Pick a category of experience: cars you’ve driven, bosses you’ve worked for, whatever you want. Quickly come up with your five best examples from that category, then your five worst. Write them down.

Next, take all ten examples and write them down in chronological order. On average, does the most recent half of the list contain more of the good examples or more of the bad examples?

This is a decent way to think about whether a particular thing is getting better or worse for you over time. If they’re getting better, awesome! If not – this might be your first warning flag to start looking a little closer.

Some level of communication will always rely on vulnerability. If you build impenetrable walls to protect you from the outside world, you have to remember that walls work both ways.

It’s better to funnel than to block. Let people know lots of stuff about you! Just make sure it’s all stuff you willingly share. People will want to look, anyway – so let them find.

Don’t be afraid of information, in either direction. I promise, you’ll survive the sharing of it.

“I’m opposed to animal cruelty. So every year, I donate 20% of my income from my ivory-trading job to the ASPCA.”

See… this is a problem. I think most people would recognize it as such. At worst, it’s rank hypocrisy, but even at best (assuming you really are genuinely concerned about animal cruelty), you’re working against yourself.

So sure, most people would recognize the dilemma there. But fewer people recognize weaker versions of this story, even though they happen every day.

“I care deeply about my children, which is why I put almost all of my income from my 90-hour-per-week job into their college funds.”

You’re trading away the thing you care about in order to support the thing you care about in some other (usually weaker) fashion.

There’s a balance, of course. If I spent 24/7 with my kids, we’d be homeless. But it’s not just a matter of deciding exactly how many hours is the right number versus how many dollars earned is enough. It’s about aligning those things together. Making the pieces of your life work in tandem, instead of against one another.

The person that trades ivory to fund the ASPCA might genuinely want to end animal cruelty, and working the ivory trade might be the most money they can make, so they’ve done some misguided math and decided to stick with it. After all, if they make less money, they’ll have less to donate. But they could instead work for the ASPCA, make less money overall, but help their favored cause more. And all the pieces of their life would be in harmony.

Don’t make bad trades just to maximize a single outcome. Make optimal trades by eliminating internal competition between the various aspects of your life. The less you fight yourself, the better.

Sometimes not getting something is a victory, when the conditions for getting it would outweigh the gain. If someone offers you a poison apple and you decline, you shouldn’t lament “oh no, I didn’t get the apple.” You should celebrate: “I didn’t get poisoned!”

The thing to remember in these moments is that there was never an apple in the first place. There was just a conveyor of poison, a Trojan horse to sneak bad things into your life. There’s no equation where you can say, “I’ll be okay with a little bit of poison if I get a delicious apple,” because you won’t even get the apple. You’ll take one bite, and be sick and dying before you’re finished.

Remember that when you summon up the courage to turn down a job offer, or a promotion, or any other opportunity that is dripping with ichor. The “opportunity” was never really there, if it came with so much poison you’d perish before you realized the gains. Instead, celebrate being savvy enough to avoid pitfalls, and look for the apples that aren’t poisoned. I promise you, there are plenty.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s gave me access to a lot of shows for which I hold a great deal of nostalgic fondness. Everything from Masters of the Universe to Transformers, Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers, Gargoyles, G.I. Joe and Inspector Gadget. These shows all shared a fundamental element – they all tried to do some sort of “life lesson” integration, usually in the form of a little pep talk from the heroes to the audience at the end, but also maybe from some mentor figure to the heroes at some point in the episode instead.

These lessons could be wide-ranging, but generally centered on themes of kindness, honesty or acceptance. Nothing wrong with that, for what it was. But every single one of these shows was also – perhaps quite unintentionally – teaching another lesson. The same lesson, week after week, stronger than all the others, albeit with a less likely messenger.

Perseverance.

You see, all of these shows featured villains. Bad guys who would hatch scheme after scheme, only to be invariably foiled by the heroes time after time. And you know what? They were never daunted for a moment. They never took a week off, never gave up, and never for a single second even doubted that this time, this time, it would work.

