I like to operate in dynamic, flexible environments. When I’m working, I want to know that the rules that surround me have some give, that I’m able to shape my environment to suit my needs. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

If your environment is stone, then nothing can be changed. You can’t easily make upgrades (or at all, perhaps). You can’t change when new information becomes available. You can’t adapt. You have to do certain things because “they’ve always been done that way,” or even because “everyone else does them that way” (ugh, barf). You don’t want a stone environment; you want clay.

But if you go too far in the other direction, you don’t get clay – you get water. Clay is helpful because it’s flexible and moldable, but can hold its shape when you need it to. Water won’t hold any shape you give it. A “water” environment is one with so few rules or so little structure that nothing can get done. It’s having no tools, no support, no direction.

You want to ask questions early about an environment to determine whether it’s a Water, Clay, or Stone environment – especially before you commit to engaging there. If no one seems to be able to give you a specific answer about anything, it’s a Water environment. If the answers you get are rigid, inflexible, and do not invite your input, then it’s a Stone environment.

But responses like:

“This is how we generally do things, and these are the tools we use. We have a few different options depending on the specific challenge, and I’m curious to hear what you’d like to see added to that list.”

…are great indicators that the environment is a Clay one, and you can shape it to your needs.

A little over a month ago I hit the 4-year anniversary of this blog and just… missed it.

Glossed over. Completely forgot. Didn’t realize it until today, nearly a month later.

At some point in your life, there was a goal that seemed so impossible, but you gave your everything and accomplished it. Now, you do that thing without even realizing you’re doing it.

Growth is good, and recognizing that you’re playing on a bigger field is grand. But go back and remember the magic, too. Don’t let the fact that you’ve outgrown a milestone make you forget about milestones at all.

You have miles to go before you sleep.

I had a somewhat startling realization today – reading has become Type II Fun for me.

I used to thoroughly enjoy reading. It was intensely pleasurable, in and of itself. I could spend hours and hours lost in books.

Now, I read voraciously – but I’ve realized I don’t actually enjoy it. At least, not directly. It’s more of a workout than a leisure cruise. And “a workout” is a great analogy, because I also don’t like working out while I’m doing it, but love it as soon as I’m done.

I want the information in my head, in the same way I want the muscles on my body.

As soon as I realized that, a tectonic shift happened in my brain. Trying to work out and getting frustrated because you don’t enjoy it is the wrong way to view things. If you love lifting weights, more power to you – but even if you don’t love it, exercise is important. You have to learn to love the result and just be neutral on the input. Lots of things are like that.

Lately, I’d been frustrated because I wasn’t “falling into” books the way I used to when I was a teenager. But pretty much nothing in my life is as it was then, so that’s a silly thing to be frustrated about. Instead, I just need to acknowledge that it’s a healthy chore and set the time that way, instead of waiting for my desire to read to catch up to my desire to have read.

My father had a steadfast principle for selecting who he’d do business with: there needed to be someone he could physically choke if it was warranted.

It’s not that he’d ever do such a thing (…I think). It’s the principle that in order to do business with someone, it’s a good idea to have:

1. Proximity
2. Identity
3. Incentive

In order to do business, my father wanted to know that there was an identifiable person who was responsible for his business, that person was reachable, and that individual was personally incentivized to keep my dad happy.

Consider doing business with a company half a world away. You don’t have one specific account manager; you don’t know anyone’s name and individual transactions are handled by whoever picks up the phone. If you’re unhappy with something, no one individual is in danger of being written up or fired, and there’s nothing except their word to hold them accountable for fulfilling their promises.

Does this sound like an ideal business relationship to you? Would you feel confident doing business this way?

If you put all that together, having an identified “choke target” puts all that together. Hence, the general rule.

Keep it in mind. It’s not that you ever would go choke someone for screwing you over in business… but the threat sure keeps people honest!

Let’s say you come to a wall, blocking your path. There’s a little system, a checklist of sorts, that you can go through.

• Step 1: Try to climb the wall. If you fail to get over, go to step 2.
• Step 2: Go a different way. If you don’t want to go a different way, go to step 1.

Many people skip one of those steps. They try to scale the wall again and again and again, failing and getting frustrated and letting the failure begin to infest them with doubt and anguish. Or, they see a wall and don’t even attempt to climb it, they just immediately go a different way, forever taking the path of least resistance.

If you want to be happy, you must engage with that cycle.

First, try to overcome the obstacle. You might do so on the first attempt! But if you don’t, the cost of that path has now increased. Any time a cost changes, revisiting your desire for the objective is worthwhile. You can do that by choosing a different goal, and then gut-checking yourself. Are you just as happy with your new goal, or are you immediately thinking “Okay, I’m not quite ready to give up on Plan A just yet?”

If you’re not, then go back to the wall for another try.

If you don’t get over the obstacle again, then the cost has increased further, and so you rinse and repeat.

Not every goal is ultimately going to be worth the price you’d have to pay to get it, but quitting before you’ve even tried is a recipe for an unhappy life. This is the way to balance it – try to climb, try to run, and repeat until one wins out. But give each their due – make them take turns.

