Every day, there’s going to be a moment when you’re at your absolute best – your most creative, energetic, motivated, savvy. The moment when you’re most “in the zone.” Likewise, there will be a moment when you’re the opposite of all that.

This is true even if the day overall is very bad or very good; there was still a zenith and a nadir. It’s true even if the gap between them isn’t that large on a given day, though the gap is often wider than you think.

The point is this – who is capturing the benefit of the highest point, and who is getting the worst work from the lowest?

Sadly, many people give the very best of themselves each day to something they don’t particularly care about, and save the very worst of themselves for… themselves. During the time of day when you’re at the height of your powers, you’re working for someone else, doing something that isn’t serving you beyond a paycheck. And when you want to work on your own goals, you’re doing so with whatever’s left over.

Reverse that. Make sure that you and your loved ones, your goals and your aspirations – make sure those are getting the very best of you every day. If you’re working a job you don’t really care about in order to pay the bills while you write the novel of your dreams, then why are you working the job during your brightest and most creative hours, and saving the novel-writing for when you’re tired and drained at the end of the day? Get a second-shift job so you can write when your heart is full, and go punch a clock with what’s left.

There is always a best and a worst, and someone gets both. Make sure it goes where you want it to.

The better an excuse is, the more damaging it is as a trap.

Some excuses are so laughably bad that we actually feel embarrassed about even considering them. In a way, they become a little more motivating, because we think not only about the consequences of failing to achieve our task, but also the social shame of trying to pull out something on the level of “my dog ate my homework” as an explanation.

But some excuses are so widely accepted that we can even find ourselves subconsciously steering towards them in order to have a viable reason to give up, to fail, with the explicit approval of our peers.

That’s a killer trap, right there.

Here’s how you can catch it. Watch yourself, and watch your own mind – look out for the wave of relief an excuse tends to bring washing over you before you’ve actually failed. Imagine a college student, a week before a final paper is due. He feels stressed about the deadline, but then he also starts to feel (unrelatedly) a bit under the weather. Suddenly, relief! “Oh good,” he thinks, “I’ll be so sick I won’t be able to do this project, and everyone will understand and it’ll be okay.” The deadline is still a week away, and all he has is a sniffle!

Let that shock you back to work! Drink orange juice, go out in the sun, and get writing. When you feel the relief of a good excuse coming, fight it for your life. That’s a siren’s call, and it’s too easy to let it crash you to the rocks.

There is a lot of value to just dumping a bunch of stuff on a table and seeing what emerges after you play for a while.

When kids do these kinds of crafts, it’s good messy fun – I’ll put a bunch of paper, markers, glue, paint, randomly-shaped bits of scrap wood, plastic thingies, and whatever else on the table and just let them go nuts. At some point, there’s a rainbow-colored frog or a sort-of firetruck or something. That wasn’t what they set out to make, of course. They just played, and at some point their play started to look like a frog so they went with it.

As adults, you can do that in the artistic sense, but it’s also a great strategy when you have a lot of information and/or resources but you don’t know what you want to make yet. Just start playing in there. Write stuff, move things around, and soon it might start to look like something. When it does, polish it and see.

The “dump everything on the table and go” strategy has a lot of merit – and it’s better than endlessly deliberating when you already have a lot of stuff to use. Just get crafty.

As always, take the day to be more free. It’s the one thing that never loses its marginal benefit to your soul.

If you pick your foot up, you’ll have to put it back down. Lean forward just a little bit, and that becomes a step.

Sometimes you have to put a task in your own way, just so you have to get it done in order to move. Sometimes that’s what you do to keep the quicksand from getting you.

Don’t even try to take the step. Just pick your foot up, and the step has no choice but to happen. Then cheer – grab the momentum it gives. Pick your other foot up.

I believe in you.

Do you lay out your clothes for the next day before you go to bed?

We think of time as very linear, but I think that holds us back a bit when we’re trying to be proactive. We can skip around a little! Time can be more like location in space.

There’s this thing called the “Traveling Salesman” problem, which is a math problem where you use certain variables to calculate the most efficient route between many different stops, with potentially different travel times on different roads and different times spent at each location, etc. Actual salespeople do this all the time; in fact, there are even apps and such where you plug in all your stops and it drives you all around. It may often seem like a tangled route, but if everything is done correctly it actually saves you time.

So, you have a task you have to do. But maybe it’s somehow “time-locked,” in that you can’t actually work directly on the task yet. Perhaps you’re waiting for an email from someone, maybe you had to order a replacement part and it won’t arrive for a week, maybe it requires access to a workspace that’s currently closed. So even though the task might be important and you have lots of time right now, you don’t do anything.

Maybe you can’t work directly on the task. But we can almost always work indirectly on tasks in ways that will reduce our total time on the main event.

