Things that are poisonous don’t always look that way. Viruses hide. Parasites must, by their nature, hide that nature in order to get close to you.

In other words, not everything that can kill you is obvious about it. The social versions operate the same way.

Some creatures can only survive by feeding on you. Some creatures can only survive by destroying you. And some creatures bear you no ill will at all, but their nature is so different from yours that they’re toxic to you. And all of these people will look like they aren’t those things. They’ll tell you they aren’t those things, and they might even believe that they aren’t those things.

It is up to you to measure them. To hold your own values and your own life in high enough regard to be worth protecting even when the poison comes in an alluring package. We all want friends, relationships, social groups, peers that esteem us. We want those things, so when people come in those guises we are more likely to accept them – to bend ourselves to fit what they want us to be.

And then you have a tapeworm.

Shed the parasites. Give them nothing to feed on, and no room to thrive. Have only noble relationships to the best of your ability, and limit your exposure to the ones you must have that fall short of that ideal. Give your resources fully to those that deserve it (including yourself!) so that you leave no room at the table for the tapeworms.

What is best for you will not always be constant. Even if your values and goals remain largely consistent, the changing of your circumstances over time will necessitate you to approach the pursuit of those things with different techniques.

If you’re 18, and you decide, “I want financial success,” then what’s best for you is often to hustle your brains out. Work a lot, use that work to learn new skills and meet new people, produce more than you consume, build good habits, etc. But at a certain point “working yourself senseless” stops being a good way to approach financial success. Once you have a decent savings pool, network, and skill set it becomes about working smarter, investing better, leveraging your opportunities, and the like.

Same goal, but different things were best for you.

That’s why framing even your long-term goals as short-term ones can be very helpful. My biggest goal and most important value is “raise my children to be happy, competent superheroes.” But if I make the time horizon for that goal “my entire life as a parent,” then I’m likely to get stuck in ruts regarding how I approach it. The tools and techniques to empower toddlers are not the same ones that will empower teenagers, so I need to grow with my children.

So instead, I set the goal: “I will do everything in my power to make my 5-year-old reach age six with all the courage and wisdom I can help her gain, and then re-evaluate.” At her sixth birthday, I’ll be able to have some pride in what we’ve done together, but I’ll also have given myself the intellectual freedom to evaluate my methods.

Do the same with all your goals, even the ones you think you’ll pursue your whole life. May you always find the best that you can.

Sometimes I try to be kind to myself in advance. I’ll think, “music always makes me feel great, so since I know next Friday is a busy workday, I’m going to pre-schedule a little music break in the middle and give myself a little boost. You’re welcome, Future Me!”

Then next Friday rolls around, the day is busy, and I’ll come to that event on my calendar. And I’ll scowl, and I’ll say “Past Me was an idiot, I’m too busy for this,” and I’ll skip it to work more.

I’m a mean old man sometimes.

I hasten to point out: only to myself. I consider “Kindness to Others” not only a moral imperative but also one of the sincerest expressions of strength and confidence there is. Only weak cowards are mean to others unjustly. And opportunities to be “justly” mean are few and far between. If someone is deserving of your contempt, then the correct course of action is almost always to simply remove your association, not to actually act contemptuously.

But I can’t remove my association with myself, so when I think of myself as deserving of it, I’m downright mean to myself. Because in those moments, I am weak and cowardly.

I’ve allowed the busyness of my day to weaken me. I’ve allowed the doubt about the successful completion of the day’s endeavors to turn into fear. And then I allowed both of those things to come together to create a mean reaction to the very person who was trying their best to help Present & Future Me: Past Me.

Self-kindness isn’t just about your immediate feelings. It’s about protecting what those feelings support, which is a psychologically sound foundation for all your works. Guess what? That Friday sucked. I did a bad job, overall. I should have taken the music break. Either it would have helped me do a better job because I’d have felt better, or I’d have done just as badly but gotten to listen to music. Either would have been better.

If you don’t brag about your work, your work will be worse.

People hate this; they hate self-marketing, they hate “bragging,” they hate living out loud. Some people are the opposite and like it all a little too much, but most people would rather fail than talk about their success.

But if you aren’t talking about your work, then you’re missing out on the greatest resource ever, which is the brainpower of other people. You’re living in a tower all by yourself and not only will your work have less reach, it will also be worse overall. Since I want this to be practical, I’m going to give you some tips on how to “work out loud” in ways that don’t feel like shameless self-aggrandizing.

