An incredible amount of your overall performance in life is determined by how much you can conceptualize moments in the future.

Picture a stack of blocks. If you push it, can you see what will happen in your mind? Can you visualize the blocks falling, where they might land? Can you see other things in the room they might collide with?

Picture a person you know. If you say a hurtful thing to them, can you imagine their reaction? Can you see the pained look on their face?

The future is very predictable. Most effects follow simply from their causes. But when you hear someone ask “What did you expect,” in response to poor choices made by another, the answer is often: Nothing.

Some people have a really hard time visualizing any future moment. It’s not that they don’t have the intelligence or logical capacity. If you asked them, point blank, what happens to a glass bottle if you throw it against a brick wall, they can tell you that it shatters. But their ability to see that moment automatically when they’re engaged in other activity is non-existent.

My theory is that it’s not a binary “some have it, some don’t” sort of thing. I think, like anything else, it’s a skill. I think reading, particularly fiction, enhances it. I think social play enhances it. Probably lots of other things, but overall I do think it’s a skill you can develop. And I think it’s critical that you do.

Because I can predict what happens if you don’t.

If you have ever experienced the sensation of missing something, or cringing at a past decision, or regret for prior actions – all of this is good. These are good things, because they mean your life is changing in meaningful ways.

A life with no regrets is a life with no lessons. A life where you never lose anything means you never had anything worth losing, because loss is inevitable. If you never thought you used to be an idiot, you probably still are.

So don’t expect to look back and see paradise. That only means you left paradise! Instead, hope to look back and see wrack and ruin. That means you left it behind.

People need both routine and novelty. Novelty without routine to deviate from is just chaos and uncertainty. Routine without novelty to mix it up is a rut.

Be the novelty in another’s life if they’re in a routine, and be their rock if they have chaos. Use that as a guiding principle, and be a boon for everyone.

People are paradoxically more likely to engage with something meaningfully if you don’t try to tell them it’s meaningful.

Telling someone “this drink is a miracle elixir that will change your life” will cause them to dismiss it. Telling someone “this drink is pretty good and once or twice a month it can really clear up digestion issues” then that’s a verifiable claim in the realm of reality. It can be engaged with. And if the drink is good and has good health benefits, people will drink more of it!

The point is, overselling comes across as lying, even if the claim is totally true. Ease people into things, let them come. Even if what you have is life-changing, you can’t change everyone’s life overnight.

Children, if they’re polite and raised correctly, express gratitude by saying “thank you.” This is good and there’s nothing wrong with it, but the reason children do this is because in general, there’s not much else they can do. When you do something for a child, you generally do it out of responsibility or simply the joy of making a child’s life better, because it’s not like the child is typically going to give you much more than a smile in return. (Not to knock the smiles of children – they’re one of the best things in the world!)

If you’re an adult though, saying “thank you” falls short. I’m not saying every favor or gesture has to be “paid back” in equivalent measure. That’s not always possible or practical; if someone saves my life there might be nothing I could do that could repay them. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try!

I consider it a moral duty of a responsible adult to put those positive externalities back into the world whenever possible. A basic example: If someone notices a fire outside my house and quickly puts it out, they may have saved me a great deal of money, effort, even harm. Cooking them dinner, buying them a gift, or something else doesn’t come close to the cost of what they saved me, so why wouldn’t I at least do those things? Why think the words “thank you” are enough?

Be an adult, and take care of your community – especially those who take care of you!

There is a weird sort of problem that comes up over and over again, any time you see a system where you pay some flat amount for an unlimited amount of a given service.

Here’s the problem: If the service itself is opt-in, then the only people who will buy it will be people who believe they’ll be getting more than the value of what they paid.

Want an example? Okay, a while ago there was this thing called “MoviePass” (as of right now it’s actually coming back, but you can research that yourself if you like). You paid a flat monthly fee and could see an unlimited number of movies. The problem is that the only people who would buy such a thing are people who expected to see enough movies that they’re paying less if they buy the pass.

Predictably, that meant that the MoviePass people started losing money. But the thing is, you can’t solve that problem by raising the price!

Let’s say a movie costs $10, and a MoviePass costs $25. No one who sees 2 or fewer movies a month would buy it, and anyone who sees 3 or more movies a month is getting a great deal (and costing the company money!) if they do. So uh oh, MoviePass raises the price to $45. But all that changes is that the people who see 3 or 4 movies a month drop their subscription and only people who see 5+ movies a month use it, so you still have the same problem.

There are only two ways a system that has everyone pay the same no matter how much they use can work. One is if it’s not optional, so everyone has to buy a MoviePass even if they see no movies ever, and then the MoviePass people can price it higher than the average cost. On average, everyone is getting ripped off, but a few people get enough out of it that they benefit at the expense of everyone else. Or, if the system is voluntary/opt-in still, you can get by for a long time by being really obscure about the costs, pricing, quality of service, etc. that people are getting. So if you think about an all-you-can-eat buffet, some people eat more than others, but almost no one knows the exact cost of the food they’re eating, etc.

(Medical insurance finds a way to do BOTH, which is why it remains so lucrative, and so terrible for most people.)

I’m always very wary of any service offered to me at a flat rate regardless of my usage. Either the service is going to be ripping me off in some way, or they’re not – and then they’ll go out of business.

I recently saw an online interaction in which a bunch of people were speculating about a particular individual. None of these people knew this individual, they were just speculating on things, as people do, based on their presence in the public eye.

As it happens, I do know this individual directly, and fairly well. So I started to join the conversation, to correct a few misconceptions and add some clarity.

And then I stopped.

Because… well, I’m not the horse, am I? Information from me is still secondhand. Who am I to speak on behalf of this individual? I could let them know, direct them to the conversation – but I already know they wouldn’t care at all, which is the correct, sane response.

More and more, I find it difficult to ever come up with a reason to talk about someone. I mean sure, in the sense of “Oh, Jack said he can’t make it today,” stuff, that’s fine. But to comment on other people’s motivations, behaviors, ideas? Why?

My middle child had a recent interaction where she was upset because a friend of hers told her that someone else had said a mean thing about her. It was a great opportunity for a valuable lesson – don’t react at all to such things, because there are about a million reasons they could be untrue. If you don’t get your information from the horse’s mouth, consider it nothing worth thinking about. (Lo and behold, upon investigation the other girl’s comment was a mundane one, simply misinterpreted by my daughter’s friend, as is so often the case!)

So don’t talk about people, and don’t listen about people, and read more books. That last one just helps with the first two.

My local town’s snow plow got stuck in the snow. Borough offices, schools – all closed.

But the local bar & grille is open, with $2 meatball sandwiches.

I love this town.

My town has a little Facebook page for townies to discuss local news, events, what have you. Today there was an interesting discussion on there.

We’re due for a major snowstorm. Someone posted a complaint that a local shop “ripped him off” by charging him a lot for a bag of salt. They shouldn’t be that much, you see. Price gouging and whatnot.

The interesting part of the discussion was the many comments, all of which were variations on one of two observations: One kind of comment was echoing the man’s experience, saying they had also gone into such and such a store and been “ripped off” at a similar price point. The other half of the comments were all saying where the bags of salt were only their normal, un-inflated price, but with the caveat that “they were completely sold out.” (One person even commented that he had personally bought 20 bags at one of the normal-priced stores.)

It’s as if all these things are related somehow…