Bring that energy into your own life. Have the same confidence that Skeletor, Cobra Commander, or Dr. Claw bring to their 156th plot. After all, even if you don’t succeed, there’s always – always – next time, Gadget. Next time.

It is a very natural trait of humans to admire people, and then desire what they desire, rather than desiring anything from internal first principles. We see this in the influence of our parents, our community leaders, our heroes. What they want, we want – and then we rationalize that desire as if we were its architect to begin with.

Fighting that impulse may be a lost cause, but there’s a nice hack around it. Pick people who desire good things as your icons. Admire people not for what they are or their cultural status, but for the things they desire – the things they truly desire, not just what they say they desire. (The two are often very, very different.)

Some people are not wildly successful, not pillars of their community, not celebrities or influential – but they desire good. Good in themselves, good in the world. And they work towards that desire, because it’s a true goal, and not a status-seeking declaration, devoid of weight.

Admire those people, and absorb their desire as your own.

Step right up, let’s play a game!

In front of you are two opaque jars. The game is simple – reach into a jar and pull out a marble. If you pull out a green marble, you win a prize! If you pull out a red one, you don’t. There’s no cost to play other than your time.

If you pull a green marble out of Jar A, you win $50. If you pull a green marble out of Jar B, you win $100.

You want to know the ratio of marbles in each jar? Sure thing. Jar A has exactly one marble, and it’s green. That’s right, you’re guaranteed to win.

Jar B has ten marbles. Nine of them are green, and there’s one red one.

Now, if you can only choose one: Which jar do you choose?

From a coldly logical standpoint, Jar B is the better choice. A 90% to win $100 translates into the value of that choice being $90, whereas the value of the choice to pull a marble out of Jar A is $50. But some people are super, super risk-averse, and the idea of pulling the one red marble out of Jar B fills them with a sort of existential dread, so they might actually pull from Jar A.

But what if I changed the game up a bit – what if I said you could play the game 10 times in a row, with the one restriction being that you had to make the same choice each time?

Now “Choice A” is worth $500, but “Choice B” is worth $900, and the likelihood that you win nothing is extremely small. In fact, even if you pulled the one red marble 4/10 times, you’d still have won more with Choice B than with Choice A.

Okay, elementary stats discussion is done. Let’s make this a little more challenging, but also a little closer to reflecting reality.

I said in the beginning that there was no cost to play this game other than your time, so let’s keep that rule – but let’s say the game takes an hour to play. After all, it’s popular, so you’ve got to wait in line for an hour. Well, an hour isn’t nothing, and for some people it might not actually be worth it. If you don’t have any other way of turning that hour into at least $50, then it’s probably a good use of your time, but if you make $300/hour at your normal job, then it’s pretty pointless to do this.

But what if you make $70/hour?

Well, now we have an interesting discussion. If you normally can turn an hour into $70, then playing the game is still worth it – but only if you pick Jar B. Picking Jar A is a guaranteed “win,” but at the cost of twenty bucks! Picking Jar B is worth twenty extra bucks to you as a statistical measure, but also carries some risk; 90% of the time you’ll come out $30 ahead, and the other time you’ll lose the $70 opportunity cost you “paid” to play.

So the game is not worth it if you’re risk-averse, but it is worth it if you aren’t!

This is one of the biggest barriers to people becoming much more financially successful in their careers. There is a plateau in almost every career journey where in order to move up, you have to accept more risk. It might be because the best way “up” is entrepreneurship, it might just be that the competitive nature of higher tiers within your industry necessitates an increased willingness to “put yourself out there” and commit to projects or sample work without guaranteed up-front payment. No matter the source, however, there is more risk as you advance.

(Here’s a personal example: As part of my work, I do free consultations with people. Many, even most of these turn into paid work, but of course some of them don’t. If I was so risk-averse that I was never willing to do anything that wasn’t guaranteed to give me income, then I wouldn’t do those consultations, but clearly I’d be poorer overall as a result, given the value of the work they generate most of the time. In a very real sense, I play this marble game every week.)

