Most of the wonderful things in your life will be as a result of crossing paths with other people. Most of the terrible things, too.

Two puzzle pieces are allowed to not fit together without either of them being “bad.” The puzzle pieces didn’t do anything wrong, they just belong in other parts of the puzzle, with other pieces. We all fit together eventually.

That means if you find yourself mismatched with someone, you shouldn’t automatically look to blame one person or the other. You shouldn’t expect a fix. You shouldn’t internalize it as your own fault or something you could have done differently.

You should just take it as wisdom to learn more about the shape of yourself, and the shapes of different people in your world.

People are funny, and they’ll frustrate you. They’ll save your life and they’ll make it hell. They’re wonderful and complicated and damaged and silly and cruel and hurt. And so are you.

Doesn’t make them bad. Just makes them different. Find your different people, the ones with the shape that fits with yours – and remember that almost never means they’re the same shape as you are.

It’s old advice, but very true: if you want to get started with a big project, break it down into the smallest steps.

Here’s the challenge: sometimes we don’t know what those steps are. We don’t even have a concrete idea of where we want the plane to land, we just want a particular kind of outcome. We have a vague sense of a “good idea.” Maybe scattered pieces of thoughts that sort of relate, but no idea what to do with them. Sure, smallest possible step: but what is that?

Here’s a “universal small step” you can use every time: label a bucket.

If all of these thoughts, scraps, ideas, and concepts are floating around without direction, then the very first actionable step is to group them up. Create a workspace. Someplace they can go, and collect, and maybe gather together and form a little gravity. They need a bucket.

Grab a new notebook, and label it “My New Business.” Get a cardboard box and write “Geneology Project” on the side. Create a new Google doc labeled “updated onboarding” and share it – blank! – with one or two colleagues.

There. Now there is a shape, a place, something calling you. A border between That and things that are Not That. A smallest possible step.

You can put anything in that bucket. It doesn’t matter what – scraps, notes, clippings, questions, whatever. Simply putting things in the bucket at all is progress; “sorting” can come later. But the project has begun.

Almost all problems “get worse before they get better.” Whatever remedies you want to use cost resources, and the benefit is usually far from instantaneous. If you get a headache and you buy some aspirin, there will be a period of time when you still have a headache, and you’re down the cost of the aspirin to boot!

With the headache example, it’s easy to see the error in judgment when someone complains that their pain hasn’t vanished the very second they swallowed the pill. With more complex examples, it might be trickier. If your monthly earnings report is bad so you implement some changes, the next month’s earnings report might still be bad. That doesn’t mean your changes aren’t working, or that you need to do something else. It just means that remedies take time.

Try this: before implementing any remedy, take a few moments and write out what you would expect it to look like if the remedy works – including the time frame. You probably won’t write “I expect that our productivity in the department will instantly triple the literal second we announce this policy,” any more than you’d write “I expect my headache to instantly vanish the second I swallow a pill.”

Be thankful for the help you can give to others.

Is there a more certain way of knowing that you’re still relevant? That you haven’t lost your touch? If people genuinely seek you for advice or assistance, what a compliment they pay you!

As an additional corollary, be eager to give what’s requested. Part of why you’re asked is because people believe they’ll be treated with respect for asking. That doesn’t mean you always have to say yes, but it does mean you’ll never treat a request as an annoyance.

If you haven’t been asked for help in a while, your life may be askew. Be glad, therefore, when you are!

You are on a sailing ship. You quickly realize that if you go overboard, you’ll drown, because you don’t know how to swim. So you quickly decide you want to get really good at your balance, get your “sea legs,” and be competent around the deck. This “skills-based” approach, you figure, will keep you from accidentally going overboard.

But then one day you accidentally cross a ranking officer on the ship, who starts scowling at you and eyeing the plank. You realize that being competent isn’t enough – you could also be thrown from the ship! So you start running around being obsequious and sycophantic, trying to keep everybody happy. This “politics-based” approach, you figure, will keep you from being thrown overboard.

But then one day a big storm comes up and the ship, which you once thought was so secure that it practically faded into the background as merely your environment, the ship begins to rock and tumble and you realize that competency and politics aren’t enough – the whole ship could go down, and then you’d be in the water and drown anyway. So you start trying to keep the ship afloat by any means necessary, but you quickly realize: everyone on the ship, including you, is already doing that. If the ship sinks, it will be despite the crew’s best efforts, not because those efforts weren’t put forward.

What you’ve truly learned – hopefully – is that there is only one way not to drown.

Learn to swim.

You might be great at your job, but someone just doesn’t like you. You might be bad at your job, but the leadership is bad so you don’t get good feedback. You might be great at your job and everyone likes you, but some random change at a different level reverberates to you and affects you – or maybe your whole company sinks in the storm.

The point is, “security” cannot be vested in our surroundings, only in ourselves. You can only be secure if you can survive, not because you can prevent things from happening to you that would warrant it. So.

Learn to swim.

You have something you want, and you don’t have it. The first question to ask is: who’s saying no?

Many people don’t ever ask this question and leave their desire and ambition on the shelf, with nothing stopping them from claiming the prize. If someone is saying no, then you can work on either convincing them or bypassing them. But often, no one has said no at all!

Maybe because you just haven’t asked. Maybe there’s no one to ask. But if you’re feeling stuck, try to answer that one question. Often, it’ll provide a lot of clarity.

I’ve got some advice for people feeling “burnt out” and overwhelmed, but you won’t like it. In fact, you’ll hate it. I know, because I give this advice professionally all the time. It works. It works really well. But people hate hearing it.

You have to cut the gas line. You’re burnt out because the fire is too intense, and it’s too intense because you keep feeding it. You can’t add a new technique or a new method or a new structure to it, because that’s still adding fuel to the fire.

