By default, I think most people assume that they have less power than they do, and that other people have more power than they do.

We think that changing our own fates is very difficult, but we sort of unconsciously imagine that other people have the ability to influence our circumstances almost effortlessly. Hence the common refrain that so many things are someone else’s fault!

The vicious trap here is that often in the belief that others hold power over us, we give it to them. Let’s say you and a co-worker both go for the same promotion, and the co-worker is the one that gets it. In reality, this is one tiny factor in the vast timeline of your life. Your career will continue on its trajectory – there will be promotions you get and promotions you don’t, and this was just one of the latter. You haven’t lost your home, your livelihood, your skills, your ability to work. But if you start spinning your wheels thinking about how badly you’ve been wronged by this co-worker, and how everything is their fault, and how if only they’d never existed your life would be fantastic – then you’re giving them power.

That co-worker probably isn’t thinking about you at all. They’re expending zero effort on you. And yet here you are, stressed and upset and distracted and far below your best self! All because you invested power into the specter of them in your mind.

Don’t do that. Don’t give away your power – recognize it for what it is. Your brain is incredibly strong when fighting on home turf; i.e. thinking about your own life. When you focus too much on the lives of others, you give that power away.

Sometimes, if you show up enough, you get what you want. You win, you find your prize, you get happy.

If you don’t show up to life, you never get it.

Those are your choices – it’s a mix between chance of success or certain failure.

Sometimes, maybe, if – or never.

If you want certainty, quit. That’s the only way to get it.

I absolutely love diminishing marginal returns.

Life wouldn’t be possible without them. If things didn’t just gradually decrease in effectiveness without a reset period, opportunity cost would cripple you.

I think about working out. After a certain point, if you do another rep you’re just hurting yourself, you’re not building muscle. You then have to give your body time to rest and repair before you can come back. Thank goodness! The universe gives you built-in breaks.

If you grind without limit, you’re not just damaging other aspects of your life, sacrificing them to the grind. You’re actually damaging the grind.

Be ambitious. Be goal-oriented. Be driven. These are excellent things.

But for the love of all that is holy, be efficient. And that means naps, people. Food. Strolls in the sunshine. Lunches on the beach. Reading things because you want to.

Don’t feel guilty! The rules of the world are tipped in your favor, here. Sometimes, in order to be the best you can be, you need to get the rest you deserve.

It flew by me. Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the first post on The Opportunity Machine.

I thought I’d have run out of things to say by now. But it turns out that if you keep living, you keep finding new things to think about.

I’ve done an awful lot of playing and experimenting here. I’ve trialed weekly or monthly features, some of which stuck around for a while, others only happened once, and some are still going. I’ve played around with how I’ve presented my ideas as much as with what ideas I’ve presented.

I’ve had neat milestones, too. The first “fan” I had. The first time I learned that someone had shared one of my posts with her peers of her own volition. The first time (recently!) that someone wrote about this blog. I’ve enjoyed all that very much.

Here’s the huge value-add for me though: since I’ve been writing a daily blog now for two years, that means I’ve written over seven hundred entries. Gun to my head I probably couldn’t name more than 30 from memory. That means that this blog has magnified the power of my memory by more than twentyfold. Thoughts I’ve had that would otherwise have vanished into thin air are now preserved in some way, to be built upon and reviewed and perhaps even disagreed with by a future version of me. But they mean something in a way that a thought you don’t remember doesn’t.

Both of my grandfathers lived incredibly interesting lives, but both died many years ago – my maternal grandfather when I was only 7, and my paternal grandfather before I was even born. They have great stories, but I’ve only ever gotten to hear them second-hand. Snippets and collections of lives that I would have loved to experience more.

I have three children, and I also have a pretty interesting life. It’s not wild to presume that one day I may have grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, and so on – and that they may one day want to know more about how I thought, how I lived, what was important in my life. Perhaps to view their own parents through eyes that saw them as children, or to trace back the origins of whatever values I ultimately pass down to them.

Maybe it will just be me, many years hence, who wants to look back through the eyes of a younger man in a different world and look at the same point in time from both directions.

This blog is part self-help advice column, part chronicle of strange adventures, part campfire stories and part amateur psychology course. It’s more, too – much more.

What it isn’t though – is ending.

See you tomorrow.

Don’t harbor an exorbitant degree of loyalty to losing strategies. Certainly don’t wind your identity up in them.

You do things, and some of those things work. Some don’t. But who you are doesn’t have to be defined by any particular act or even set of acts. If you switch to a meatless diet for health reasons, you don’t have to suddenly “be” a Vegetarian(tm), especially if later it turns out that the diet isn’t working for you.

Not every challenge is zero-sum, of course. Many aren’t; just because you didn’t succeed at something doesn’t necessarily mean that someone else did, nor at your expense. But maybe a strategy won where yours didn’t, and it’s foolish not to look at that strategy and see what you can take from it.

The biggest thing that keeps people from doing that is identity. They wrap their egos up in a course of action and make it part of who they are, instead of saying “this didn’t work, so I don’t need it.”

Sometimes the circumstances of a choice have near-zero consequences, so you don’t need to care. You don’t have to switch which football team is your favorite just because your favorite team hasn’t won in a while, because it doesn’t matter. But if you’re actually betting, and not just cheering? Cheer for whoever you want, wear whatever colors you want… but bet like the money in your wallet is worth more than which color shirt you’re wearing.

