The most persuasive appeal for vegetarianism I’ve ever heard was “Meatless Mondays.” Instead of trying to convince people of the moral imperative or health benefits of a total conversion, the pitch was simply: try skipping meat one day a week.

Many people do this accidentally anyway, this just makes them conscious of it – and lets them feel good about something they were either already doing or could do easily.

Seven people skipping meat one day a week is the equivalent of one full vegetarian, in terms of impact. And it’s much easier to accomplish!

Plus, there are large spillover effects. In the same way that “one pushup” is a great goal because you’re incredibly likely to do more once you’ve started, “Meatless Monday” can turn into more surprisingly quickly.

Pick a change that’s been daunting you. Try making a fraction of that change. Trying to quit smoking? Start with “Smokeless Sundays.” Drink too much coffee? Try getting half a cup instead of going cold turkey.

Direction is more important than distance or speed. Enjoy your half a cup.

Sometimes people want to help. Sometimes they insist on helping, in fact. And many times those people are worse than unhelpful – they’re an active hindrance. Still, you want (or even need) to maintain relationships with those very people outside of this particular circumstance. What do you do?

Have you ever seen an older movie or television show where a woman unexpectedly goes into labor and has to deliver a baby somewhere inconvenient? Someone will take charge and give people instructions, and the instruction for the husband is usually something like “go boil some water.” Do you know why?

To get the husband out of the room.

While there’s an outside chance that some sterilized water may be necessary, it probably won’t be. The main reason you have the husband doing that is so he isn’t doing anything else, like getting in the way. (Nowadays, this is a pretty sexist and patronizing view, but that’s not the point.)

So, have people boil water. Usually, this isn’t a negative – you’re doing someone a favor. They want to help, and you want them around in general. So you help them help you, even if there’s nothing to do.

When I worked at my very first job, often my boss would find work for us to do even if there really wasn’t any in order to make sure we were making money. One time he told us to go “organize the napkin shelf,” so we did. About fifteen minutes into the task, my coworker said “organizing the napkin shelf” and we split our sides laughing at the absurdity of the task we were working so diligently on. But even then we recognized that we weren’t being treated badly – quite the opposite. We were being treated extremely well, because the alternative to this task was to leave, unpaid. We wanted to work, and our boss wanted to support his employees, even without much to actually do.

This happens all the time. Your clients want to “help” with something they shouldn’t even touch. Your junior intern wants to help but it’s a sensitive task. Your kid wants to help you make dinner. No matter what the situation is, if you want to keep that person around, give them something to do. Let them organize the napkin shelf.

A model is only as good as its ability to explain.

Perfect models aren’t models anymore – they’re just, I guess, pictures. A model simplifies, but for clarity. Does yours?

Do people understand the real thing more deeply because of how you explained it? Can they make accurate predictions and realistic plans that will translate over to the living, breathing world?

Then your model is awesome. Practice that – practice modeling things. Sketch diagrams. Draw little doodles and flowcharts. Make them accurate as long as you’re not making them complicated.

See what you learn. See what you can teach.

Core upstream content. That means visible, actionable advice for an organization that also provides a landmark to return to when you get confused.

I don’t like creating “fire and forget” content that assumes people will absorb it perfectly the first time and implement it flawlessly with no challenges. That’s silly.

Instead, I try to create good starting points that also provide a way to circle back. Anchor points, “bases.”

Do this in your organization. Focus on instructional content that gives a core concept and philosophy of implementation, not endless edge cases. Let people come back to base when they need to. Welcome and guide them.

This way, you create a stable “expanding spiral” instead of trying to force a straight line that falters.

Strategy is better than conflict.

An employee goes to their boss and complains that they need a raise, don’t get to do the projects they want, and doesn’t feel in general like they have the resources they need to succeed. The employee is a great asset to the team, and overall likes their workplace, but these things are becoming a problem for them. They don’t want to quit, and the boss doesn’t want to lose them.

But it’s already a conflict! These things need to be resolved, and there’s a great relationship under them – but they’re cause for alarm. Yet this is a bad way to address them. It’s already adversarial.

