The first step to building all good things is the belief that they can exist.

There’s a pervasive cynicism that says that you’re being fooled any time you believe anything good, especially about a business or organization. That you’re “drinking the Kool-Aid.” You’ve somehow been suckered to ever repeat a good thing you’ve been told and have come to believe.

Hogwash. If you can’t give the benefit of the doubt, at least a little, to a group you want to work with – how will you ever work with them effectively? How will you be more than a drag on the whole operation?

Look, sometimes Kool-Aid turns out to be snake oil. Sometimes people lie, and adapt to new movements in positive language to co-opt that language for nefarious ends. But more often, people are trying their best and doing an imperfect job of communicating what they want to believe.

If someone gives you some generic positive affirmation, like “believe in yourself and you can achieve anything,” it’s easy to dismiss that. “Sure pal, great advice. All my problems are solved. What are you selling?”

But why? The advice was generic, but it was true. It might not have been maximally helpful, but it wasn’t harmful. What good do you do for the world by pushing back against that? For that matter, what good do you even do for yourself? In our efforts to defend ourselves against being taken advantage of, we often completely throw away any positivity that we can’t prove is perfectly altruistic and completely relevant to us specifically.

But lots of good is just “laying around,” or is part of a win/win arrangement. In fact, a tremendous amount! Some of it, some genuine good, is just mixed in with the Kool-Aid. If we only accept positivity in these extremely specific forms, we often get none at all.

The collection of things you’ve done in the past are not ingredients for a specific, singular meal. They’re utensils and cookware you’ve collected, with which you could make many things.

When people view their progress through time, they often feel as though they’re walking down a steadily-narrowing corridor. With every passing day, the possibility space decreases as more and more options are whittled away by the knife of time.

Preposterous!

It’s the exact opposite. You’re not walking down a steadily-narrowing corridor, you’re walking down a rapidly-widening one! With each new day, you wake up more capable than the day before. More opportunities are available to you because you know more things, more people, more ideas. Your life’s choices haven’t been coiling around you, constricting like a noose. They’ve been opening doors left and right.

The only thing narrowing your pathway is you. Your belief that your past must somehow define and dictate your future. It certainly can do that – if you let it. But the control is yours.

Let’s say you’re a rational, intelligent human being – so naturally, you like the middle parts of the brownies. They’re superior, and preferring them reflects upon you as a person of culture. Now imagine you’re looking for a romantic partner. Surely you also want someone cultured and intelligent, so you should seek out someone else who also prefers the middle parts of the brownies, right?

No! Despite the fact that liking the edge pieces is indicative of an unhinged personality, that’s probably who would make the best partner for you (at least, in this one area). If you both like the middle parts, then you’ll fight over them and the edge pieces will go uneaten.

The point is that the right person to complement you is not necessarily the person most similar to you. If you want to start a bakery to make your own brownies all the time, you don’t necessarily want business partners who also have a deep love of baking. You want business partners who have a deep love of operational organization, or finance, or workforce management, or any of the other things that are required to run a successful small business. If you all love baking but hate doing the books then the business is doomed.

To put it another way: when two jigsaw puzzle pieces are the same shape, they don’t fit together.

This is yet another reason to diversify your life. Get out of your echo chamber. Sure, it might be intellectually satisfying to hear other people agree with you about which parts of the brownies are the best. But when the hands start reaching for the pan, that intellectual satisfaction dries up real quick. Just like the dry, disgusting edges of the brownies.

In your life, you will do work for free. This is amazing.

When you work for free, you free your work. You work without permission, you work without constraint. At least, if you do it early.

Here’s the life cycle: in order for someone to want to exchange with you, they have to have some confidence that they’ll get what they want. In order for that to happen, you need to have some evidence to present. This is the classic paradox: “I can’t get a job without experience, and I can’t get experience without a job.”

Of course, that paradox is easily solved, but it’s the opposite of what most people making that statement want. Most people lamenting the existence of that paradox are wishing that someone would just give them the job without the experience, but that’s not the false part. The false part is thinking that you can’t get experience without a job.

