If you pick up a handful of snow and hand it to someone else, some will fall away, forgotten. That person will pick up a little more and pack it in before handing the snowball off, and some more will fall away. And so on and so on through a hundred pairs of hands, each adding a little snow and letting some fall. When it’s in the hundredth pair of hands, not more than a tiny handful of flakes might be retained from the original clump – if that – but all the same, they’ve been playing with the same snowball.

Such it is with culture. Every great book you read, movie you watch, song you love: these are snowflakes. You’ll build with them with your loved ones, and some will fall away. They’ll add their own.

All this is as it should be. At the core of it all is the shape, the way a snowball forms and is full of joy no matter the shapes of the snowflakes within it.

I don’t know if every movie I enjoy with my children will be a movie they eventually share with theirs. But it doesn’t matter. Today, my daughter and I watched Beetlejuice, and we laughed together, and then we danced together, and that moment was joy. That shape is eternal.

At any given point, your brain is dividing its attention between whatever you’re doing right now, and whatever else you’d like to be thinking about.

If you’re trying to disarm a bomb, it would be really great if 100% of your focus was on that task. Active distractions should be cleared – no loud sounds, no flashing lights, no one poking you in the arm. But you need to get rid of passive distractions, too. If your spouse just walked out on you last night, that might be taking up a big part of your mindshare.

Positive things can take up mindshare, too. If you’re really excited for an upcoming concert this weekend, thinking about that experience can be taking up a lot of your mental space, distracting you from your focus.

These experiences are part of life, but keeping them from owning your mental space and energy is important. So what do we do with them?

I give them their space – but I fence them in.

I carry a small, physical notebook with me that I exclusively use to vent these kinds of thoughts. Often the desire to think about something is synonymous with the desire to communicate about it. If I’m excited about that concert, I just want to tell someone how excited I am. So I’ll give myself five minutes and write about that – and then close the book and be able to go back to my work.

Create your outlet for things that you find occupying your mindshare. Often, they’re jus trying to get out – so let them.

Happy new month!

It’s the shortest, and often the bleakest month of the year. But today I started it off with joy, as my children lept from their beds to the sight of the first snow of the year on our front lawn. They raced out of the house with the sun still barely peeking over the treeline to pick up the sparse dusting of magic.

So that’s my theme, my resolution, for this month. It’s a short month, and I have a lot to do. Several deadlines are looming, several major projects need my attention, and several important life events are right around the corner. But amid it all, I will not lose sight of the early dawns full of magic and I will not miss the opportunity to race into them, cold and smiling.

Wish me luck, as I wish you!

Someone’s house is flooding; their basement and maybe even their first floor are underwater. Their possessions are being ruined, and their house itself might soon be totally destroyed. “I wish there was a little less water in my house,” that person might lament.

“Easy for you to say,” says someone in a desert, parched beyond belief. “Some of us don’t have any water at all!”

We can always do this, in any situation. We can complain that someone else’s complaint isn’t as bad as ours, or even that their complaint is the very reverse of ours. Someone complaining that they’re overworked could be scowled at by someone unemployed. Someone who can’t seem to gain weight can be sneered at by someone who can’t seem to lose it. The possibilities are endless.

And endlessly dumb.

It’s not just dumb because complaining, in general, is a foolish way to spend your energy. It’s also extra silly because there’s value right there to be generated, and you’re squandering the opportunity.

If you had two friends, and one said “I have too many hot dogs and not enough buns,” and the other said “I have too many buns and not enough hot dogs,” you’d probably figure out a solution pretty quickly. And sure, the problem of a flooded house and a drought don’t exactly cancel each other out, but there’s always an opportunity to combine efforts in some way – even just to talk, share resources and ideas, and look for overlaps.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say, right?

“On a scale of 1 to 10…”

You’ve probably all heard a question that began that way. Defining the parameters – sort of. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much does your arm hurt?” But what does “1” mean? Does 1 mean no pain or the smallest increment of pain I can think of? What is “10?” How can you objectively know?

You can’t. Pretty much all human experience is subjective, and that’s why other people are your best insulation against being trapped, fooled, or lost.

All human experience is subjective, but if you get a sense of what other humans think about, experience, enjoy, dislike, and seek out then you can start to have a sense of where your own thoughts might fall. This isn’t an exercise in conformity – you aren’t learning those scales in order to place yourself in their dead center. But how can you know if the grass is greener or not if you’ve literally never seen a yard that wasn’t your own?

Talk to people. Listen to them when they explain their experiences, and don’t rush to respond with your own. Gather data, and reflect. On a scale from 1 to 10, it’s very very helpful.

If you break your hand, you can’t type for a little while. Then for a bit after that, you can’t type as well, even if you gradually get back into it. And then after a time, you’re good to go again – assuming that you took proper care of the injury.

If you don’t take care of the injury, it’s different. If you try to type on the same day you break your hand? You’ll still be terrible at typing, but you’ll also make the injury worse. It might not ever get better. If you don’t acknowledge the injury and treat it with the respect it deserves, it can cripple you.

