Pick three things to do. Not the whole list – just three. Three isn’t a lot! And you can get a little synergy going, without getting overwhelmed. Take the laundry downstairs, that’s one. Downstairs is also where the cat food is, so bring that back up and feed the cats, that’s two. And while you’re feeding the cats, empty the litter box, that’s three.

Boom, you just got a lot done! But it didn’t feel like a lot when you started it.

Okay, now answer an email, that’s one. The email asked about that project, so update those slides, that’s two. And the slides reminded you that you needed to send that email to Nancy to ask her for last quarter’s data. That’s three, now break.

Cluster, break. Cluster, break.

I like things that are popular. Why wouldn’t I? If they’re popular, they’re good!

Wait, that doesn’t sound right. But it doesn’t sound wrong, either. Hrmm…

Okay, let me think this one through. For a lot of folks, something has to cross a certain minimum popularity threshold before they’ll consider approving of it themselves. And for other people anything that crosses that threshold immediately gets dismissed. I could dwell on the psychological nature of “conformists” versus “elitists” all day, but that basically just boils down to tribal status-seeking and not much else, so I don’t find it particularly interesting. What I do find interesting is the set of conditions under which it’s reasonable to assume that “popular = good.”

On the one hand, we talk about “the wisdom of crowds” with some regularity. There’s the Efficient Market Hypothesis (and the corollary that betting markets are the best predictors), and these things take as an axiom that “the masses” are better than any one person at knowing if something is good. But then there’s also the reverse – in some cases, it’s clearly true that elite experts are more knowledgeable than the masses on certain topics. We shouldn’t “poll the audience” when someone is having a heart attack – we should get out of the way of the cardiac specialist.

So how do we know?

Okay, here’s the easy one. I think “the crowds are right” is almost always true in matters of taste, as long as it’s a crowd of your people. For instance, if you like classic rock, then the most popular classic rock songs are also probably going to be ones you really enjoy, with some variation on the rankings, perhaps. If you like comedy movies, then the most popular comedy movies are probably the ones that make you in particular laugh the hardest, too. That’s because there’s no second step – music or movies or whatever aren’t good because they lead to something else we want, they’re just good because they are the thing we want.

That’s different from, for example, policy. Lots of very bad public or company policies are very bad, because they’re a means to an end. The means part may be popular because we like it in and of itself, or because we think that it will lead to a desirable end – but we don’t know. That extra layer of uncertainty is what starts to create static in the “popular = good” formula.

Ultimately though, in any of these cases, the formula really rests on one variable – how close are you, personally, to the median member of the crowd in question?

If you’re in the exact center of a particular crowd’s tastes, then the chances are high! But if you’re not, then the popularity bell curve will fall farther and farther from your personal position. So even when listening to the “wisdom of the crowds,” make sure you ask yourself – which crowd?

For a most people, their first experience with the concept of interpersonal hierarchy outside of their own families is with their teachers. I’ve written before about how our experience in the traditional American school system gives us all sorts of incorrect ideas about how the world works, and notably about how overcoming obstacles happens. But the school hierarchy doesn’t just teach us bad lessons about how to impress other people – it also teaches us bad lessons about how to be impressed.

In the normal model of school in the US that the majority of kids go through, a few things are true. First, it’s mandatory. Sure, your parents can do extraordinary things to get you out of it, but most don’t, and it tends to be all-or-nothing. In other words, even if your parents crafted for you a different model of schooling, within that model all the parts are still mandatory for you as a student, more or less.

So if a particular teacher wants to get a reputation as being extremely difficult, it’s easy for them to do without repercussions. In fact, they can usually increase their own status by being “harder” – after all, if the class is harder to pass, then you must be learning more, right? (Ha, but that’s the flawed logic, anyway.)

If you grew up in this system (as so many do), it can give you the really flawed idea that this method will work anywhere else, when of course it won’t.

See, if you’re a teacher, you have a captive audience. Your students can’t do anything at all about your methods: they can’t object, they can’t quit, they can’t swap teachers, etc. (Well, they can – and sometimes do – try to do all of those things, but usually their only reward is failure or discipline.) But outside of that very narrow context, virtually no one else in society has that kind of power.

In pretty much every other context, if you want to “put people through their paces” in exchange for some reward, you have to actually balance everyone’s interests. Just because someone wants something from you doesn’t mean that you have ultimate authority. Employees can quit. Adult learners can seek other options. Job candidates can opt out of your arcane process and find another game. No matter what you have and how much people want it, you’re probably not the only person who has it. And people aren’t forced to seek it, either – even if it’s desirable, there will be an effort threshold at which it’s not desirable enough.

In the real world, “take my ball and go home” trumps “my way or the highway” just about every time.

