It’s quite natural to want to associate with people who have particular qualities. After all, the people around you make up your River, and you want it to work with you, not against you. So let’s imagine that you want people around you who are ambitious, kind, and intelligent. You specifically don’t want people who are petty, selfish, or foolish.

Okay… now what?

People don’t walk around with labels on their foreheads saying “Ambitious” or “Petty.” (And even if they did, how accurate or truthful could they be?) So we have to use proxies. Of course, the most accurate way to determine these traits is by interacting with that person multiple times over an extended period, but by that point they’re already in your River. Plus, clearly you can’t just absorb everyone you meet into your life at full capacity – there isn’t the time nor the space, for you nor them.

So instead, proxies. But which proxies we use often says more about us than about the people we’re trying to attract or repel, and like any offloaded decision, it runs the risk of giving many false results that harm us in the long run.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that I highly prize having intelligent people in my life. But I don’t have a superpower that allows me to tell how intelligent someone is by looking. So I proxy some piece of data that’s easier to evaluate. Because it seems correlated, I choose “education level.” It’s easy to ask in even an initial conversation where someone went to school, and for how long, and for what, and it doesn’t seem wildly intrusive. So if I was comfortable proxying “education level” for “intelligence,” I have a more efficient solution.

The enormous problem, of course, is that “education level” is not a good proxy for “intelligence.” Depending on why I wanted intelligent people in my River, it may even have negative correlation! For instance, suppose that if I was more self-aware, I would have realized that I wanted “intelligent” people in my life because I think of intelligent people as more free-spirited, creative, and inventive. Well, filtering by education level is not a good way to determine how free-spirited someone is, for sure! If I’m looking for out-of-the-box brainstorm buddies, getting rid of everyone who didn’t navigate the Ivy League probably isn’t a good strategy.

So that’s the danger of using a broad, society-imposed standard proxy. Instead, what if you used a more personal one? For instance, I could pick a few books that I both very much enjoyed and felt were intellectually stimulating and evaluate people’s intelligence by whether they read, understood, and liked those books. There are two problems with this strategy. For one, your experiences are unique to you and are just one possible path out of trillions. Someone could be completely within the category of “intelligent” as you would define it, but has simply never encountered those specific books. For two, there’s a whole lot of bias in the idea that you can define positive traits by their proximity to your own experiences.

It’s easy to sort by “people like me.” But that’s a sad River indeed.

So what are you left with? You can’t use the proxies of society because they’re too broad to be able to apply to your specific needs, and you can’t use the your own proxies because they’re too narrow to apply to the rest of society. So how can you possibly figure out who possesses the traits you want in your life?

Well… you can use any of that. Society’s proxies are actually fine. So are yours. So is your neighbor Steve’s. So is throwing darts at a dart board. As long as you’re prepared to be okay with being wrong, and changing.

Your life isn’t a vault. Entering and exiting is as easy as you let it be. People can come in for a while, give you something wonderful, and then leave. That’s okay – in fact, it’s expected, good even. There really is no risk-free way to tell who’s going to be a perfect life-long companion, if such a thing even exists. Start somewhere, anywhere, and adjust as you go.

There are very, very few non-reversible decisions in life. Meeting someone isn’t like jumping off a cliff, with no easy way to “un-jump.” It’s taking one stair. If you don’t like the slightly different view, you can go back the way you came, and take a different one. If you filter too strongly, you can miss the very best ones.

Just as you shouldn’t take positive correlation to be proof, you also shouldn’t take negative correlation to be an automatic dismissal.

Someone can be trying to take advantage of you, but using true information to do so. Lying and manipulating aren’t positively correlated with things that are advantageous to you, but that doesn’t mean that every word out of someone’s mouth is false just because some things were.

This makes the world more complicated than most people would like it to be – it would be nice if all lies came from “liars” and all liars always lied, like doors in a riddle. But they don’t.

So you can’t just outsource all of your decision-making onto external people you’ve categorized as “good” or “bad.” Doing everything that a given person tells you to do is a recipe for disaster, but so is deliberately doing the opposite every single time out of spite. In both cases, that person is controlling you and you’ve yielded all agency.

One of the great tragedies in life is that what’s important to you and what’s important to others will never align perfectly. As humans, we’re not great at wrapping our heads around that fact and acting accordingly, no matter how much we accept the truth of it. We think that if something is important to us, naturally it must be important to other people. And we think that if something is important to other people, naturally it must be important to us.

Neither is true. At least, not automatically.

Let’s define our terms a bit here. What does “important” even mean? This trips people up right from the start, because things can’t even be “important.” They only be more or less important than something else. It’s a relative term. Once you grok that, it becomes easier to see why the level of importance something has for you can’t possibly be universal.

For instance, you can (and should!) consider your own emotional state and level of general happiness to be important. Meaning you should prioritize that over a lot of other things! But you can’t prioritize everyone’s happiness, which means no one else can prioritize yours, which means your level of happiness will (and should!) be more important to you than it is to anyone else.

