I think threats are silly.

Why threaten? If you want to intimidate someone, actions speak louder – why warn your enemy and give up the element of surprise? If you want to compel behavior, about any other form of influence is better. If you want to preserve a relationship, threats are horrible.

The words “or else” are foolish ones.

You should be nice to people all the time. You should strive to be professional, and courteous, and you should go out of your way not just to avoid offense, but to be extra kind. You should do all of this because it’s good to do, but there’s a large personal benefit as well.

The concept is “social capital.” The idea is that if you are generally a very kind and courteous person, your missteps will be more readily forgiven. We all make mistakes, so it’s good to have a large store of that capital built up. If your account is large, then you can do things like make bold social moves or make risky jokes (risky, not intentionally unkind!) without as much fear of losing the good graces of your community.

Be nice, have fun!

Let’s say that you think that blueberry scones specifically are causing the obesity crisis. You collect two pieces of data very carefully: how many blueberry scones are available in each county, and how many obese people in each county report eating blueberry scones at least once a week. You discover damning evidence: the higher the number of blueberry scones in a given county, the higher the number of obese people who reported eating blueberry scones. Ergo, blueberry scones are directly and positively correlated with obesity, and you stand by your position that we’d have far less obesity if the scones were banned.

But… wait a second.

I mean… of course those things would be correlated, right? And you’re asking the totally wrong question. If you want to make the case that blueberry scones are driving the obesity crisis, then you need to be comparing the availability of blueberry scones with obesity in general. If people in low-scone counties are just as obese but simply getting that way from eating different foods, then scones clearly aren’t the issue (or at least, not alone). It’s even possible that low-scone countries have higher rates of obesity in general, because maybe there’s some other food that’s even worse for you that people eat more of without scones as an alternative.

The point is that it’s a weird take to claim that scones are associated with scone-related obesity as if that was some sort of gotcha. Cars are associated with vehicular deaths too, but unless the total number of deaths are higher in areas with more cars, then you don’t know the whole picture. If you took an island nation and removed all vehicles of any kind, you’d have fewer fatalities from car accidents. But you’d also have more people dying because they couldn’t get prompt medical attention. Do I know that those numbers would wash out? Nope. But I wouldn’t make the claim that they don’t without checking – and measuring the right things.

(Warning: Perhaps one of my more controversial opinions follows!)

Let’s say you watch a popular fictional television show, one that features a large cast of characters. One of these characters does something you don’t like. How upset should you be about it?

My answer: virtually zero. While watching the show, go ahead and make a shocked face and enjoy the narrative, of course. But then the show is over, and you shouldn’t still feel upset. It isn’t real! It doesn’t actually affect you! And if you find yourself remaining very upset for a long time after you’ve seen it, then I suggest that you should not watch the show. It’s purely for entertainment, and you aren’t being entertained – you’re being upset. You should have the mental fortitude to not get upset by it, but if you don’t, then the next best thing is not to watch it at all.

Okay, by itself, that opinion is maybe only a little controversial. It shouldn’t be controversial at all, but I can imagine several people arguing with me about it, so I suppose it is. But here’s the much more controversial view: 99% of “news,” pop culture, or current events is indistinguishable from fiction as far as you’re concerned.

Do you watch the news and get upset? Why? Those people are no more real to you than the characters on the fictional television show. You’ve never met them and never will. You couldn’t prove they’re real by touching them, interacting with them, etc. Every aspect of them could be an elaborate hoax and you’d never know. So why let it bother you?

I adopt the view that everyone I can’t interact with in a real way is fictional. Their exploits are fictional, their pagentry is spectacle for entertainment only. And I’m not entertained by it. So I live in the world of the real, and my life is very good.

I don’t like the term “necessary evil.” When someone describes something in that way, they’re often putting a lot of work into the “necessary” part, insinuating that it can’t be changed or even challenged. “Yeah, no one likes the payroll system, but it’s a necessary evil. People have to get paid, you know?” Consider the defeatist, fixed-mindset view that sentence proposes!

I prefer to use the term “load-bearing flaw.” In the example above, the current payroll system is bad, and we all know it’s bad. It’s a flaw. But flawed or not, it’s currently holding up a lot of critical infrastructure – if we just ripped it out without consideration, no one would get paid and we couldn’t run the business.