Many people, at one point or another, find themselves in this position. They’ve reached a point where their “guaranteed” income level has largely maxed out. Their total income level could be much higher overall, but only by accepting some day-to-day statistical risk. And many people, because they don’t have the proper tools for evaluating the choice, make the wrong one. Hopefully this has given you a new tool – so that when it’s time for you to make that choice, you go for all the marbles – the red and green ones alike.

What you’re passively but consistently exposed to will have a far greater impact on your life than intense yet sporadic bursts of information you seek out.

Imagine two topics: celebrity gossip and ornithology.

Imagine someone who really likes celebrity gossip, so they follow a dozen tabloid-style social media accounts, watch shows like TMZ, and have friends who share the same interest. Imagine this person also has to pass a class on ornithology to graduate, so when they have a paper due they research the relevant facts and put them into reports.

Which subject does this person know more about?

If you really want to learn about anything, you have to make that thing part of the natural flow of information that surrounds you. That flow exists no matter what – but you have a great deal of control over its content.

“Whenever” becomes just “never” really, really easily.

Goals require timing. In order to achieve a goal, you need at least one of either a firm deadline or a firm cadence. If you have both, so much the better!

It’s fine to say, “I want to lose twenty pounds by December 1st.” It’s also fine to say “I want to do 50 sit-ups per day, and fast for 12 hours, 3 times per week.” It’s even better to do both! But if you say “I want to do more sit-ups and lose some weight,” you never will.

Some goals are naturally open-ended, and so you use a cadence: a set, regular schedule for the activity. No deadline, but that’s okay – if you stick to the cadence.

It’s hardest to do this when the thing you want isn’t fixing a problem, but improving an okay situation.

If you have a hole in your roof, you’re naturally more motivated to fix it than if you just think your house would look better with a different kind of roof. Problems come with their own motivations – improvements rely on us.

Otherwise, you’ll have the most mediocre version of every aspect of your life, until you improve it. And if you improve it “whenever,” it’ll happen never.

There is so, so much value in how to explain what you do to other people. Because guess what – no one has any idea.

Pick a topic you know anything about. Now pick the most elementary fact within that field; the thing you think “everybody knows.” Nobody knows it! A random sampling of a thousand people would produce may one or two other people who know that fact.

All knowledge is highly specialized, which means that in general nobody has any idea what you’re talking about most of the time.

They nod along, make assumptions to fill in the gaps, or politely ignore most of what you say. If you’re trying to make a conversation into a substantial platform for real action, that won’t do. You can’t rely on anyone else to bridge that gap on their end – you have to bridge it from yours, in how you communicate.

Use analogies. People understand the things they understand, so link the thing you want to explain to something they already know about. There’s a reason sports analogies are so popular for… well, tons of stuff. Sports are popular, and lots of people understand the basic mechanics of the major sports in their culture.

Use examples. People are way better at understanding stories than they are at understanding theory. That’s why anecdotal evidence holds so much sway over people, even though it shouldn’t. But that quirk is to your advantage – tell a story about a time you did your thing. For the parts people don’t get, use analogies.

Connect it to a goal. The other reason sports analogies are popular is because sports are goal-oriented and have clear “achieved goal” versus “failed to achieve goal” conditions. If you’re trying to get something done, but people don’t even understand how to tell if you’ve succeeded, it can be very difficult for them to help you, or even to root for you. They can’t measure success. But if you say “the real home run here is if we get a meeting with Mr. Smith,” then people understand that’s a goal and it’s important.

Specifically, connect it to one of their goals. If you want other people’s understanding of your thing to lead to action on their part that benefits you, then you need to make sure they’re motivated. To do that, make sure they get how your thing will help them; that’s way more important than them understanding the thing itself. If I’m selling cars, you don’t need to know how a car engine works to be interested in buying one, you just need to know what a car will do for you.

You can do all of those things without talking down to someone, insulting their intelligence, or trying to over-inflate yourself. And if you do, well… that’s a home run.