There’s a lot of power in triangulation. Getting three examples of anything starts to show the actual topography of the category to which they belong.

Pick a style of music you’ve never listened to before. If you listen to one song of that genre, you still don’t know much about the genre. You have no way of knowing whether the song you listened to was representative of the whole category or not. Listen to a second song, and maybe it’s wildly different from the first. Maybe you love one and hate the other. How do you know if you like the genre or not?

You listen to a third. Now you start to see patterns and similarities. You start to see how it more closely resembles one of the first two more than the other. You start to get a little triangulation going and can safely start to form your initial hypothesis.

It’s not perfect, but it’s leagues better than zero, one, or two examples as far as extrapolation goes.

When you want to work on a project, start with three data points. Three examples, three bits of research. Heck, take three bites of something before you decide if you like it, just like the kids have to. Fail at something three times before you try to guess why you failed. Read three job descriptions from different companies before deciding if that kind of role is worth exploring.

There is a lot of information in the spaces between your set of three – often more information than is contained in the examples themselves.

In my work, I get a version of this question very frequently:

“How do I ask for the thing I want without it seeming like that’s what I’m doing?”

In other words, people often want to be very cagey. They want to hide their motivations and shield their true intentions. And I must emphasize that they want to do this with intentions that are actually very pure and even noble. I don’t coach like, drug dealers or whatever.

I understand, of course. People don’t want to be vulnerable, and they equate “vulnerability” with other people knowing too much about them. But in that particular kind of “vulnerability,” there’s a ton of strength, value, and success.

There’s also toughness. You’re not really vulnerable at all just because you’re honest with someone about the fact that (for example) you want to start a non-profit to help teens find writing mentors or whatever and you don’t have any idea how to begin. It feels vulnerable to say that because in our modern lives, we’ve come to equate “awkward” with “vulnerable” and equate “unfamiliar” with “awkward.”

It’s only unfamiliar. And that’s most of life. All the things you want are unfamiliar. Of course they are; you don’t have them yet.

You aren’t vulnerable in the unfamiliar. You’re unassailable in your purpose. Honesty is your armor, ambition is your shield. Nothing can harm you for wearing more of it.

Do you know why you open the fridge when you’re hungry, see that there’s nothing there, and then open the door again five minutes later?

If you look statistically at all the times you’ve been hungry in the last few years, the majority of the solutions were found inside that fridge. So that’s your default. It’s familiar. Opening the door again doesn’t solve the problem this time, but it feels good. It feels right. So you keep doing it.

When we’re scared, stressed, or uncertain we default to the familiar. We do the things we’ve always done. We solve the problems we know how to solve, even if that isn’t the problem we currently have. But solving any kind of problem feels good in the same way opening the refrigerator door feels good.

When you want to solve a problem, you have to get uncomfortable. You have to do things that, at first, might not feel good – because they’re unfamiliar. As you navigate them, they’ll become easier, and problems will get solved. But the solutions aren’t where you were to begin with, or you wouldn’t have had the problems.

You’re hungry because that fridge is empty. Now you have to go somewhere else.

The movements of the masses provide a lot of insight into the shape of the world around you. If you take a moment to step out of the group yourself, you can look back at it and really glean a lot about your own future.

Here are some rules to remember:

1. The pendulum always swings. If there is something that everyone is currently doing because it’s being touted as an amazing idea, at some point too many people will have done it and it won’t be a good idea anymore. This cycle has been happening forever and always will. That doesn’t mean it’s never a good idea – but it means you should be wary.
2. Common complaints will happen to you. You’re not immune to life, so if you hear about some particular struggle often, don’t assume you’re never going to catch a piece of it. You too may be sick, unemployed, lonely, or attacked. Be aware of what you’d do if you were.
3. When someone in power says something that everyone not in power readily agrees with, that thing is a lie.

If you keep those truths in your mind, you’ll avoid a lot of heartache in your life.

I am always happy to share helpful ideas when people ask. (I try hard not to share them unless they do.)

People often guard their ideas, putting them up behind various kinds of social (or literal) “paywalls” and sharing nothing at all until a solid benefit exchange has been established.

This is silly. Your ideas are only a signal of your value, they’re not the value themselves. If I don’t know how to fix my sink and a plumber tells me for free, I’m still going to pay that plumber to do the actual work. If the fix was so simple that I’m actually able to do it (“That one valve is loose, just tighten it and you’re fine.”), then the work itself also wouldn’t have been valuable enough to guard – you gain more in the long term by establishing credibility and trust.

So if someone comes to you regarding your area of expertise and asks a question – answer. Each idea you share is a little birdie that flies out into the world singing your praises and bringing you back twigs for the nest. When you have a whole flock of them out there, you’ll have more work than you know what to do with.

We don’t, as people, howl as much as we should.

We all have the howl within us. The deepest sadness that comes from change, the loss of time and what that time held. As the nights pass, it is natural – even good – that we should howl. It is better than how we normally deal with that sadness.

