Most resources in your life naturally replenish. Unless you’re doing something terribly wrong, you will regain energy, creativity, even happiness. They will build up over time – unless they’re draining faster than the natural process is creating them.

Likewise, bad things build up, too. Those are the things you want to drain, but often we don’t have a good way to let the anger, the sadness, or the problems wash away.

Consider what you’re deliberately retaining. Have you stopped up the drain when it comes to outrage? And have you completely opened it when it comes to creativity?

These are all flows you can control. Most of these things enter and exit your life at paces you set in the first place. Take a moment to adjust the knobs.

The better a teacher you are, the more assured it is that your students will surpass you. This can sometimes leave you with some regret, asking yourself if you’d have been better served by turning those skills more to your own benefit than towards teaching others.

Who knows? Maybe it would have. But you chose to teach for a reason. Whatever your subject, whoever your students, that reward is a different thing altogether. Be glad of it; may we all be so cursed.

No matter how much water is in a container, any small amount of ice will float to the top of it. In the same way, no matter how much good is in the world, the little bit of bad tends to float to the top of your attention.

I say this because it is important, even vital, that you should hear it. These are truths, and they are important truths.

1. The world is very good. There is far, far more good than bad. For every bad person doing a bad thing, there are ten thousand people doing ten thousand good things. There is more peace than war, more prosperity than poverty, more love than hatred, more beauty than horror.
2. Even as good as the world is, it will be even better tomorrow. The world is not only good, it is improving. We grow in material wealth, longevity & health, knowledge & understanding, wisdom and compassion.
3. You – yes you – contribute to the growth of goodness. You are good. If you hold yourself to certain very basic moral principles, you always will be, even amid your mistakes and setbacks. The world is better because you – yes you – are in it.

Those three things are true. They are true despite the fact that there are problems – and always will be. The problems get solved, so we search for new ones; this is both part of the mechanism by which the world improves and part of the reason why we don’t always believe it. The very fact that we always find new problems makes us believe that they are insurmountable, but it’s also why we’re so great at being great!

When people tell you that the world is worse than it was, they are either lying or wrong. When people tell you that there is something wrong with you, specifically, they are very likely being manipulative for their own ends. When people tell you that despair and ennui are natural responses to a world on the brink of destruction… well, those people are among the villains, quite frankly.

Commiseration is a powerful force. Sharing in triumph takes both effort and confidence, and not everyone cultivates those traits. Sharing in misery only takes a statement of misery, so people sometimes just take the easier route to bonding, since bonding is usually the most base motivator of all humans. And “misery loves company,” as they say. So here is how the pattern works: someone finds that effort and confidence are too hard, so they’re miserable. But they still want to have a social relationship (know your Maslow). So they first invent a reason why their failures aren’t their own fault. Next, they validate that reason by projecting it onto others (after all, it’s less likely to be a made-up excuse if it affects more than just myself). This means they’ll try to convince other people that they have this particular excuse as well – and that’s an alluring bottle of snake oil. Soon they’ve convinced you that you’re part of a very “identity of failure” that can’t be helped in any way, and you in turn start to spread that to others.

When someone succeeds on their own merits, it threatens the entire house of cards. You don’t want to have to face the fact that people really and truly can just go out and have a good life because the world is actually mostly very good and those people – just like you – are in fact incredibly fortunate to live in such incredible and wonderous times.

You need to recognize that pattern. You need to avoid that trap with all your heart, because that trap is one of the few things that can prevent you from enjoying all the treasures of the marvelous world in which you live. You stand before the very gates of a terrestrial paradise, and the only thing standing in your way are a group of people telling you that it isn’t, because they themselves have not the courage to enter.

Do not ever – ever – let unhappy people convince you that their way is right. The world is too good.

Sometimes, the process matters more than the individual outcomes. For example, it is more important for the criminal justice system to be fair and impartial than it is to always punish the guilty. (You might disagree with that. You’re wrong.)

Sometimes, people create processes because they’re trying to improve outcomes. Sometimes, people create processes for… other reasons. And sometimes there’s reasonable disagreement!