“I would go 0-30 before I would go 0-9. 0-9 means you beat yourself, you psyched yourself out of the game.” – Kobe Bryant

You are, absolutely inevitably, going to lose, fail, crash, screw up, or drop the ball. Probably more than once; probably, with some significance, a hundred times. There’s lots of good advice out there about how to move forward past it, how to learn lessons and improve for the future. Heck, that’s a topic I’ve written about in this blog more than a few times.

But it’s also important to do the failing itself with a little grace and a little style. It’s important to keep a sense of self that isn’t defined by the failure, and that’s easier to do if you can fail with dignity.

There’s a sci-fi novel by Robert Heinlein called Space Cadet, and in one chapter two of the main characters have crash-landed on an alien planet. They’ve survived, but their ship is completely wrecked. However, their course was well-known and they belong to a major organization; rescue will happen quickly and they’re in no immediate danger from their peaceful surroundings. Despite this, one of the cadets gets to work on the utterly impossible task of attempting to repair his spacecraft with basically rocks and sticks. The other cadet asks why he’s bothering – even if what he was attempting was possible, it would take decades and rescue would reach them in days. The more ambitious cadet answers that he’s well aware that they’ll be rescued, and when they are, he does not intend for his rescuers to find him sitting around on his ass waiting to be rescued.

That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. It’s going 0 for 30 instead of 0 for 9, because you didn’t give up. It’s crossing the finish line in a race, even in last place. It’s keeping your head up, even when that’s all you’ve got left.

When people are scared, hurt, or confused it can be natural for them to lash out. Do you know where the term “scapegoat” comes from? It’s a religious tradition; people would “put their sins into” a goat, and then release that goat, chasing it away from their village. The idea was that the goat took with it the sins – and the blame.

That can seem absurd by modern standards, until you realize that people do that all the time. If someone is scared or hurt or confused, all you have to do is get close enough and the scared/hurt/confused person can lash out and heap a bunch of blame on you while simultaneously chasing you away. This doesn’t do much to solve their problems, but it does satisfy some inner desire to be free of a sense of ill will. If that’s all it did, it would actually be okay! There’s nothing wrong with a ritual to make us feel better – except if it happens to you, it can make you feel… scared, hurt or confused!

You see, when people did this to a goat, it didn’t matter. From the goat’s perspective, a bunch of humans said a bunch of words and then let it go. Cool! No sweat off the goat’s back, right? If anything, great for the lucky goat. It certainly didn’t create any cycles of harmful behavior. But when a human becomes a scapegoat, that human is now experiencing the very conditions that create the need for a new one.

Another unfortunate aspect of this is that “proximity” to a person experiencing the negative emotions is more likely if it’s someone you care about, someone you interact with frequently. So it’s not uncommon for colleagues, friends, family members, or other close people to lash out in exactly this way.

And you don’t want to blame them! After all, you care about them. And you understand everything they’re experiencing is natural. Fear and pain and confusion are unpleasant stimuli. Lashing out in this way is so natural that we have a whole word for it, going back to parables in the Bible. This isn’t healthy, but it’s perfectly understandable.

So you don’t want to continue the cycle by passing it on to another, and you don’t want to be mad at the people who passed it onto you. So what do you do?

Let people be hurt, scared or confused. Let them come to you. Be understanding; they’re only human, just like you. Help them find a solution if they really want one, let them vent if they don’t. If it becomes necessary, walk away – some people may not give you any other option. But above all else, love your neighbor. Because no one else can carry your pain but you – not even goats. But lots of people can carry your love with you, if you share it.

When presented with a frustrating failure or setback, often your well-meaning loved ones will tell you that no one else’s opinion matters, and the only one who needs to be satisfied is you.

This isn’t wrong, on the face of it. But oh, the excuses it makes!

First, it’s simply not true that no one else’s opinion matters. Your self-respect is paramount, and only your own self-respect is an end in itself. But other people’s opinion does matter, insofar as other people choosing to interact with you is how you live your life.

But even more importantly – people often use the phrase “the only person whose opinion matters is yours” to mean something akin to “everything is fine as it is.”

If self-respect is the default, then it’s meaningless.

Just like the respect of others, you need to earn your own respect. You need to work for it. Now, you should of course treat everyone – including yourself – with respect. An unfortunate thing about that word is it sort of has two meanings in our modern society. It can mean “basic dignity” and it can also mean “elevated esteem.” Everyone deserves basic dignity, but of course tautologically everyone can’t deserve elevated esteem. In this post, I’m referring to the second definition – as far as the first goes, be nice to everyone, including yourself.

But if you want to truly esteem yourself, you have to do things worth esteeming. You get to decide what those things are, but it’s a cop-out to just declare that they’re just all the things you’re already doing. If I stopped writing, stopped working, stopped taking care of my children, stopped exercising – I might still be worthy of basic humanity, but I certainly couldn’t say I respected myself. And if I did, then the respect I have for myself now is meaningless.