Of course you can! In fact, you can get much more. You can do whatever you want if no one is paying you; it’s up to you to realize how beneficial that is.

You don’t need an audience to speak. You speak, and then an audience will come. We live in a glorious golden age of social proof – it’s so easy to do things in a way that others can witness. You can write, or speak, or build, or create, or anything. Others can witness in the present or (more likely) the future. You don’t trade your labor for money; you trade control of your labor for money. You can always labor, you can always think, you can always do. How wonderful it is to be free!

And the more you take advantage of that now, the more control you will retain when it comes time to trade. If you wait until someone pays you before you do anything, you yield not only control over your work, but over the development of the identity of your work. If someone pays you to paint houses, now you’re a painter – whether you wanted to be or not. That will start to stick to you, start to carve you. But if you do what you want when you can, then that will be what people generally pay you to do later.

This isn’t just advice for young people, by the way. You died yesterday, every single one of you, and you die every day. Every new day you are born again, ready to choose the expression of this new life, this new freedom.

The world conspires to rob you of your freedom at every turn. Nature makes you hungry and lashes your labor to the pursuit of food, shelter, security. Do not squander what freedom you retain! Do not yearn for more chains, simply because they may give more slack to those you started with. Do what you love and let the world follow. But no matter what, do – before anyone asks.

Something like 80% of small businesses fail in the first year. Those aren’t good odds. So why do people start small businesses?

Let’s assume for a moment that it’s not total ignorance of the statistic. Some of it might be, of course, but even for people who know that 80% fail, some try anyway. To begin with, the 80% distribution of failures isn’t random. There aren’t 100 equally-viable businesses, of which 80 crumble through no fault of their own. Sure, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune play some part in any business’s success or failure, but they’re not as big of a factor as all of the controllables are.

No, what makes people start businesses isn’t ignorance of the statistic, it’s the awareness of the fact that it isn’t random combined with the general faith that they, personally, are in the 20% of viable businesses. Of course, 100% of people can’t be right about being in the 20% minority, but that doesn’t shake people.

And it shouldn’t! It’s good that people take these risks – if no one took the risk, we’d have zero new businesses. The process of sorting through them is what advances us.

Humans are bad at risk assessment, as a general rule. We don’t have intuitive calculating machines in our brains, we’re not great at “gut-level statistics,” we don’t evaluate probability well. Often I lament this and work hard to try to train myself to do it better. But to some extent, I think a lot of our species-level survival has depended on the very fact that we’re bad at knowing when not to jump.

We very often think there’s more risk than there is, and we frequently think there’s less. If you’re going to have to make one of those errors, make the second one. The worst that can happen if you jump when you shouldn’t is that you die. That’s not nearly as bad as what will happen if you don’t jump when you should, which is that you never live.

In physics, there’s a concept called the “observer effect,” which basically means that to accurately measure something you very often change it a little through the actions of your measurement. We can’t really be “passive observers” most of the time; in order to study something, we have to interact with it at least a little. Think of checking tire pressure – the very act of attaching the pressure gauge to the valve lets out just a smidge of air. So by measuring the air pressure you also changed it, if only a bit.

This isn’t just a physics thing. If you study animals in their natural habitat, you have to disrupt that habitat, if only in a minor way. You have to sneak in a camera or something, and get your smell on things and scare away a bird that might have been the next meal of the tiger you’re trying to study, etc.

And it’s not just a hard science thing, either. In fact, the problem is much, much worse in the realm of human interaction. Because in addition to everything else, humans can usually observe that they’re being measured – especially if you tell them!

Let’s talk about resumes for a moment. Most people that use resumes have the core idea of them completely wrong. Most people think that a resume is an impartial record of their professional life. They think of a resume almost as if it was created by an outside observer who’s been watching their career. If that was actually how resumes got made, that would be fine – but it isn’t. Because if that were how resumes were made (by impartial, outside observers) then employers could use them as a measure of a candidate’s ability and experience.