The key is this: if you’re trying to get to a specific outcome, and one (or more) of the processes you have to follow is hindering you instead of helping you, it’s reasonable to question the process. It might be reasonable to eliminate it.

But don’t expect the process people to help you.

No matter what, the process people believe in the process above all else. Some processes are important, like fairness in the criminal justice system. Other processes are needless bureaucracy, like which color pen you have to use on forms at the DMV. But to the people behind the process, they’re all vital. Process people believe that their process trumps individual outcomes, whether they’re right or not.

This means, quite simply: you cannot appeal to them in the language of outcomes.

If there is a person who is clearly guilty of murder, but the court has been unable to prove it, you’ll never get a judge to agree with you by saying “I know we didn’t prove it, but come on, we all know he’s guilty. Can’t we just throw him in jail anyway?” That’s outcomes-based language, and process people dismiss it. But you might be able to convince a judge that some part of the process wasn’t adequately fulfilled, and therefore a mistrial should be declared and a new trial should begin – all to serve the proper process, of course.

If you’re an outcomes person, remember that every process person you talk to thinks they’re a judge in a murder trial. So if you want to get anywhere with them, you have to speak that language.

That’s just the process, I’m afraid.

Happy New Month!

When I was much younger (pre-kids), I was pretty obsessed with money. I hustled relentlessly and money was my primary motivator in just about everything. When my oldest was born, I doubled down on that; the additional pressures of fatherhood made me feel like I had to.

Very quickly, I discovered that my rampant chasing of the almighty dollar was really hurting my ability to enjoy the things I really loved. I reprioritized hard and I’m happy to say I’ve had a wonderful relationship with both my children and myself.

But money is still good! Chasing anything in an unhealthy way is, well… unhealthy. But that doesn’t make the thing itself unhealthy, and so it is with money.

So that’s my resolution this month. I’m going to – in a moderate, healthy way – chase a little bit more money. Bring a little of that into balance with the rest of what I do. If my kids object, I’ll listen.

Good luck in all your resolutions!

There are lots of things worse than being sick on the floor. You could be sick and have no floor, for example. Endure.

The year my younger sister was born, my parents did a lot of renovations to the house we lived in. At some point during those renovations, some of the permanent ductwork in the basement was removed because the heater was being repositioned. My father put up some temporary plastic ductwork, the kind that’s just a long grey flexible tube, to fill the gap. With a black sharpie, he scrawled on it “Temporary as of 6/26/90.”

For years and years, I laughed constantly at that “temporary” ductwork. It lasted until 2011 when the house was damaged in an unrelated fire – it would have lasted much longer otherwise, I’m sure. Every time I walked past it, I would chuckle.

One day I even told my father how much it made me laugh, and he said “Why do you think I wrote that? I knew the second it went up that it was as ‘temporary’ as anything else in the house. Made me laugh then, makes me laugh now.”

There’s a lesson here. Everything is temporary, and “temporary” doesn’t mean that there’s a plan to replace it. People get “temporary” jobs that they work for twenty years. Calling something “temporary” is a means of saying you don’t want it to last very long, but that isn’t automatically so just because you wish it.

The reality is that things are only as temporary as the willingness to put up with them. If you don’t make the plan to create something permanent in its place, “temporary” can last until the whole house burns down.

Let’s say you have a machine with twenty distinct parts. The machine lasts about ten years before it breaks. If you pick one part and make that part a hundred times more durable, do you know how long the machine will last now?

About ten years.

See, if a machine has twenty parts, making just one of them better isn’t going to radically change the life of the whole machine – unless, that is, the part you’re fixing was significantly more deficient than average. If the rest of the parts in the machine all last twenty years, then yeah – you’ve got one weak link. Improving it will bring up the floor.

So how do you find that weak link? How do you isolate the part that’s so bad that it’s bringing down the lifespan of the whole system?

You’ve got to break that system. Twice.

Take the whole machine and – figuratively – drop it off the roof. See which part breaks. Then do it again. If the same part is what broke each time, there’s a very good chance it’s a weaker link than the rest. If a different part breaks each time, then it’s more likely that every part is roughly the same in terms of durability.

