hard.

“I don’t know what they’ll write on my tombstone. But I’m glad you’re here.”

You can do anything you want. That isn’t the same as saying that your actions have no consequences. You own those consequences, but you own the actions, too. Don’t ever forget it.

The more versatile you keep your life, the more situations you can encounter with immediate adaptation. You can add and extract value more easily. Keep yourself modular.

Your goal isn’t to never make mistakes. If anything, you should probably make more than you make now; more people are too risk-averse than the reverse. No, your goal should be to keep the average cost of your mistakes low.

Especially relative to the average learning you get from a mistake, the cost of mistakes is more relevant than the frequency. If you can maintain an excellent cost:learning ratio for your mistakes, then the math alone explains why you should make more!

Consider: how much do you gain from learning something new? How much is more wisdom worth to you in the medium and long term? Whatever that number is, just make sure your mistakes cost less than that. Make your mistakes in an environment that makes them easy to recover from. Pad the edges and put on your helmet, and then go bonkers.

The version of you that exists three years from now will be far better off with this strategy than simply one of “make as few mistakes as possible.” Making this mistake would be very costly, so don’t.

Happy New Month!

August is always the most surprising month for me. Personally, I’m not much of a “summer” person. I love autumn and winter, so my whole life has been spent basically “enduring” summer and its deathly heat until better seasons came along. Even when I was in school and summer meant a break from it, I preferred the rest of the year.

Now, of course, I have kids – and they haven’t inherited my dislike of the season. Or maybe they’re still just young enough that the “vacation” part is so primary. But in either case, I vow this month to live it up. To embrace the summertime, do some fun hot-weather stuff with my kiddos, and maximize their fun before the new school cycle begins.

It’s good to get out of your own comfort zone, especially with people you love. May your own August be just as fun!

No amount of stress, pain, worry, or uncertainty can darken the world even a tiny bit while the laughter of my niece rings. I can say “Who’s your favorite uncle” a hundred times, and every time she’ll throw her little hands up and yell “Uncle Johnny!”

These fonts of pure joy, they are everywhere you look. Mostly we run from them because some part of us wants our pain. We don’t want it to evaporate in the face of a child’s giggle because somehow that will lessen our struggle, make it seem like we were upset over nothing.

It will lessen your struggle, because you were upset over nothing.

Look, problems are real. You’ve got to solve them. But you don’t need to feel anything you don’t want to feel. So go feed some ducks, watch a sunset, or tickle your niece until you’re both laughing so hard you can’t breathe. Then come back and solve the problems with a smile on your face.

Our view of history is so strange. So much of what we know about the past is based on which objects or writings randomly survived. When it comes to knowledge of things that happened thousands of years ago, it’s never based on deliberate messages preserved for that purpose. It’s always something like some random receipt for bad copper or the rules of a weird game of chance that happened to survive, and then we have to extrapolate based on that.

That’s true of distant history, but it’s true of yesterday, too. We don’t appreciate how random so much of our lives really are – how many things that we know, we only know because one of a million possible combinations of moments occurred at exactly the right time.

To make good decisions, you need to understand that you can’t really control this. You’re not so much planting and picking crops as you are catching meteorites. Good things are happening all the time, but you have a very small field of control – it’s basically just you and your reactions.

It’s an adventure! It’s fun, and it’s joyous, but it isn’t secure. It can’t really be planned or controlled. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.