I don’t think most people appreciate how big a deal it is to make even a small improvement in the odds of success for an activity you do frequently.

If you make driving 5% safer for yourself, you’re doing yourself a huge favor over the course of your life. If you reduce your chance of a heart attack by 5%, that’s years added to your life. But people treat these things like they’re small because their likelihood of affecting a single incident is too small to notice.

Good advice doesn’t always work, but that doesn’t make it not good. Buckling your seat belt is solid wisdom even if you know someone who got killed despite wearing one. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that something isn’t worth doing unless it guarantees success. These little improvements add up. A lucky life starts with a little tilt.

The process of solving problems and the process of creating solutions aren’t exactly the same. They’re adjacent and related, but there’s a time and a place for both. If you mix them up, you’re often making things worse for yourself.

Consider a burning building. While the building is on fire, that’s the wrong time to think about designing and installing a sprinkler system. It’s the wrong time to research pricing for flame-retardant carpeting. If a building is on fire right now, you should put the fire out – even if you have to do so in a less-than-perfectly-efficient way.

This is true even (and especially!) of smaller problems. If you respond to every problem by going to the drawing board for a system-wide solution, you’ll be spending far too much juice on every issue. You’ll also be making a lot of snap decisions when you often should do nothing at all, besides just address the current scenario as-is.

Instead, you should have a set schedule for visiting larger, systemic issues within any system. If you run a business, problems are going to come up all the time. Each one will seem like a major emergency. Most won’t be, and very few will actually require designing an entirely new system to handle.

When a problem occurs, solve it and track it. If a light burns out, replace the bulb, and note that you did so; don’t install a whole new lighting system. Every quarter, review your notes on the problems. If a bunch of bulbs burned out, then sure – take a look at a deeper issue. If it was the one time, you’re fine buying a new bulb now and then.

Taking this approach also lets you deploy those solutions in a reasonable way. If you’re running around in a panic all the time, those solutions aren’t going to be implemented well. They won’t be communicated well, either. If you only create new systems at regular intervals, you build for stability in the long term.

Visualize. Imagine you could turn down someone’s volume, make them mute to you. Imagine you can turn someone’s words into physical hooks, so you could see them for what they were. Imagine you simply chose not to bite them.

Visualize. Imagine a physical rope tying you to someone, and imagine cutting that rope. Imagine standing on an iceberg with someone, and it breaks apart, allowing you both to drift in other directions.

Visualize. You take all of your pain, all of your fury, and you unleash it upon a simple grey rock in a field. The rock is utterly unaffected. If you were to take the rock’s entire existence and view it condensed over a day, all your fury wouldn’t even be a blip on the screen.

Visualize. Imagine clenching your fist around a shard of glass. The harder you tense, the more you bleed. The greater your effort, the greater your pain. Imagine the relief when you simply open your hand and release.

Release.

There is no sadder state of existence than being defined by hatred. If your entire identity revolves around things you dislike, are against, or want destroyed: find something to love. Hate does not destroy hate. Put some joy out there. Like something instead.

So much of the secret to a good life is just to shape your environment.

If there’s a river flowing, and you need water for your crops, you could just cup your hands together and transport the water. A few ounces at a time, expending effort with each trip, to bring the water where it’s needed. Or, more wisely, you can shape your environment. Dig a small canal off the river so water flow is diverted to your field. The water is flowing anyway.

Not everything you want to create must be created through conscious effort. If you shape your environment correctly, things will grow. My children are all avid readers. Why? Because I filled the house with books and didn’t otherwise intervene much. I read whenever they asked, but never forced it. I let them sneak a few extra minutes awake beyond their bed time as long as their excuse was book-related. I shaped an environment, and things grew.

Think about what you want. Now, don’t think about what you need to get it – think instead about what kind of environment that thing needs to thrive.

Whether you realize it or not, certain things are keeping you afloat. Some of those things are pretty solid and healthy, things like community or family. Some of them are shaky at best, like a job or caffeine habit. And some of them are downright unhealthy things to cling to in icy waters.

Take a look around you and think about which things would do the most damage to you if you lost. Then take at least one action to make that thing more secure. If it’s a relationship with another human, thank them. If it’s your beloved pet, take them in for a checkup. If it’s your home, revisit your insurance.

And if it’s something you’d rather not be so dependent on, then start to wean off of it. If the only thing keeping you going is a pack-a-day cigarette habit, then you need to quit before the rug gets pulled out from under you and you have to.

The water pulls us all down. We all need something to float on. Stay dry.

Have you ever thrown up bleach? I hope not! And assuming you haven’t ever experienced this yourself, let me describe it for you: it’s agony. I’ve had to do it; to induce vomiting in order to regurgitate a stomach full of it. It’s terrifying, because everything in your body screams at you that it will be agony. That it will hurt worse than anything else you’ve ever felt. You would absolutely prefer not to.

And if you don’t, you’ll die.

That’s the thing. As horrible as it is to vomit up that bleach, it will kill you if it stays inside you. The best thing to do, of course, would be to never get it into you in the first place. But sometimes accidents happen, and you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between bad and worse.

Sometimes you have a thought, or a memory, or an experience – an unpleasant one. Maybe you’ve gotten by for the past few days or past few decades by not letting that thought, memory, or experience work its way out of your system. You resisted it because letting yourself really live through it would feel like throwing up bleach.

But all pain is process. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual – pain is something happening. And that thing might need to happen, because the alternative might be way worse.

Who is the nicest person you know personally? How about the meanest? Now how about the wealthiest and the poorest? The smartest and the dumbest? The funniest and the most boring? The most industrious and the laziest?

Why bother to think about these things? There’s a humorous little bit of statistical trivia: for any given positive trait, about 80% of people will rank themselves as “above average” for that trait. So, by default, most people’s personal calibration for where they fall on a given trait’s spectrum is pretty off.

I was thinking about a really mean person I once knew, who of course didn’t think of themselves as mean, self-centered, or narcissistic. But I realized – that person was utterly surrounded by people pretty close to them on that end of the meanness scale. You can try to figure out whether the chicken or the egg came first – whether they were mean because they were surrounded by other jerks, or whether they were surrounded by jerks because they chased away all the nice people – but it’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that they’d been in that environment for so long that they had no idea what a nice person was even like.

So they didn’t think of themselves as mean, because in their personal frame of reference, they weren’t any meaner than average.

So, now and then, it’s good to get a sense of the boundaries of your personal bubble. It may be uncomfortable – but that discomfort may well be a source of clarity and improvement.

People sometimes dream so big that they sabotage themselves. They have lofty dreams and ambitions – which are good! But they think exclusively about them, instead of the tiny action they need to take today to make it happen.

Look, I get that if you have a major problem or a major goal, the tiny, 0.1% action you take towards it can feel so far removed that it actually feels like you’re moving away from it. You feel like mowing lawns for money is a distraction from becoming a millionaire.

But it’s the opposite. Thinking about being a millionaire is what distracts you from becoming one.

Dream big, to set the goals. But once the goals are set and the actions decided on, you should only allow yourself to think about the goals themselves every now and then, to revise and reevaluate. If you allow yourself to do nothing but think about the finish line, you’ll feel like the short steps are beneath you, or are taking you in the wrong direction.

Dream big, yes. But think small.