1. Ask questions. If you’re building a soapbox derby racer, even if you’re amazing at it, ask questions of a broader community. Share a picture of the thing in progress and say “what does everyone think of this wheel choice?” Post another picture next week and say “thanks for the wheel suggestions – now does anyone have any thoughts on spoilers?” You’re not only tapping the vast network of people with additional knowledge, but you’re also sharing what you’re working on. And you’re staying humble while you do it.
2. Answer questions. Other people are doing #1. Join those conversations wherever you find them. When someone else asks about building material weight versus durability, answer them with what you know. You’ll be helping other people (in a way that they specifically asked for!), and you’ll also be sharing that you’re doing something similar. Especially if the platforms are connected (i.e. answering questions in the same forums or communities in which you ask your own).
3. Give stuff away. You’ve been building that thing for a while now, and you have some leftover materials that you don’t need but are perfectly good. Post that you’ll give them away if anyone wants them. Or maybe you won the derby and you want to give away the blueprint of the final model so other people can build them. Whatever! Giving stuff away is great and helpful and fun, but it also lets people know what you’re doing in the first place. And you can feel good about it.
4. Mentor someone. You feel bad about promoting yourself, but you probably feel awesome about building up someone else who’s doing great work – especially if they did you a big favor, right? So find someone else who’s doing what you’re doing, and offer to teach or share with them. Do that enough times and you’re not only helping the world and your own community, you’re also creating an army of cheerleaders for the work you do.
5. Join a club. Look, there’s a club for everything. And the purpose of pretty much every club in existence is to promote the primary topic and the work of the members on that topic. So if you build soapbox derby racers, just go ahead and sign up for your local Soapbox Derby Club. It will definitely give you more opportunities to do #1-4, at least, and probably a few other things too.

If you do all of those things on a regular basis, then congrats! You’re engaging in self-promotion without ever having to be overly braggadocious. You can find fun, community-building ways to talk all about your soapbox derby racer without ever having to stand on a soapbox.

My children have grown tomatoes.

For many people, this is an ordinary thing. But I have never grown anything edible in my entire life, and now my children have successfully brought edible food into the world from a seed in a packet. They dug the garden, they planted the seeds, they watered and nurtured. And then they ate the absolutely delicious fruits of their labor.

I am so very glad they did it. The lesson isn’t about gardening (although that’s great). The lesson is that we have the power to put things into the world that were not there before. We are not passive participants in a life that carries but does not include us. We lay our own path, brick by brick, unless we yield that power.

Don’t. Use your own hands, and your own feet, and your own brains. Use your own eyes and your own heart. Grow your tomatoes because it is good to remember that you can.

Here is a skill: knowing when the worst outcome from a failed attempt is simply a return to the status quo versus when a failed attempt will result in a major loss.

You’d be surprised how often people do not make that assessment correctly. You’ve probably gotten it wrong many times; I know I have.

If you try a high jump to touch a high ceiling, you might make it or you might not. But you end up back on the ground either way. If you try to jump over a ravine and you don’t make it, you don’t end up safely back on your original side – you end up in a ditch.

That’s an obvious example, but plenty more are less obvious. This is a valuable skill because, by default, we all assume that “disaster” is the natural state of failure. We don’t even attempt things that wouldn’t have any negative consequences for failing because all we can picture is being in a ditch. This makes us avoid low-risk opportunities when we should be embracing as many of those as we can.

The next time you decide not to try something because you might fail, stop yourself. Ask yourself what failure looks like in this case. If it’s your body in a ditch, then sure – don’t do it. But if it’s just you back where you started – jump!

There are a lot of “movements” and groups and things that, over the years, I’ve joined and left. Little (metaphorical) membership cards left discarded in my wake. Yet my preferences, values and desires have been largely very consistent for a long time. So why the mercurial associations?

Let me explain what happens. I think “One of my values is that I want more of X, both in my life and in society at large.” So I look around and I see a group of people who also want that! Great, I join up. Often this isn’t any sort of official “joining” (I almost never do that anyway), but rather I start thinking of myself as belonging to that group, I start joining in their conversations, etc.

Then, inevitably, I look around and I say “I want more X, and this group wants more X, but me belonging to this group isn’t actually getting me more X.” So I leave.

I love tacos, so I join a group that loves tacos. I join thinking that I will get more tacos as a result of joining this group, because they also want tacos. But it almost always turns out that what the members of the group actually want, is to want tacos.

They want the group more than they want the tacos, in other words. I get it, groups are important – we’re social creatures. But when you join a group because you want to join a group, but you say it’s because you want tacos, you’re creating all sorts of weird problems down the line.