But that’s not what they are at all. They’re self-created marketing documents, and that changes things a lot. You see, what employers generally want to see on resumes is generally pretty known (or at least discoverable). Their standards of measure are public information, for the most part. And that means, for the most part, that they’re bad standards of measure.

Let me go deeper into this tangent for a moment. Let’s say an eccentric billionaire walks into a sleepy town one day (without announcing anything about his wealth), and asks around until he finds the person who has worked hardest to become a painter. Discovering an artist toiling away on brilliance in poverty-level conditions, the billionaire bequeaths a million dollars on this person in a public display of support, speaking about how much the billionaire values the artistic pursuits and why they’re so important. The billionaire then says that he’ll return to the town next year.

What would you expect that town to look like, a year hence? The place would probably be overrun with artists! But here’s the problem – that very first artist was pursuing art out of a genuine love of it. You could be sure of this because the artist had no expectation of a sudden windfall. Meanwhile, every other artist in the city now has their motives sullied by the fact that they know that there’s a major reward lurking if they paint hard enough. Incentives change behavior. The people of the city know that the measure of “best artist” would be rewarded, and so they changed their behaviors appropriately in response to the measure. That means that the measure is no longer the measure the billionaire wants it to be – it’s no longer a measure of “who loves art the most,” but rather “who wants a million dollars the most.” Since those two measures will reflect different people, the point is lost.

So, back up to resumes. If a measurement becomes a target you can adjust to, it stops being a good measure. That is extra true when it comes to measurements that are very easy to change and very hard to quantify in the first place, which is like 99% of what shows up on resumes.

I can read a resume, but what I’m reading is a piece of paper written entirely by a person who wants a specific thing that I have to offer, and who knew in advance exactly what I wanted to see. I’m not saying that all people who turn in resumes are shameless liars or anything (though certainly a few are, and their resumes will look the same as those of the people who aren’t), but I’m saying that even if the resume is 100% truthful and accurate, even doing the actual stuff you’ve written about was informed by the fact that someone else would want to read it, not because you wanted to do it or it had value.

For example, I’ve talked to a number of people who worked at Facebook, and I heard this story many times: it was a good idea to work at Facebook for two years, even though Facebook was a terrible employer and everyone hated working there, because it looked so good on your resume. Many of these people did nothing of value while they were there. They “phoned it in” and did just enough to not get fired for two years (or close enough to round up) and then bounced, knowing that future employers would look at their resume and go “Ooooh, Facebook! How impressive!” No lying involved – the resume was accurate – but the actions of the person in question were deadweight loss to everyone involved.

See, that’s the other problem with targeting a measure – in most cases, you have to do wasteful things in order to do it. In the example of the town full of artists, a LOT of time is being wasted. I don’t think “art” is a waste or anything. But I think that garbage art that you don’t even want to make and no one else wants to see that you’re creating in a frenzy just because one of you out of hundreds will get a million dollars for doing so is just about the definition of wasteful. All of those people, absent the million-dollar prize, would have been doing significantly more valuable things with their year. In fact, if you added up the value of all the things those people could have built or accomplished in that year, the total would certainly be more than a million dollars.

Of course, in some cases point of measuring things in an observable way is to encourage changes in behavior. Measuring grades in school is meant not only to be an observation of ability but also an encouragement to improve ability. And of course… it doesn’t work. For exactly all the reasons I’ve stated. What grades measure is precise. “How well you’re learning” or “how smart you are” are very imprecise things that only very loosely correlate to your grades in school, but they do make sure that children spend all of their time and energy not actually learning, but trying to get good grades. Actual knowledge retention of the things children are graded on is abysmal (remember that show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”), because grades don’t measure how well you retain stuff, just how well you pass tests.