But when you don’t get your head around that, you do silly things like assume your happiness increasing is a reason for anyone else to do something, when of course it isn’t. I see it in job interviews – candidates using the fact that they’d really really love the job as a reason to hire them. Look, you might be happier if I hired you! But I’m not prioritizing your happiness with this hire; I’m prioritizing a whole lot of other things.

What’s important to you isn’t always important to other people. It’s not that they want the opposite or they want to act against it – it’s just that importance is a relative ranking of prioritization, and your happiness is a lower priority for me than a lot of other stuff.

Really, this means you should act differently in at least two ways. One, you should expect other people to act in ways that boost your personal priorities a lot less (trust me, you’ll be a lot less disappointed in life if you do this). And two, you should expect yourself to act on behalf of your priorities a lot more. No one else is going to!

Don’t internalize the priorities of others. Recognize that they have their place and might be perfectly logical from where the other person is sitting, but that doesn’t mean you should act in accordance with those priorities. You should align to them when you’re looking for win/win scenarios, sure. But for your own long term health, success, and happiness – only you know what’s important and can act accordingly.

It isn’t always easy to keep a group of people focused and on-task. Even if they all want to do so, the very thing that makes it advantageous to use a group in the first place – their diversity of thought – also can make it difficult to focus that diversity into something useful. The more possibly combinations of creativity, the more possible distractions.

Time is usually more of a factor, too. Not only is it more difficult to stay focused, but you often have stronger time constraints than when working alone. So you have even less time to get to your end goal, but more potential pitfalls!

How to manage this – while still getting all the benefits that creative collaboration brings?

The Rules.

You can’t just get together and say “hey, let’s turn our creativity towards X.” You have to establish some rules of engagement up front, and get everyone bought in. The reason you need to do it up front is because a lot of these rules can seem downright mean if you enforce them by surprise, but they’re perfectly fine if you’ve created the framework for them in advance.

For instance, saying up front: “You’re all very smart people, so I know that if we just let this meeting run wild a lot of brilliant things will get said. But just because something is brilliant doesn’t mean it’s useful to our work. So I’ve got a special notebook here (or maybe a specific shared online file if this is a remote meeting) that I’m calling ‘Other Ideas.’ If you start to go down a tangent that is brilliant but not where we need to be, I’m going to sound the metaphorical buzzer and ask you to just stop that track and put the idea down into that notebook/doc (so we don’t lose it!) and then let someone else pick up the track of our main project. Everyone okay with that?”

You want to unleash creativity, but you don’t want to unleash chaos. So create some healthy outlets for those other ideas, but keep the minds steered towards where you want them.

Imagine you’re playing a game of basketball. Maybe there’s some money on the line – you’ll get paid some amount if your team wins. So, you try very hard to win. You attempt to have a very cohesive team and you try very hard to work together effectively. Meanwhile, you not only attempt to outplay the other team, you also attempt to disrupt their teamwork as much as possible. Here’s what you don’t do: you don’t try to convince anyone on the other team to switch sides.

Why? Well, because the rules of the game don’t allow it. That would be a silly thing to do. The other team is… the other team, of course.

But now imagine that instead of being told “you’ll win $X if you win, and nothing if you lose,” the conditions were slightly different. Imagine being told “everyone will be paid $X for each point your team scores.” Well, now the money-maximizing thing to do is deal with the other team. To say: “Look, we don’t really care who wins, we just care about maximizing the number of points we both score. We’ll both score way more points if we stop trying to stop the other. Let’s just take turns making free throws for the rest of the game and we’ll all walk away with a ton more money than we would otherwise.”

Life is more like that second version. Very rarely do you gain anything by preventing someone else from gaining something. You gain things by maximizing the productive activities that lead to the gains. And sometimes that means just agreeing to stay out of each others’ ways! In fact, a lot of the time it means that.

In the real world, people can switch teams all the time. They don’t even have to be on a team in the first place. They can just do what they want to get the results they want – and so can you. Don’t get tricked into thinking otherwise.

When I was an adolescent, an adult once told me that a period of two weeks was called a “fortnight” because that was how long people would stay in forts during a war in colonial or medieval times before being replaced with the next shift.

This is absolutely hogwash, of course. A fortnight just means “fourteen nights.”

But here’s the thing about that fact. It satisfied two essential elements necessary to make it a false but “sticky” fact. First, no part of my brain was immediately trained to reject it: it didn’t contradict any of my prior biases, it wasn’t tied to anything I was being asked to do, it didn’t register as automatically false. It slipped under my “skepticism radar,” and it would do the same for most people. Second, it made me feel kind of smart: “Oooh, look at this new cool little trivia fact I know, which I can maybe later use to impress other people.”

So this fact stuck around in my head for a long time. Since the “fact” was totally trivial, it lasted a long time without being disproven. Even if I went my whole life believing it to be true, that false belief would never have caused me to lose my job, make my health suffer, etc. And it was contagious, because if I told it to someone else, they were likely to have exactly the reaction I had when I first heard it.

If if’s false but trivial, who cares? Why bother considering this at all? Because it illustrates a weakness in our perception of the world. This piece of false information was both spreadable and persistent for reasons that can absolutely apply to information that is harmful. Just because this piece of information didn’t really carry any cost for falsely believing it, doesn’t mean another piece of information won’t. That other piece of information may just as easily fly under your skepticism radar, but also do a lot of damage once its inside your decision-making matrix.