The modern human hates being sad. We do so many bad things with it.

We turn it into other emotions. We don’t like being sad, so instead, we get mad. We pick fights, we blame others for our sadness, or we just rage where rage does nothing.

We evade it with self-destruction. We punish ourselves because we feel like all emotions must be deserved and so if we’re sad, we must have been bad, and so we must enact punishment on ourselves. Or perhaps we just need to escape ever feeling anything real, so we drown it in the worst habits our modern lives can give us.

We misinterpret it. Some deep part of our soul tells us we’re sad, and so we think that part of our soul is trying to get us to change that, to fix that, to do something – anything – to make us not sad anymore. We make stupid decisions and avoid healthy behaviors because they even bring us close to sadness.

These are all terrible things to do. What we should do is howl.

Embrace it. Bring that sadness in. Don’t avoid it, don’t drown it or mute it. Let it wash over you. Let it just be, because that is a part of being human. A life in which you are never sad means you never cared about anything because all things must change. If you care about anything, at some point that thing will change, and that is the core of sadness. This is inevitable, and so the howl is eternal.

Don’t trap it. Let it become you and embrace you and escape you. Sob, weep, scream, reach for the heavens, and feel it. Become nothing but a soul that can experience only sorrow… for a time.

And then, when the howl quiets, you will be more human than ever before. You will be clear, free from terrible vices or terrible choices because you just let it in. The howl won’t be something you’re trying to fight or run from, it will just be quiet, for a time. It will come again. Make your peace with it, for there is no substitute.

It is pure, it is eternal. As you embrace it, so are you.

You cannot get bigger and more complicated. The path to growth is simplicity.

If your process is very complex and requires a lot of spot decisions, it will always be an artisanal process. You can’t create an assembly line unless the steps are easy and measured.

This is true as an organization, but it’s true for your personal output, too. And one of the main inputs in any personal process is “stress.”

That means that if you try to scale without simplifying, you might increase your productivity a little in a linear way, but your stress levels will increase exponentially. You won’t even realize it at first, but it’ll kill you.

If you want to get better at something, figure out how to do it with fewer steps first. Recycle your wisdom, recycle your effort, capture your own waste runoff and use it. Only then can you scale.

Doing good things for bad reasons is an easy way to burn yourself out and do more harm than good.

You have finite juice to do things you actually want to do, and you won’t run out of good options any time soon. But most people try to do too many things for bad reasons, and not only do they overload themselves – they don’t even do those things well!

We’ve all had that friend that didn’t want to see the movie that the group had decided to see together, but they went anyway because they didn’t want to be left out. And then that friend complains the whole time, talks through the movie, etc. They spend money to have a miserable time, and they dampen the time of everyone else.

That same trap exists in business, too. You join some team at work because you don’t want to be left out, but you don’t actually want to be there – so you don’t contribute much and you end up spending a bunch of time just to hurt your own professional reputation.

It’s a true superpower to be able to just say no to things without eliminating your role in the larger social fabric. You can say, “I’m actually going to see a different movie playing around the same time, want to meet up for burgers after?” And you can say “I’m fully loaded on projects where I can give 100%, I don’t want to dilute my contributions – let’s sync up in a month and see what info we can share with each other.”

That’s the walk of confidence. It’ll make you happier and more successful – and you don’t even have to do anything.

People don’t know what they don’t know, but they do know what they do know. And so when people want to help, train, teach, or educate others they default to the stuff that’s already in their head.

That’s fine as far as helpfulness is concerned, but it means you’re often missing a crucial piece: what the other person actually needs to know.

Humans want to help, and humans usually want to talk. We also leap to information that sounds relevant, even if it isn’t necessarily helpful. If a friend tells you that they’re learning to fly a plane and you happen to be a chemical engineer, you might start telling them what you know about jet fuel. That feels relevant – jet fuel is part of flying a jet, right? – but it has nothing to do with the skills they need to fly a plane.

The very first thing people need to know is “how do I get from point A to point B?” Everything else, even things that are in the same general information sphere, are roadside attractions. When you’re teaching, keep it in mind.

Imagine that you’re the conductor of a trolley. It has numerous stops and is headed to Greenville. People board your trolley because they want to go to Greenville, and you sell them tickets and off you go. Once the trolley is full of passengers, you decide that you actually want to go to Redville, so you steer the trolley in that direction at the next interchange. To your shock, at the stop after that everyone gets off and demands a refund for the remaining fare.

Doesn’t seem very strange to you, right? But replace “trolley” & “passengers” with “company” and “employees,” and it’s like everyone forgets.

Remember, no matter what system you’ve built – people don’t join up because they believe in that system. They join up because it gets them what they want. If the system changes, they might not go along for the ride. If you expect that every passenger will go along with every change simply because it’s obvious to you that it’s a good change for the system overall, you will be frustrated and disappointed often.

Before steering the trolley to Redville, before you even begin to plan the route, you have to sell Redville to your passengers. They can always find another trolley if you don’t.