Now, imagine a different scenario:

The CEO sits down with their Head of People for their weekly digest. The Head of People shares some statistics: 45% of employees have made inquiries about different projects than the ones they’re being assigned, indicating a misalignment of workforce priorities. In addition, an unbiased comprehensive salary report indicates that the company is trending behind the market average, which might cause higher turnover in the near future. Because this is strategy-driven, non-adversarial, and unrelated to any specific employee, it allows the CEO to strategize solutions and actually implement them.

The difference is a system that allows the initial “conflict points” to be distilled into actionable strategy. The Head of People (or Chief Culture Officer, or CHRO, or whatever title they have) is an essential part of this system. Their existence alone encourages the team to voice their concerns, and their role is to consolidate those concerns into something actionable.

Everyone gets heard, efficiency is maintained, and a mutually beneficial relationship is enhanced. Win/wins all around as employee engagement and retention skyrockets and the true power of your organization is unleashed.

If you’re not doing something like this in your organization – why not?

When you find yourself ahead of the curve on something, you can end up doubting the very thing you’re ahead of the curve on.

You look around you and you see no one adopting the new methodology or technique. You see a useful tool laying around unused. And you think: maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you shouldn’t be trying so hard to make this work, maybe it’s not a good idea after all.

Give it a little time. Your early successes will be part of what inspires others. Someone has to be an early adopter, after all. There’s more risk there, certainly. But also greater reward.

Don’t take “verbal shortcuts.” That’s when you want to be thought of a certain way, so you say it instead of being that way until other people say it.

For example: if you want to be thought of as generous, then give. Give until people say you’re generous. But don’t just call yourself generous.

The verbal shortcut is a bad path. It makes people think things about you, all right. But not the things you’re aiming for.

Here’s a good general rule: don’t describe yourself, except to yourself. Talk to the person in the mirror about what you want to be, and be it. Other people will see it and say it – or they won’t. But you’ll sleep a just sleep, and that’s enough.

If you wake up in the morning with a pounding headache, it’s possible that you spent a long night drinking heavily, banging your head to loud music, and crushing beer cans against your skull. Another possibility is that you were minding your own business and an unprovoked lunatic assaulted you with a blunt object.

The thing is, you probably know which one it was. If you wake up with that pounding headache, you probably don’t confuse one cause for the other. You either wake up mad at your past self for a bunch of bad choices, or you recognize that it wasn’t your fault.

That’s for physical pain. We’re really, really bad at that for mental or emotional pain.

Some things are your fault. Some things aren’t. We make mistakes in both directions. We blame ourselves and internalize fault for things that had nothing to do with us. And we blame others (or “the universe“) for stuff that we absolutely engineered for ourselves.

So how do we avoid these mistakes? The very first step is to accept that neither one is automatically true. My observation has been that individuals tend to skew one way or the other. Either everything is their fault, or nothing is. By first accepting the paradigm that individual challenges need to be evaluated individually, you can begin to look for ways to look at your pain in a fair way.

Once upon a time, sawdust was seen as a waste product. An unfortunate externality of the lumber milling process, sawdust had to be discarded in vast quantities. It was burned, buried, or even dumped into rivers.

Eventually, people figured out that sawdust was a valuable product in its own right. It had myriad uses and could be bundled up and sold. Instead of paying to get rid of it, people would pay to take it! The best part: this was pure profit. The sawdust was already being created, and the cost of disposing of it was already baked into the operating cost of a lumber mill. This didn’t just reduce waste. It completely inverted a negative into a positive.

You produce sawdust all the time, and you throw it away.

When you do something for work, that’s the lumber going through the mill. Your boss needs you to write a report for the shareholders this week. That’s lumber. The sawdust is the connection this makes between you personally and those same shareholders, as well as members of other teams within your company that don’t usually hear from you. Instead of doing nothing with that connection, instead of throwing away that sawdust, use it! Send a follow-up email afterward asking for feedback and a coffee chat.

Everything you do produces side effects that you could harvest, but don’t. Tasks you complete can become articles on the associated skills. Projects you finish can become rapport-builders because you complimented your teammates on social media. The beautiful lawn that you landscape diligently can become an equally-beautiful picture to put on a postcard to send to your family.

The point is simply this: don’t waste the side effects. Bundle them up and make them valuable to you, because you’re already making them anyway.