But that term leaves open the possibility of careful and considered change. If you remodel a house, you can move the load-bearing walls. You just have to be careful when you do so and make sure the weight is supported during the transition, the new layout works, etc. It’s harder, but it’s doable. And it’s worth it, if the new layout is that much better.

No evil is necessary, no matter how entrenched it may be. We can, and should, do better – and adopt a growth mindset about it.

I learned today that a “fricative” is what happens when you make a sort of transitive consonant sound between two mashed-together sounds, even though the actual consonant sound you’re making doesn’t appear in either of the two “main” sounds.

Huh?

Okay, if I say, “Whatchy’all doing,” you understand that I was saying “what are you all doing” but with a heavy accent. But where is the “ch” sound coming from? There’s no such sound in any of those words! But in hastily moving from the end of “what” to the beginning of “y’all” and sort of glossing over the “are,” your tongue just makes a quick stop at the part of your mouth that makes the “ch” sound. That’s a fricative.

Why am I telling you about this? Because it’s cool! And because I love that I still learn cool new things all the time, because life is amazing, and there’s so much treasure just lying around. How could anyone be bored? I mean, whatchy’all doing out here?

When you have to make a decision, committing to “think hard” about it first is usually just an excuse to spend longer ultimately justifying your emotional impulse. Yes, it’s better to take some time rather than just fire off a response to an important decision, but unless you’re spending that time in a truly data-driven process, it’s only a little better.

Try this: Right now, without any major decisions looming, decide on a process for making important decisions. Maybe you’ll assemble a council of intelligent, trusted advisors and commit to following their majority input. Maybe you’ll commit to making a list of pros & dealbreakers before settling on the final answer. Or any number of good decision-making techniques might work for you, but the point is to commit to that process now, before you have any specific decision that you’re trying to make. The more you commit now, the more likely it is that you can overcome your emotional rationalization when the time comes.

The more you know, the more you should learn. Think of the glorious chain reactions as some new piece of knowledge connects to some existing one, sparking a chain of a thousand insights. That becomes more possible the more bits there are to interact. As you gain more knowledge, you need to learn more just to keep up with yourself.

The most unpredictable input in your life is what other people do.

You can control so much of your own actions with discipline and mindfulness. The biggest “wild card” is how other people behave. For example, people often talk about how certain demographic factors in your life, such as race, gender, or even height can have a profound impact on how your life plays out. Dwarfing them all, however, is simply whether or not the people who raised you were good, noble people. Nothing else comes close to the advantage or disadvantage that gives you. And you had zero control over it. From your perspective, it was all luck.

Smaller versions of this play out everywhere. You can be an exceptional worker but a new manager comes in who is absolutely terrible, and you had no control over that. You can be a great partner but it turns out the person you were initially attracted to becomes a lunatic. Sure, in both of those situations you can exercise some control and leave, but even if you do there’s damage done along the way.

So the biggest source of randomness and uncertainty in your life comes from other people. But in a great sense of cosmic justice, that means you have a tremendous amount of control over other people’s fortunes.

You can be an amazing parent, leader, or partner. You can be kind to strangers. You can put the shopping cart back. In other words, you can be the reason that someone else’s luck is very, very good. No matter what cards were dealt to you, you can be the pocket aces for someone else.

I am pro-whimsy.

I love putting magic into my kids’ lives. I do the “Elf on the Shelf” thing at Christmastime, and I go all out. One time I deliberately made a mess in my kitchen at night, put several of my kids’ stuffed animals and dolls around it, and then in the morning scolded them for making a mess while playing, just so that they would be convinced for a while that their toys came to life at night and caused mischief. I love the dad in Calvin & Hobbes.

As my kids got older, this sharpened their bullshit detectors (a welcome side effect!), but they also started playing along, creating fun whimsical tales of their own to explain the world to me.

But, as in all things with children, you must be careful of their hearts.

My son recently told me that he was worried that if he asked me a serious question, I wouldn’t tell him the real truth. More importantly, he said that this belief made him hesitant to even ask me important questions in the first place. That is a dangerous place to be, and I never want that.

So first, I apologized to him. Genuinely. I told him that his trust was the most important thing to me, and that I would tell him the whole truth from now on.

He told me he still wanted the funny stories, though. So his suggestion was to give me a code word that meant “I want the real truth this time.” I thought that was amazingly mature of him (he’s 7!), and I gave him my word that I would always adhere to the code word’s command.

Whimsy, magic, and wonder are all vital. But all children deserve truth from their parents when they request it.