I am at an age where a lot of the sentiment I hear expressed on Mother’s Day is “I really miss my mom.”

I know this pain well, because I really miss my dad.

But tonight I ate unparalleled baked ziti with my mother and we talked and laughed, and then I brought some over to my grandmother and sat looking at her flowers for a while as my children played in her yard.

And though these were mundane moments, they were also magical ones. The ones I will miss when someday they’re gone, but I will know that I cherished all of them.

Happy Mother’s Day.

I observe a parking lot.

There was a thriving store here, amid other businesses in the area. Its parking lot was always busy but never full. There were always a dozen or more spaces available despite how many people frequented this business. The store has recently moved to a different location, so now the building is empty.

The parking lot, however, is packed. There are barely one or two spots open.

There are many businesses in the area, and the collective patrons of those businesses need to park somewhere. I know this because I often frequent those other businesses and parking is very inconvenient overall in the area, so I always parked in this store’s parking lot.

Sometimes I would shop at that store, but certainly not every time, despite parking there. After all, there were always at least a dozen empty spots; I never took the last one, I always took the one furthest from the store itself (I’m not a monster) and I never stayed long. And I always looked for a spot near the actual store I was visiting, but most of them didn’t have their own parking lots the way this store did. So my options were generally to park many blocks away on a side street or just park in the neighboring store for fifteen minutes, and I inevitably chose the latter.

Everyone could have done this. Most didn’t. Most didn’t, which is why anyone could have. Anyone could have, but most didn’t, which is why I was able to, and did.

I am sure that if I actually interacted with someone and they knew I’d parked there while they’d parked on a distant side street, they’d have disapproved. But why? What’s the alternative? Empty parking spaces, unused resources, inefficient action. In an ideal world, all resources are efficiently allocated. In an ideal world, everyone parks exactly where they want and there’s never a single spot left over but also never a time when you can’t find one.

We don’t live in an ideal world. So go ahead and hack the one we have. Don’t steal from your fellow humans, but steal from the Great Ghost of Inefficiency all you damned well please.

The older something is, the more likely it is to be awesome.

Exceptions abound, sure. But consider: every year a whole bunch of movies get made, books get written, buildings get built, clothing gets produced, songs get recorded, and so on. When something is new, you hear about it because it’s new, not because it’s good.

But when you hear about something that’s 40 years old, it’s because it lasted.

Not only is the quality higher, but it’s likely to be more timeless by that simple virtue. Jokes about modern political trends are funny for a week or so. Comedy sketches that are timeless classics are about the human condition or universal experiences.

This is a comforting, even rewarding fact! If you’ve ever tried, you realize quickly that you can’t possibly keep up with the rate of production for anything you like. And if you try, most of what you consume is garbage. But if you let a few years act as your filter, your overall quality of consumption will skyrocket.

They’re classics for a reason.

If you work for a company, you presumably want that company to thrive and succeed, right? So if your company came to you and said “We’ll be more profitable and successful if you take a 50% salary cut,” you’d leap at the chance, right?

Okay, clean the spit off your screen, and let’s continue.

You’ve now encountered the fundamental conflict in all motivation – the conflict between success of the self and success of the team. We want both of those things to be true. But when push comes to shove, most people will pick themselves most of the time.

It’s natural – you can’t pour from an empty cup, after all. We’ve all gotta eat. So if you want someone to do what’s “good for the team,” then you have to align the incentives such that the same actions serve both goals. If you can’t do that, then people are going to be acting against the team most of the time.

Here is a bad thing we do to kids: we issue a piece of paper to their parents every few months for their entire childhood telling the parents how well the kid memorized state capitals. In the footnotes of that paper, if they’ve been exceptionally kind, we give this throwaway line: “plays well with others,” which does not matter at all to the evaluation metrics being levied against this kid.

Being able to play well with others is about a thousand times more important than anything else that happens in school.

Here’s another bad thing we do to kids: we answer their questions. When a kid asks a question, we should do everything in our power to teach them how to be finding and verifying new information themselves, rather than training them to rely on authority figures to spell it out for them. Even something as simple as “Where is the bathroom?” should (outside of emergency situations, of course!) be met with something like “Let’s walk out into the hallway and look around. Look for landmarks – things that stand out – so you can find your way back. Then, let’s start looking at the different signs so you can see what they mean. Who here knows what things might be on the sign for a bathroom?”

Being able to find the bathroom when you don’t know where it is might be a pretty essential skill, don’t you think?

Here’s yet another bad thing we do to kids: we force them to be wasteful. The concept of “child labor” is nearly hilarious to me. People will tell you with a straight face that child labor is a terrible thing, but they’ll force kids to work 8 hours a day, five days a week from age 4 to age 18. They’ll do this even though the kids hate it, even though there’s an enormous amount of evidence that the majority of those kids are wasting the majority of that time. They’ll do it even though it has a massive cost to society. But if you suggest that a fourteen-year-old might actually learn something valuable by ringing a cash register for 6 hours a week, they’ll string you up.

Being able to work when it’s valuable and play when that’s valuable is pretty much the core happiness formula.

If you get the opportunity to move the needle on any of these things – however slightly – don’t stay silent. Your kids will thank you. So will mine.