Like laying out your clothes for work the next day before you go to bed. Your work might be closed, so you can’t get a jump-start on actually getting there. But you can “advance the cause” in preparation now. Builds a buffer against future impediments.

So you don’t have the email yet. Small tasks: you can open up the draft of your response and type in everything that you can before you have the final info. Replacement part isn’t here, but you can take out the bad part, prep the tools. You can’t get to the workspace you need, but you can print out the instructions so you don’t have to do it there, wasting time.

See, we can jump around a little back and forth in time, if it helps us do things. Helps us take action. Reduces future cost.

Every single obstacle you face when trying to accomplish something comes, automatically, with a really awesome benefit. No matter what the obstacle is, this benefit is included – and in fact, the tougher the obstacle, the more of this benefit you get.

The Benefit: The story of your accomplishment and what it says about you is improved by a like amount.

Training for and completing a marathon? That’s pretty awesome! But if halfway through your training you suffer an injury, then despite that injury you finish your training and complete the marathon? Wow, way more impressive!

There is no hurdle to jump where this isn’t true. No matter what the difficulty is, it adds to the completed task. And that is, in fact, so beneficial that it’s almost a shame when it doesn’t happen. Why? Because the benefits of the accomplishment – whether they be personal satisfaction, improved skill, demonstration of competence to others, whatever – are enduring. The hurdle was temporary. Trading very short-term struggle for more long-term gain is very often a great deal.

So when your goal suddenly gets more difficult to achieve – rejoice! You are delayed but for a moment, for you can overcome – this hurdle will not defeat you. And when you reach that brass ring despite all else, it will shine all the brighter for it.

When presented with evidence that they’ve been doing the wrong thing, a shocking number of people keep doing the wrong thing, but harder. As if the problem weren’t direction, but intensity!

One of the biggest reasons for this is that they can’t bring themselves to believe that the wrong thing was the wrong thing, because they have some sort of preconceived, often societally-imposed bias towards it being the right thing.

I knew someone who got an undergraduate degree in a subject that neither tremendously interested her, nor was tremendously marketable. Surprise surprise, she did not find a fulfilling, lucrative job with it. So what did she do? Went back for her Master’s in that subject. When that also didn’t work, she was in the process of applying to grad school before she saw the light!

The wrong thing, but harder.

Here’s why this happens – there is no “wrong thing.” There’s just the right thing to get you goals that you don’t actually have. Getting an undergraduate or higher degree in that subject wasn’t “wrong” in some universal sense. But it didn’t lead her to the goal she actually had, which was a fulfilling and lucrative job doing something she actually liked.

This is what happens when we take “the right things” off the generic shelf of society. Those are tools for specific tasks, not miracle elixirs that will improve every single life they touch.

You can never really fail, you can just move in a direction you don’t really want to go. Whenever you think you’ve hit a failure, something that makes you upset or dissatisfied, reframe it and ask yourself: “This accomplished something. What was it? Is that something I want more of?” Maybe it is – maybe the “failure” is just that you didn’t get enough of what you wanted, which then is a problem of intensity. But if the result of your actions was to get you something you didn’t want at all, then doing more of that thing isn’t the answer.

I speak often about how one of my driving values is that I want others to be happy and successful. That’s still true, but I’m starting to think that I’ve left that value incomplete.

Happiness (however you define it) and success (in achieving your definition) are very good. But I want more. I want sustainable happiness and success. Not just “sustainable” meaning “long-lasting for myself,” but in the sense of being self-sustaining, repeating and continuing far after I’ve put it in motion, and far after I can no longer put direct effort into it.

I want to do more than help create happy and successful people. I want to create happy and successful heroes, those who can then do the same for others.

My children’s happiness, joy, fulfillment, success, and love mean the world to me. I would sacrifice anything for it, and I work very hard towards it. But if all I do is create an engine where I can input my own effort for the output of their happiness, I’ve failed. Because that engine will one day grind to a halt, ideally many, many years before the end of their lives.

They need to be not only self-sustaining, but they need the ability to do that for the people they care about, in turn.

Along the way, I would love to take those lessons, those skills, and apply them to anyone who’s interested. My children are the motivation and in many ways the proving ground for everything I do, but there are tons of positive externalities to my efforts to become a better parent. Many of which I hope will benefit you, my reader, my friend.

To that end, let me impart what I believe to be the foundational lesson of this endeavor: Creating happiness in others creates happiness in yourself. If you help others find true, deep fulfillment – even if your contribution is minor – you will increase such things in yourself. It’s almost impossible not to. So if I encourage you to make others happy, that will make you happy, and thus I will be happy because I helped make you so.

That’s the sustainable hero cycle. Let’s do that, just as much as we absolutely can.