Stress-tests are good for any system. Don’t just randomly pick a part and improve it because you can – you might be wasting time if the rest of the system won’t last any longer as a result.

Scale and context are incredibly important, and humans are spectacularly bad at estimating them.

You hear of some particular evil. It’s purely bad in all forms, and so you want to rail against it. Should you?

Maybe! But maybe this thing, no matter how purely bad it is, represents such a minor ill in the grand scheme of things that your response is disproportionate.

You only have so much anger and effort to go around. Even if something is deserving of it in a vacuum, we don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a world of connected, interdependent features and some of them might be “less bad” but affect far greater swaths of that world. Keep that in mind when you want to be mad.

The default, normal state of your existence is that you do nothing. Everything you do is an exception – and exceptional. By default, you aren’t flying to the moon and back every day, so if you actually did that it would be really amazing. The corollary is that it makes no sense to apologize for not doing that since not doing that is the normal state of affairs.

And yet, we do that all the time. We build enormous amounts of guilt around not doing things, to the point where we feel we have to offer endless explanations for inaction. We send out “no apologies” – that is, apologies for saying “no” – as if we were doing something wrong by doing nothing at all.

Here is the truth, as difficult as it may be to hear: you don’t owe anyone an explanation for your “no.” You certainly don’t owe anyone an apology. We live in a finite world. Even if you have infinite love in our hearts, the world does not provide us with infinite opportunities to express that love. Our minutes, our dollars, our attention spans, the very breaths of our lives are all limited, and that isn’t your fault.

I can hear your protest. “But Johnny, this isn’t the same as building boundaries in business. These are my friends and family, my loved ones. I have to do what they ask, because that’s how it works. How can I say no when these are people I care about?”

First off, I totally get you. This is a hard challenge, with a lot of emotional weight. How can we build and strengthen relationships when I’m pushing them away?

You aren’t.

That’s not what a “no” is. A “no” is a building block, part of what shapes the pathway of the “yes.” The strongest rivers flow in specific spots, while water that spreads out everywhere spreads shallow and weak. The “no” is part of the channel, which helps create the space for a deep and meaningful “yes.”

If you want to be able to give a strong and healthy no that actually builds rapport instead of eroding your own self-worth, try this:

1. Do not apologize. Strike the language of “sorry” from your vocabulary. You have nothing to apologize for, and carrying guilt in your heart turns into resentment, which makes you want to push the other person away. It also plants the seed in the other person that you have done something wrong, even if they didn’t think that to begin with! Far from making your relationships stronger, needless apologies make them weaker.
2. Offer no explanations. It’s hard, but we immediately default to giving excuses – even if they’re true, we feel like we owe this expansive description of our circumstances in order to justify the no. But that’s not only untrue, but it’s basically inviting the other person to try to “solve” this for you as if you were giving them a puzzle with your “yes” locked inside.
3. Instead, if you truly care about this person and you want to build rapport, offer an alternative.

Here’s an example: your cousin, who you love but barely see, invites you to an expensive destination wedding. It’s way outside of your budget and also lands smack in the center of your busiest time with your children’s activities. Here’s an unhealthy way to say no, but it’s what most people would do:

“Oh, I’m so so sorry! I feel terrible, I really want to be able to go, but I just can’t. We just had to fix the downstairs bathroom and the kids have a huge run of rehearsals and ugh I’m so sorry.”

You think you’re “making up” for the no (which you don’t have to do!), but you’re not even doing that. You’re saying, “here’s a list of all the things I think are more important than you.” That’s what they hear, anyway. Instead, try this:

“That sounds fun! I won’t be able to make it, but when you land back in the country, let’s go out and have a big celebration dinner! My treat, and you can tell me all about it and show me the pictures. Love you cuz, have fun and can’t wait!“

See what happened? You celebrated, you encouraged, you invited – all with a “no!” No apologies or explanations were given because none were needed.

You only have so much life to hand out. Don’t waste it on needless apologies; spend it on joy.