“Treating it with the respect it deserves” includes not only altering your life for a time around the injury, but it also means making sure others in your life do the same. You don’t have to stop all activities, but you do have to control the flow of activities involving your damaged component. You also have to make sure that others don’t keep trying to force you to type – you have to communicate.

That doesn’t mean you owe anyone an explanation about how you broke your hand. But it does mean that you need to be honest about the current level of typing proficiency as well as an expected estimate about your return to full strength, at least to those with whom you have a relationship based on typing.

All that seems pretty reasonable, right? No major objections? Didn’t say anything wild, there?

Okay, good. You know how your hand is pretty essential to your typing ability? Cool. Now think about all the tasks you have that are affected by your mental and emotional health. Now think about the ways those things can be hurt.

Now do all of that when that happens, and don’t be ashamed of it.

The journey of your life is full of potential problems and hazards. You’ll encounter them all the time. And in many cases, you’ll react badly and cause more damage. I’m not talking about you specifically – everyone does this. But don’t worry, I’m going to show you how to stop.

First, imagine you’re driving down a road at some reasonable clip. Up ahead, you spot a large pothole, right in the middle of the road. That pothole represents the problem. What most people do is react to the situation, often with anger or frustration. “There shouldn’t be a pothole here! Someone should have taken better care of this road! It isn’t my fault that there’s a pothole here, so I shouldn’t be held accountable for the outcomes!” And they’ll drive right into the pothole, yelling the whole time about how the resulting damage to their car shouldn’t be their responsibility.

What gets in the way of their clear thinking is this: they’re right. There shouldn’t be a pothole there! It was someone else’s responsibility to fix it! It isn’t their fault that the pothole is there, so someone else should be taking responsibility! But guess what?

Being right is not the same thing as getting what you want!

So, skip the situation itself, for a moment. Take a deep breath, and ask yourself: what do I really want? I know a secret – you don’t really want the pothole fixed. You don’t care. What you want, is to be safely on your way with no damage to your car. And in order to get that, you have to work backward from that result.

You have to say, “I want to be safely on my way. What’s the best way to get that, given this situation? It seems like the best way is to slow down, carefully take the shoulder, and edge past the pothole before speeding back up.” That can feel like a bother, because why should you have to? You didn’t put the pothole there!

I will say it again: being right is not the same thing as getting what you want!

If you focus on being right, you will miss out on a lot of what you want. Almost all of that comes from focusing on the situation itself, rather than focusing on what you want your life to be like on the other side of it. Problems are temporary. Don’t waste time thinking about the kind of person you want to be during a problem. Think about the life you want after, and take the best route to that life. The pothole will soon be far in your rearview mirror.

Don’t waste energy on a problem you don’t intend to solve.

There are many problems in the world. Not all of them are yours. But almost all of them will try to convince you that they are.

Whether they’re the problems of other people that they try to dump on you or the problems of the world that try to invade your personal bubble, the only effect most of these problems will have on you is to drain your energy. They’ll kill your mood, distract you, and make you miserable – all without you making a dent in the actual problem itself.

Every second you spend thinking about a problem that you don’t truly intend to engage with is a wasted second. A portion of your life drained away by the most relentless vampire in existence. Don’t let it happen.

Fair doesn’t mean “equal.”

The most equal trade in the world is this: I give you a dollar and in exchange, you give me a dollar. Perfectly equal, and equally pointless.

Lots of trades aren’t equal, but they’re better than fair – they’re win/win. I give you a dollar and you give me something that’s worth more than a dollar to me, but less than a dollar to you. Since “worth” is entirely subjective, this helps us both!

So what is a partnership? It’s not a permanent, equal exchange. I mean, it can be that, but that’s not super great. If two people can each afford $2k in rent each month, then splitting the rent on a $4k/month place might get them marginally better living conditions than two separate $2k/month places. Or maybe not – do you value more space or more privacy?

Here’s a better option – two people that can’t afford equal amounts of rent living together and finding ways to create win/win trades. Maybe the person who makes more money has no time to clean. Maybe the person with less money has more time to paint. And so on.

Look at business partnerships. When you see two people partner up to start a business, it’s not because they have identical skills and are splitting the work into two exactly even piles. It’s because they have complementary skills, and the division of labor creates a mutual benefit.

So don’t look for trades, partnerships, and situations where you get out exactly what you put in. You’ll be miserable. Look for situations where you get out exactly what you want – and you put in whatever it takes to get there.

Today I made a meal for my kids that I’ve made a thousand times. My chicken-and-rice casserole is a staple of the Roccia household, and all my kids love it. It’s easy to make, so I probably end up making it once a week or so.

Today, due to having some slightly different ingredients on hand, I made a very minor change to the recipe.

You’d think I landed a rocket on the moon and came back with Spider-man. My kids went nuts. They told me they actually loved me more because of how good it was!

So apart from the fact that I’m on cloud nine because of the heaping praise I got for my cooking tonight, there’s also an interesting lesson here. Just because you’ve done something a million times doesn’t mean it isn’t still worth experimenting with a little. Especially if the risk is low, mix it up! Worst case, you have one sub-par experience. Best case, you open up a whole new universe.

And get your kids to love you a little more, too!