So here’s the upshot of all this rambling: as soon as the subject of your measurement knows that they’re being measured (assuming that some reward is also tied to the measurement), they will bend towards appeasing the yardstick. If you aren’t fully aware of that when you try to measure, you’re wasting your time – and probably everyone else’s, too. In a real way, you’re inflicting harm. Of course, our understanding and operation in the world requires that we have data and that requires measurement. At some point, you simply have to. But you have to know that this effect exists. You have to know that you cannot be an impartial observer – your observation will change the outcomes. The easier it is to bend to the yardstick, the more of exactly that you will get.

Sherlock Holmes said: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Here’s a version of that to apply to your life: “When you have eliminated all which will not happen, then whatever remains, no matter how you feel about it, are the possibilities for the future.”

Want to make yourself really miserable all the time? Then expect things that won’t ever happen, and get mad when they don’t. Note that the question of whether something is likely to happen is totally separate from the question of whether it should happen (or whether or not you want it to). Don’t confuse them.

Your high school bully should call you, out of the blue, twenty years after graduation to apologize for the way they treated you and offer to make amends. But if you sit around mad that they aren’t, it’s because you were foolish enough to somehow confuse the question of whether or not they should with whether or not they will.

This is the source of, I’d say, maybe 90% of people’s unhappiness? If not more! Expecting something to happen just because it should happen. If you want contentment, learn to not expect things that aren’t going to happen. “Should” is a stupid question when you apply it to other people – if you decide that you should do something, you have the power to make it so. But the question of whether anyone else “should” do anything is purely academic and theoretical. Eliminate such thoughts, for they consume your time as well as your contentment.

Lots of things just happen, and lots of other things just don’t. You can’t control the storm that happens, but you can control how you stand against it.

As I reflect on the nature of gratitude today, I’m reminded of the views on the topic expressed by one of the founders of Western philosophy, Plato. Plato should be unfamiliar to no one, even if you don’t know the full breadth and depth of his work. He lived for eight decades, spending the lion’s share of that time in philosophical pursuits. His work spanned the nature of love, thought, mathematics, and a wide variety of other topics. Yet in all that time, he never once wrote or – as far as any records indicate – even spoke the words “thank you.”

Do you know why?

He didn’t speak English.

My middle kid is 4. She is a constant, never-ending stream of absolute side-splitting hilarity. That’s not just me saying “my kid is special,” in the standard parent-bragging way. In fact, as far as I can tell, my kid is very much not special in this regard.

Right around this age, give or take a few months, kids seem to be absolutely hilarious (my oldest kid certainly was at this age, and I expect my youngest will be as well). A few moments of reflection and it’s easy to see why: much earlier than this, and they can’t really talk at all. Much later than this, and their language ability develops to the point where they speak “normally” and don’t say the funny not-quite-right charmers that are such a hallmark of this particular development stage. This is the sweet spot.

I think this principle is easy to see when you’re looking at the hysterical half-nonsense spewed by a four-year-old, but it’s present everywhere. Between “not knowing anything” and the point where your knowledge levels out and joins the “general consensus” is a sweet spot where the most creative things can happen. You know enough to be dangerous, but you don’t know so much that you’ve started following familiar pathways all the time just because they’re familiar.

Capitalize on that. Lots of people get frustrated in exactly this stage because it feels like you’ve emerged from the stuff that’s easy to learn and you’re on the precipice where expertise feels elusive, like there’s so much more to absorb that you don’t have yet. In your race to avoid that discomfort you grab anything that looks like expertise, but what looks like expertise is often just the standard model of whatever it is you’re doing. In order to avoid looking or feeling foolish, you surrender your freedom to do really creative things in the nonsense-space.

Part of why kids are hilarious at that age is because they don’t know what things, exactly, they’re wrong about – and they don’t care. They’re trying to get their point across, express themselves, and use language to manipulate their conditions. They’re not yet focused on status or whether there’s a “right” way to do things that might be separate from the “effective” way. Be like them. Don’t rush out of the sweet spot. Stay there and play for as long as you can.