I was reading recently that when it comes to improving your life (or some aspect of it), people mostly default to looking for additive changes, ignoring subtractive ones. The feel like their life is missing something, so they look to add to it: Start doing yoga, get that fancy gadget, take that medicine, go on that vacation, find that special someone, apply for that promotion, and so on.

Only a very small group of people will default to looking instead at subtractive solutions. Add it to the list of ways I’ve discovered that I diverge from the typical person in my civilization.

I always look first to figure out what you can get rid of to solve a problem. If I feel like my life (or an aspect thereof) isn’t what I want it to be, I look for stuff to exorcise. Like cutting words out of a lengthy essay or a tumor out of your stomach, removing things generally feels like improving things to me.

There’s this joke where people use the term “retail therapy” to mean “when I’m sad, I buy myself something to cheer myself up.” But if I want to cheer myself up, I throw stuff away. If I need to be less stressed, I really just need to do less stuff.

Some people look at five objects and a shelf that only fits four and think “I need a new shelf.” I look at that and say “which of these objects am I throwing away today?”

Try it. The next time something feels wrong, try solving it by taking something away instead of by adding something. If nothing else, it’ll be a change of pace for most people and maybe lead to more creative thinking. But for some, it may just be exactly the change you need.

There’s this prank that you can play on someone that involves a bowl of water and a broom. It also involves a ceiling. If you use a plastic bowl and a room without anything really valuable in it, it can be a pretty harmless prank, and videos of it have floated around the internet for a while.

The prank is this – you get a bowl full of water, and then you stand on something so you can reach the ceiling, and you put the bowl up against the ceiling. You make sure there’s a broom nearby. Then you call in the intended victim and just sort of casually say “Hey, can you help me with something,” and when they come in, you ask them to grab the broom and use the handle to press the bowl into the ceiling. You’ve got to have that perfect tone in your voice so that the person doesn’t question why they’re asked to do this absurd thing.

Then, when they’re essentially using the broom to hold the bowl against the ceiling, you let go and climb down. Then you just leave.

Because now the person is holding a bowl of water above their own head against the ceiling, and there’s no good way to get it down without just letting go and it falls on you. I may not be explaining this super well, so just watch:

Why am I talking about dumb internet pranks?

Because sometimes you do this to yourself. You don’t mean to, but sometimes you just solve a problem in a way that is essentially holding it up against the ceiling with a broom. Once you realize it, it’s too late. You’d love to construct a more permanent solution, but you can’t. The only way to do that is to just let the water fall and start over.

So then the only thing to do is look around and decide how much damage the water’s going to do. Either that, or hold the broom forever.

I’ve written before about my love of my “primitive camping” hobby. I like to go in with just a backpack and hike for miles until I find a suitable site, tame it just enough to stay there overnight, and then leave it as I found it and hike home. I also love all sorts of other flavors of camping, from barely-counts-as-camping renting a cabin to pitching a tent at a campsite, but the backpack-only style is my favorite.

So this time, I brought along The Beansprout (age 9) on her first such trip.

She took to it like a fish to water.

She was my trailblazer, navigating with a compass, hiking miles with a ten-pound pack, cutting through thorns, scaling rocky cliffs, literally fording a river at one point! (Okay, more of a decent-sized stream, but adventurous nonetheless!)

Her inherent wilderness skills notwithstanding, she’s definitely still The Beansprout, which means that she also pretty quickly dug up an animal skull, had me affix it to the end of her walking stick, and then declared herself The Forest Witch, in command of all creatures of the woodlands and layer of curses upon the unworthy.

Never a dull moment with this kid, for sure.

But the greater lesson is this: I honestly wasn’t sure, prior to the trip, if she was old enough. For regular camping, sure – but a multi-mile hike into the woods? Heavy pack? No easy out? And then she blew away every expectation. People – kids and adults alike – rise to their challenges. If you don’t challenge, you never rise.

And if you never rise, you can never become The Forest Witch, and is that really the life you want?

If you get a full night’s sleep, only a small percentage of it is “REM sleep” and that’s supposed to be the truly restorative stuff. You might get like 90 minutes of REM sleep but for most people that’s all you need. Less than 2 hours of REM sleep would be enough to fully restore you.

But the rub is that most people can’t get 2 hours of REM sleep without a bunch of normal garbage sleep around it.

Lots and lots of people put lots and lots of time and effort into trying to improve that. Everyone from scientists to mattress companies try to find ways to get into REM sleep faster, extend it longer, require less sleep around it, etc.

I think that’s valuable work! Could you imagine if eventually we developed medicines, devices, or techniques that allowed you to just drop right into the “good” sleep, do it for 2 hours, and then wake fully rested? I’d pay a lot for it.

I was thinking about that in relation to creativity. When I put myself in a creative flow I can do pretty cool things. I might only do them for 30-60 minutes but get a lot out of it. But my best, most creative 30 minutes often happens in the middle of a 4-hour block.

When I first get warmed up I have to create “the zone.” And when I know I’m approaching another scheduled responsibility the fire tends to cool a little and I’m wrapping up, saving files, organizing things. But that sweet spot in the middle is where magic happens.

Shortening the time it takes for me to get into “REM Creativity mode” or extending how long it lasts in the face of looming responsibilities would be of great help to me. Because of how I currently work, my best work happens pretty exclusively in the wee hours, because that’s the only time when there aren’t any upcoming responsibilities for several hours (sleep? what’s that?).

So just like the scientists and mattress makers, here I am.