For better or worse, we live in a world of massive connectivity of information. When I first heard the fortnight thing as a kid, I didn’t have Google in my pocket, on tap at all times. Checking the etymology of the word “fortnight” would have been an all-day project at best. Now, it’s very much worth it to take an extra fourteen seconds to run new information past a filter or two. Don’t let things just take up residence in your brain without your permission.

Think about all your accomplishments. Everything you know. All the cool stuff you’ve experienced, or done. All the good things you’ve collected into your life. For each of those things, there was a “before.” A time when you hadn’t yet. If you’re proud of a beautiful picture you’ve painted, then there was a time when you hadn’t yet painted it. Heck, there was a time when you hadn’t yet painted.

This is universally true. So why do we act like it’s something to be embarrassed about?

I’ve noticed that when people are proud of something, they often try to present their lives as if it was absolutely inevitable that they would accomplish that thing. If they’re proud of their artistic ability, then talking to them you’d think they were born with a paintbrush in their hand. A child prodigy, whom everyone always knew was destined to become a brilliant creative soul! It ends up seeming that way because they never want to share the embarrassingly bad few early paintings, or the time they spent pursuing something totally different before they discovered their love of art, or anything like that.

But you had past lives. I had past lives! It doesn’t reduce my credibility or my achievements. All of the things I’m good at now aren’t diminished by the fact that I was a stable hand when I when I was 18. (Also: not rhetorical! I was actually a stable hand when I was 18.)

The life you’re currently living is also a past life for the future you. Maybe what you’re doing now will conveniently fit into the preferred self-narrative of that future you. Maybe it won’t though. But it’s leading to that future life, all the same! And if that future life is good, then the things that led to it are worth sharing, no matter what they were.

Here’s a neat little thing about orbital mechanics: nothing actually revolves around anything else. Instead, multiple things revolve around each other.

Our mental model of the system of The Earth & The Moon is usually that Earth is stationary, and The Moon rotates around it. But that isn’t true! Even within just the closed system of Earth+Moon (i.e. ignoring other things like the Sun), the center point of that system isn’t the exact center of the Earth.

To get a better idea of what I mean, imagine two planets with the same size and mass spinning around each other. The fact that the center of that system is the middle point in open space between the planets is a little easier to conceptualize, right? As one of the two planets gets bigger, that point in space moves closer to that object, but it will never be in its exact center as long as there’s other mass in the system.

To put this way more simply: anything that a particular object influences via gravity is also influenced by that other thing’s gravity, however small the effect.

You and your life are also such a system. Everything you introduce in your life, however minor, affects both your trajectory and the movement of everything else around you. You are changed by everything. If you have a promising career as a professional athlete in a sport you’re passionate about and you meet the love of your life and want to pursue a family with them, both of those things will be affected by the other. (I’m not saying either will be worse, just that both will be different in some way than they would have been in the absence of the other.)

People have a tendency to sort of act as if this wasn’t true, however. They think that they can keep all the ups & downs within their own “lane” and never have one thing affect the other thing. But even a constant movement affects the rest, so certainly variations do! The Moon’s constant, steady path affects the Earth, so imagine if the Moon had a bunch of sudden stops, accelerations, and direction changes. We couldn’t just say, “oh well, that’s all the way up there, it doesn’t affect us down here.”

The same in your life! If you say, “I really like my life, except I wish this one aspect X was different,” then changing (even improving!) aspect X is going to change other things about your life. Those changes might be positive! But they won’t be zero – so it’s worth stepping back and looking at the system as a whole before you just chuck another moon in there.

It’s amazing to me that people will make plans for projects or ambitions that span several or even many years, and yet make no accommodation for how the rest of their life will change in that time.

You’re going to get older. You’re going to want different things. The world is going to change. If you don’t acknowledge this, then you’re going to be really, really shocked when you come out on the other side of your five- or ten-year plan.

One of the most important things to do when setting a goal is clearing enough space in your life for its achievement.

(“Space” can also mean, well, “time,” at least in this context.)

Your life has a finite capacity. You do things, you have things. If you want to add to a particular area of your life, then you have to make sure you have room for the machinery. Do you want to be healthier? Then you have to have actual time in your schedule to work out, room in your home for exercise equipment, stuff like that.

I’ve met people who talk about wanting to have kids – and soon! – but their homes are filled wall-to-wall with expensive, breakable stuff. Every corner is used for something that they’d find indispensable. Every second of their day is scheduled, packed. There just isn’t space for kids in that life, no matter how much you want them.

If you clear space for a goal, the goal will expand to fill that space. If you clear a whole room of your house out and say ‘this room is reserved for a nursery,’ and you do likewise with 2 hours each day, spending them only on parent-related things, then a child is way more likely to appear in your life.

It’s the same with any goal. If you want to grow your own vegetables, you need a plot of land. Without that, all the intention in the world won’t help. Clear the space for the things you want – and start by clearing out the things you don’t.