You’ve got to put out the fire first, and rebuild. There is absolutely zero possibility that you can maintain your current levels of output, without interruption, and still cure your “burnout.”

I know. You don’t want to hear it. You don’t want to hear that (at least for a short duration), you’re going to have to just accept getting less done. Maybe making less money. Maybe pumping the breaks on your advancement. Maybe putting a major project on hold.

If a jet plane is going so fast that it’s about to break apart, it might be possible to redesign the plane and get it to where it can fly just as fast – maybe even faster! – without blowing up. But it is impossible to do that without landing the plane for a while.

You can’t do repairs while maintaining 100% efficiency, especially if 100% efficiency was killing you.

This is the first step: accepting this as truth. From a stationary position, a thousand different methods can work to rebuild your engine and do things right. I don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution there, because there isn’t one. But literally none of them will work without you taking a break.

I know you don’t want to hear it. If you were the kind of person who swallowed that pill easily, you probably didn’t get here in the first place. But the sooner you accept it, the sooner it’s over. And the sooner you can fly again – the way you were meant to.

Many organizational systems have a “miscellaneous” compartment. Whether it’s your workshop in your garage or the org chart of a company, occasionally inputs or tools don’t fit neatly into the broader categories you’ve created. Rather than create dozens of smaller categories, each with only one entry, we create some catch-all. A “miscellaneous” drawer for all the odds and ends, that sort of thing.

There’s nothing wrong with that, on the surface. But you have to occasionally step back and ask a simple question: is my miscellaneous category several times larger than most of my other boxes?

If so, you’ve got a problem. I’ve seen it plenty of times: imagine a toolbox with one drawer for “hammers,” one drawer for “wrenches,” and one drawer for “everything else.” That last drawer is not only going to be much bigger than the rest, but it’s also going to be pretty shoddy as an organizational tool! If you have a tool drawer with hundreds of gadgets, widgets, sprockets, and sockets – it’s time to organize a little deeper, don’t you think?

The same thing tends to happen in organizations. One person or department is put in charge of sales. Another person or department is put in charge of IT. And then some person or department gets put in charge of “everything else.”

They don’t call it “VP of the Miscellaneous Department,” of course. But that’s what it is. Whether it’s something like “operations” being used as this catch-all term for WAY too much stuff, or an “administrative assistant” doing a thousand different jobs, this is the workforce equivalent of dumping all the extra tools in one drawer.

Having no space for the et cetera is bad; it results in either things just not getting done if they don’t fit into the proscribed existing boxes or the creation of endless pointless categories for single incidents. But no department or role is more at risk from scope creep than the miscellaneous department, whatever it’s labeled. You can absolutely drown in et cetera.

So, audit your et cetera. If 60% of the objects in the “miscellaneous” drawer are screwdrivers, then make a screwdriver drawer. If your administrative assistant is spending 75% percent of their time correcting errors on timesheets, then make a dedicated position for that – both to do it, and to improve the process. I’d give some more examples, but you get it.

Et cetera.

Sometimes you mess up. You fail, you falter, you fall. And when that happens, you have to make a difficult choice from among three options. The choice is difficult because all three options are sometimes correct!

The three options are: quit, try again, or change.

Sometimes it is absolutely the correct choice to quit. Sometimes you try something and what you learn from the very first failure is that you have made a grave error in judgment and you should walk away from the whole thing. It’s sensible to do that when it’s appropriate! Maybe you attempt to jump a gorge on your skateboard and you end up really, really hurt – you barely survive. Once you’re healed, it’s very sensible to just not do that again.

Sometimes you should try again. You might have almost made it, or you might just need a little more practice. Maybe the stars didn’t align this time, but they could. And sometimes you should change your approach considerably, but still aim for the same goal.

How do you know?

When the horse bucks you and you’re laying on the ground, it can be hard to get a sense of the right answer. Is this horse a lost cause? Do you just need to get back on? Or do you need to walk it around a little first and get it calm, then maybe try a different riding technique?

A lot of it depends on how steep your success ramp is.

All goals need a time frame, or they’re not goals. You can’t ever succeed or fail if you don’t define “by when.” So a true goal is never “tame that horse.” It’s “tame that horse by the end of the year.” You don’t have infinite time in your life.

So whether or not you should quit, try again, or change depends a lot on how much time you have!

If you have a lot of time, then try again. Get in more reps, gather more data, practice, and practice some more. If you have a medium amount of time, change your approach. Try some variations, develop some new ideas, and see what sticks. And if you don’t have much time at all, quit. Walk away before you burn everything in your attempt.

Notice that “a lot of time” becomes “a medium amount of time” after a while! So this also ends up being your order of operations. First, try again. After some tries, change what you’re doing if you still haven’t succeeded. And if you try different things and still don’t get it, know when to walk away and save some juice for the next project.

You can tame any horse and you can climb any ramp, but you can’t ride every horse up every ramp, so be smart.

Have you ever experienced that unpleasant drop in your emotional state right after something good has happened? You experience something very pleasant, but the “reset” back to your normal state of existence then carries with it a sharp shock as the fleeting nature of all moments reasserts itself.

Perhaps this causes you to pursue pleasant experiences again, to recapture what you’ve lost. Perhaps it does the opposite: makes you reticent to pursue those experiences at all if the sensation of loss must accompany every highlight. Hopefully, it just brings you some reflection on the fact that our lives cannot be bottled and held; they must by nature always be moving from one moment into the next.

We exist in light and shadow and the same universal mechanisms that cause the sun to rise also ensure that it will set. What goes up must come down, as they say – but at least you can know it. You can have a safe cushion at the bottom for the fall, and a way to climb the stairs again.