Sometimes I set a goal for myself and manage to accomplish a lot, but I fall short of the actual goal. While that can be disappointing, I try to remind myself: any progress is good!

If I say “I want to clean my whole house today” but at the end of the day have only cleaned the kitchen, bathroom, and main living areas… that’s great! That’s a lot more than was clean before, certainly more than if I hadn’t set a goal at all.

It’s easy to get discouraged when your progress falls short of your original goals, but those were just directional. Actually accomplishing anything is better than nothing, and half speed is better than zero. It’s easier to build on half a success tomorrow than to pull yourself away from lazy inertia.

So go forward at any speed, and enjoy the trip.

Nobody deserves anything, nothing is automatic, and all of life is at your fingertips. You have a wide varieties of currency at your disposal – everything from time and effort to kindness and ingenuity. You can pay any combination of these and buy anything you like, but you never get anything else.

Invest wisely.

When a baby cries, it’s because it wants something. Crying is the only real “lever” that a baby has to control its environment, so it uses it. If it’s hungry, tired, uncomfortable, or scared – it cries. If you figure out what thing the baby needs and fix that problem, the baby generally goes back to cooing pleasantly.

Frequently, adults will whine and complain about something, and if you try to fix it or help in any way, that adult will tell you they don’t want a fix, they just want to be heard.

When do we learn that?

At some point between being a baby and being an adult, we must learn this behavior. Because a baby doesn’t just cry for the sake of crying; it doesn’t just “want you to listen to it cry.” It wants something about its situation to change!

So my theory is this: we’re interpreting “I just want to be heard” incorrectly. That’s not what the adult wants. The adult wants to feel loved, in exactly the same way that the baby sometimes cries just because it wants the touch of a parent. But adults feel weird about just asking to be loved or held or comforted, so instead we proxy in something else. “Just listen to me” is really just a substitute for “please make me feel like somebody cares about me enough to listen.”

So… do that. The next time someone asks you to “just listen,” so a little bit more than that. Make sure they feel safe, secure, and appreciated. We’re all just babies crying, sometimes.

Do you have too much to do? Then change that. Make your “To-Do” list only one item: “Make a list of the things I have to do.”

Then you still only have one item! The list!

It seems silly, but the power of queueing is really amazing. If you can catch a ball, then you could probably catch five balls in a row. But not if I threw all five at you at once. The power of the list is just that: it turns five things into one thing. It’s a wonderful defensive filter.

So when you’re feeling overwhelmed, just write it down. Watch it fall away.

People like to say “just for fun,” as if “just” was an appropriate word to use there. Fun is the most important thing! Everything you do should either be fun, or enable fun in the future. Everything else is the “just!”

“Why are you doing that?” Oh, just to make some money.

So if there’s a day with a certain kind of fun attached, lean in! Dress up, be silly, give treats. What joy it is to spread joy!

Happy Halloween!

Your worst traits are never gone. They’re waiting in the places where you first learned them. So don’t go back to those places.

There’s a reason that alcoholics don’t go to bars if they’re trying to stay sober. Bars are not only where you get alcohol, they’re also where you found all the good memories and fun you got from alcohol. Those ghosts are powerful, but they’re often pretty immobile.

If you have any trait you’ve shaken that you’d like to stay that way, you also need to avoid the situations where that trait was beneficial. You’re never free, only sober.

If you have ears to listen, then almost immediately after meeting anyone, they will explicitly tell you what joy they can bring to your life.

Everyone has something. Everyone has a particular kind of happiness they can give you. Our great task is to accept that joy from everyone, no matter the person, and to not expect any other kind. Almost all of our sadness about other people comes from expecting something from them that they never offered, and in fact are not capable of giving.

No one can be everything. You can’t expect everything from anyone, therefore. You have to take people as they are. If you can, if you do – they are joyous. They are wonderful, in their way, each one of them. You only bring them low with your own inflated expectations.

When I was ten, I took a trip to South Dakota with my family. While I was there, my father and I went on a hike and saw a buffalo. I learned several things that day.

I learned buffalo are much, much bigger than I imagined. I learned that just because an animal isn’t a predator doesn’t mean it isn’t wildly dangerous. And I learned that, unlike every wild animal I had met as a kid living in the suburbs, these animals will NOT run away just because a human makes noise at them. In fact, quite the opposite.

The buffalo charged us, and we ran.

But that’s how we learn! Misadventures make us smarter, if we pay attention.

We do too many things in a binary way in modern society, I think. Take work – you’re either at work or you use some PTO and take a vacation. On or off. But that’s too extreme! Imagine there was a different bank of days you had called “Easy Days.” You still have to come to work and do your basic job, but you’re free from all meetings, new projects, or other unusual stressors, including any responsibility to answer emails. If you could trade 2 full PTO days for 5 of those “Easy Days,” would you? I sure would!

Just an idle thought, but more things should have scaled middle options.