All groups ultimately morph into a group whose only purpose is self-sustainment. Along the way, if you’re lucky, the group might solve some problems. It’s just that solving the problem won’t dissolve the group – even if they got tacos, they wouldn’t call it a day and disband their “Association of People Who Demand More Tacos.” So you should view all of these memberships as temporary – bind to solve a problem, then escape. When you make your groups, make them honestly. Make them just because you like the group.

I always wonder what makes it likely for two people to connect. The “secret sauce” that causes two (or more!) people to really vibe together.

I’m not talking romantically, either. I just mean “connect” in some way that causes a more-than-casual relationship. I’ll see two people that I know, but that don’t know each other. I’ll think, “wow, these people have such a similar vibe; they both like A, B, and C and incorporate those things into their lived values – I should introduce them!” And I often will, but… nothing. They’re happy to have met, thankful of the introduction, but nothing really happens.

In my head, I was imagining grand partnerships, new business ventures, joint projects, maybe even deep friendships.

“Having things in common” simply isn’t enough for all of that (or any of that) to reliably manifest. Of course, it’s also quite possible that I’m simply wrong in my limited perception of two people “having things in common,” but even if I’m dead-on it wouldn’t be enough. So what is?

What is it that makes people “click?” What makes two people think that their lives would be sufficiently enriched by the other to the point where they put in the required effort to create a sustained reaction?

I don’t have the answers to this, but I love the question. It’s something I want to pay attention to more closely.

Imagine that you haven’t eaten in a few days. You’re really hungry. Your blood sugar is low, you might pass out at any moment, and you’re definitely not at your most clear-headed. Suddenly you are presented with two options for food.

Option 1: A bowl of probably-rancid meat. It’s certainly out of date, it isn’t cooked well. It’s something not especially healthy even at its best, and it’s certainly not at its best. It may make you sick; at the very least, it won’t improve your overall health. But it’s food, and it’s available right now.

Option 2: A delicious and healthy meal, balanced and nutritious, cooked to perfection. It has all your favorite foods, but the meal itself is centered around maximum nutrition as well. This meal will take you about 6 hours to prepare; maybe only a coupon for the ingredients is provided and you’ll have to shop for the ingredients and prepare the meal, etc.

Many people pick option 1. In fact, it’s often correct to pick option 1; if you’re about to literally starve, don’t be picky. Picking option 1 isn’t the mistake people make. The mistake people make is that they’ll often pick option 1 and then instead of eating exactly enough to stave off starvation and then move on, they’ll eat it all. They’ll keep ordering it. That will just be the thing they eat, maybe for years.

The point is that sometimes you’re in truly dire straits and you have to make a call. That’s fine; make it. But don’t then make that bare minimum, that survival choice, your default. If you’re completely broke and you have to take the first job offered to you in order to make rent, okay. Zero judgment. But recognize that you made that choice under duress and as long as that choice is active, you should be altering your lifestyle until that choice is no longer necessary.

That means take four bites of the rancid meat, choke it down, and then stop. Move immediately onto the better healthy meal now that you’re not literally going to starve in the next six hours. Or, while you’re working whatever terrible job you have in order to make rent, make sure you’re spending every extra hour you can banking money and learning skills until that’s not the case.

Survival choices are fine. Allowing them to become permanent will kill you.

Let’s say you’ve got a sinkhole in your yard. That’s a pretty big problem, but it’s possible for you to solve. After all, you’re smart and capable. You have access to a modern world full of resources. You’ve got everything you need to fix this problem.

But now imagine the same problem, except you’re in the hole. This problem suddenly got much more challenging. While you’re down there in the hole, you’re still smart and capable – but your access to resources just got significantly more limited. You don’t exactly have a lot of options.

If, in order to get out of the hole, you need to borrow a ladder – do it. Even if you definitely wouldn’t need a ladder to solve this problem normally. Even if you already have a ladder, you can’t access it (because you’re in a hole). Don’t get salty about the circumstance. Just borrow the ladder.

Problems are easier to solve from the outside. In fact, the difference in difficulty (and therefore total resources needed) is much greater than the cost of renting a ladder or getting a small favor to get out of the hole.

Some people refuse to do it. Those people tend to stay stuck in a hole.

Self-sufficiency, as a default, is a good thing. You should be able and willing to solve your own probems. But part of being competent in general is knowing when you’re burning way more resources than you need to by using self-sufficiency as an absolute, rather than a default. Just borrow the ladder.