The hardest fight is not against the strongest opponent. It’s against the opponent so small and so weak that its only defense is to convince you that it isn’t worth fighting.

That very first dark thought. That insidious little seed. You have to fight like hell against that.

Once it’s big, it’s not a fight anymore. You won’t have it in you, because all its strength came from you.

When you finish with a project, destroy it.

Okay, don’t annihilate it. Don’t remove it from existence and erase it from history. I just mean that you should take a copy and break it down. Carve it up. Look at the parts.

Not only are those parts potentially helpful as starting points or components in future projects, but if rearranged the right way, they might be an entirely new project – already done!

Any finished work isn’t just the components, but the arrangement thereof. So if your components are good, there’s a good chance that other arrangements will produce something of value, too.

So don’t always go on to a new blank page. Carve up what you’ve already finished a little, first.

There will be things you care about. Keep them few, and small, and light. Don’t let them be taken.

Some things are too big for you to protect, no matter how much you care about them. You can’t keep a whole ocean or a whole year to yourself. So you must be comfortable with that. And you only have so many hands.

Choose your precious little jewels well, but then they’re yours. When you have that day, keep it as you want it. That day may have to carry you for a long time.

Here is a superpower: the ability to instantly forget discomfort once it’s over. The very instant it’s not affecting you, it’s gone from your mind.

Why is this such a wondrous ability? Because people spend incredible time, money, and effort just to avoid the most temporary of discomforts. They spend hundreds of dollars on a hotel room they’ll stay in for nine hours, when a terrible room was fifty bucks. They’ll buy a neck pillow at a gas station for an hour-long car ride. Stuff like that.

Look, just be uncomfortable. It’s amazing. You become so efficient, you’re able to navigate life so effectively, if you can just be okay with some temporary discomfort. The long-lasting things? Your home, your office? Make them comfortable. Make them pleasant. But don’t spend that same effort on something so fleeting.

Learn to forget it. To let it slip away. And learn to remember that you will forget it, so it slides away that much more easily.

I want to oppose some standard wisdom, oft repeated: “Don’t go looking for trouble.”

I object! You should absolutely go looking for trouble. How else will you solve it? How else will you improve the world?

Trouble thrives when it can strike first. It seeks the vulnerable, those not prepared for it. Keep the element of surprise. Sneak up on trouble.

No one saves the day from their couch. Get up and go looking for trouble.

I try not to be aimless. I try my best to move with purpose, act with intent. I think that there are many forces in the world that attempt to rob you of your power and agency and that it’s a bad idea to give it away for free.

But a tight grip is a painful one. Sometimes, just so you don’t break, you have to bend a little.

Not forever, but there is a time to let the wind take you for a while.

Your own breath fills the room. Sometimes you need to find new air. You need to capture it out in the wilds and bring it home with you; domesticate it for a while. It will grow old as air does; but you can go out again and capture it new.

Shake the cobwebs off when they form. Roll off the moss. You’ll be amazed.

I am an adult. I live in a pretty urbanized part of the world. The upshot of this is that at any point, day or night, I can buy ice cream. There are very few barriers to me doing so.

Therefore, it shouldn’t be special when the ice cream truck rolls by. This shouldn’t signify anything. I can get ice cream any time.

But of course, it does.

Some of this is nostalgia, sure. But my kids have never known a time when they couldn’t also get ice cream whenever they wanted – the only barrier is my approval. But the chimes still make their hearts swell.

To some extent, I think there’s value in taking joyous moments and nesting them outside our direct control. Scarcity and unpredictability can create a sort of joy that an on-demand existence cannot. The ordinary cannot, by definition, be extraordinary.

Here is something for you to do today.

Take something you know how to do very well – for this example, let’s assume you know how to bake a cake. You can bake a cake in your sleep, right? You’re amazing at it. (And if not – just pick something where you are.)

Now do it while recording yourself. Talk out loud; speak through your process. Stop to snap some pictures. Video the whole thing.

Next, take that raw data, and turn it into a presentation. A nice slide deck with quotes from yourself, images of important steps, video clips of the hard parts. Put all of that into a presentation.

Why? Because being able to take an action and turn it into a talk about that action is a really high-value skill. Most people try to do it for the first time with an action they don’t know very well, and then deliver it to an audience they’re unfamiliar with in a high-stakes scenario.

Ever had to deliver a talk at work? Maybe even for an interview? Yeah, like that.

If you did it instead with an action you already know intimately in a setting where nothing at all is at stake, you would be able to spot ways to improve your performance by a factor of ten, easily. You don’t even have to show it to anyone but yourself if you don’t want to (though you’d be surprised how easy it is to underestimate the interest others might have)!

And, as a nice reward for yourself: you get a cake.