Self-respect is inexorably tied to self-improvement. You are the only person you truly need to impress – but you should also be the hardest. Loving someone does not mean accepting every one of their flaws without reaction. I love my children, but I would be expressing that love poorly if I didn’t work hard to give them the tools to improve themselves. You should love yourself – but you should express that love by motivating yourself to be the best expression of “you” that you can be.

In either direction, we can over-anticipate our arrival at a destination. We can expect something amazing or terrible, and it may overshadow what actually happens. It can then be difficult to notice – or accept – that we have, in fact, arrived.

My son was once going in for a booster shot. I had explained to him what was going to happen, and that it may be a little uncomfortable. He worked himself up into a bit of a meltdown – but the shot itself barely bothered him. In fact, the shot was so easy compared to what he expected, that even on the drive home he was still worried – he couldn’t accept that the bad thing had already passed, because it was so much less severe than he had anticipated.

We experience this in reverse sometimes, too. We expect to feel a certain way upon reaching some milestone, and if we don’t then we think we must not have reached it at all. You think being “successful” in your career will make you happy, but it doesn’t – so instead of re-evaluating the goal, you just think “I must not be successful yet.” Because if you were, you’d feel happy, right?

What a cycle that creates!

I try very hard not to set “emotion goals” or even emotional predictions. I try hard not to let myself say, “when X happens, I’m going to feel very good/bad.” That can create some cognitive dissonance that I don’t want to deal with. Keep your goals grounded in real results, and your predictions centered around the physical world. Then, emotionally, say – “whatever happens, I will respond maturely; for I am in command.” Mark the arrival, and see it for what it is.

I was once in a very small airport in Indiana, the kind that gets about two flights a day. I was on one of those flights, so I arrived and looked for the check-in for my airline. I noticed that while the airport was virtually deserted that day, it was at least designed to accommodate a much larger crowd, should such a need ever arise. One of the design features was that in front of each check-in desk was a long winding line painted on the floor, winding back over itself until eventually it reached a small free-standing sign that said ‘Enter Here.’

You can imagine the purpose of such a thing, when there’s a large crowd. It would direct the queue of people into some order, allowing them to file towards the desk in a structured fashion. From the looks of the place it didn’t seem like it was frequently used.

When I came in, one other person entered the cavernous lobby with me, headed for a different airline. And I watched with dawning horror as she first went to the ‘Enter Here’ sign, and then walked the entire path of the line. Carrying a suitcase! It must have been something like eight times the distance than just walking in a straight line to the desk.

I looked towards the desk for my airline, and there was a similar line painted on the floor. But, since I was the only other person in the lobby and also not completely insane, I just walked up to the desk. It took about ten seconds. I think by the time I was done checking in the other lady had finally made it to her desk.

There are lots and lots of painted lines in the world. There are surprisingly few walls. Sometimes we think there are a lot of walls, but that’s just because we’re mistaking the painted lines for impenetrable barriers. They’re not.

I’ve seen this sentiment paraphrased in one way or another many times, in many different places. The gist is this:

“The cost of success is tons of hours of work, no social life, sacrificing your health & sleep, skipping family events, and putting all your money back into your work – if you’re not willing to do that, you won’t succeed.”

I mean… I can imagine something being worth that. If I truly believed that doing all that would cure cancer, I’d be morally obligated to do it. But for just “personal success?” I mean – if you don’t have any of those other things, what does “success” even mean?

Some people naturally have a high work ethic, and I’m a big supporter of hustle. But you also have to define success, not just seek the word.

Sometimes, when I’m driving, I’ll make a mistake and do something that upsets another driver. Or maybe it wasn’t even a mistake, just a necessary tactical decision due to some unusual but emergent circumstances. In any case, I can see that another driver is upset, and what I would love to do is find a way to contact them, apologize, and explain my reasons for doing what I did.

Obviously that’s not going to happen, so I started doing something else a few years ago, instead. Every time this occurred (and it wasn’t often – I’m a safe and considerate driver, by and large), I mentally noted what my behavior must have looked like to an outside observer, stripped of internal context. And then I filed that impression, and whenever another driver upset me by doing the same thing, I instantly forgave them. I just assumed that their reasons for doing whatever they did exactly mirrored mine in that one instance from long ago. “Sure, it looks like they just were inconsiderate and cut me off to make that exit, but maybe they also have a snapping turtle loose in the back seat and it’s trying to get at grandma’s birthday cake which you’ve been instructed to deliver to the nursing home that closes in ten minutes! Good luck, brother!”

(That one never actually happened, but you get what I’m saying.)

What quickly happened after I started doing this was that I realized no one had the ability to upset me on the road any more. Everything was expected, understandable, forgivable.

This extends way beyond road etiquette. Every mistake might be unique, but they definitely fall into broad categories that you’ve contributed to yourself, more than once. This humility of understanding can lead you to a far more peaceful inner life – I highly recommend it.