You go out in your back yard and turn on the hose. After a while, you realize that your yard is soaked, but most of the actual water is either disappearing into the ground or running off. You’re certainly not getting anything you can swim in.

“I know,” you say. “I just need more water.” You turn the hose up, but strangely, the problem persists.

“Amount of water” wasn’t your problem. You lacked something to give it structure. By itself, water doesn’t have a shape. You need a container – like a pool – to do that. Water is essential to the process (a pool without water is just a hole), but it’s symbiotic.

That’s like ideas. If you have plenty of ideas but they haven’t become action, reward, or change – the thing you need isn’t more ideas.

It’s a structure. A format. Somewhere to put the ideas so they can take shape. The marginal return of each new idea rapidly approaches zero, just like water in a pool; to a certain point it’s great and even necessary, but after that point it’s just flowing over the sides and being wasted.

So if you find yourself having idea after idea but nothing actually happening, stop thinking. Start gathering resources instead, and then using them to obtain something to put it all in.

I am, obviously, a junkie for personal development and improvement.

That doesn’t mean I’m always great at it, but it certainly means I’m always working towards it. The dark side is that I’m bad at feeling satisfied. My father was much better at this than me – despite his lifelong love of learning and improvement, he is also good at looking at the lawn when it’s appropriate.

Over the past week or so, my daughter and I built an art studio for her in the basement. She’s tremendously talented and has been painting for some time. She’s taken it more than seriously enough to warrant additional parental investment, and a studio was a reasonable ask – especially since she wanted to help with the labor. So we cleaned, and built, and shopped, and unpacked, and built her a really awesome little corner art studio and workshop.

And as soon as it was finished, the very second, I looked around the basement and started mapping the next projects. Creating her art studio had necessitated this thing be moved here, which means I could do this, and so now I want to make this out of this section, and then after that I’ll be able to…

Over and over and over. This is my pattern.

So today, I’m trying to stop a little. I’m applying my drive for self-improvement to this flaw, and trying to improve it. Instead of immediately looking at the next thing, I am saying “this is cool.”

I’m declaring victory. That art studio is great, and my daughter couldn’t be happier with it. I’m not sure I’ll be able to convince her to leave it ever, in fact.

Of course I’ll do more projects. Of course I’m not finished. Maybe I never will be. But even if I can’t finish, I can pause. I can look upon my works, and be proud. I can let that sink in for a bit.

I will always have tomorrow for ambition, but I can reserve today for joy.

Whenever people are asked to do something, in any context, here is how they usually process the request (whether consciously or not):

Step 1: Ask why.

Step 2: Process that reason as good or bad, and based on that information…

Step 3: …decide if they can/will do it (possibly with the addition of an excuse if not).

That’s a terrible way to evaluate task requests. The better order is:

Step 1: Decide whether you can perform the task (and if so, whether or not you want to). The reasons for this are all internal – your current workload, your ability, etc. External reasons don’t matter yet, because you either can or you can’t.

Step 2: If you decide that you can, do it. If you decide that you can’t, inform the person making the request of this fact politely but directly (possibly offering alternative suggestions, if helpful). After all of that:

Step 3: Ask why.

Now, this is a general rule. There are exceptions, usually in the form of tasks that might have huge gaps between the most ethical and most unethical reasons to do so. (For instance, this advice is great for “spot me five bucks,” but might not work for “help me dig a hole in the woods at night.”)

Why is this advice good, though? First off, you don’t usually need to ask why in order to agree to a task and then do it, because people will offer you that information in the request. Most people aren’t deliberately cryptic – your friend doesn’t usually say “do me a favor and show up at my house Saturday.” They usually say that they’re moving some furniture and could you help? So if you ask for any additional information, you’re only going to get one of two things – pleading or lies.

So if you want honest information (and you should, for future reference!), you should ask why after the fact. People who you’ve just done something for are more likely to feel like they “owe you one,” and combined with the fact that they know they aren’t risking the favor itself by being honest with you, this creates the conditions most likely to result in you getting the truth.

A few months ago, a friend of mine called me and asked me if I could pick up his car from the mechanic that is only a few blocks from my house. I didn’t need to ask for any clarification or expanded information – I knew that no matter the circumstance I’d say yes, because a.) I could do this task easily and b.) this is a good friend of many years. After I dropped the car off, I asked him about the circumstances, just because I was curious; but no part of the story would have affected that favor – only potential future ones.

In another instance, a casual acquaintance asked me to lend him a very substantial amount of money – an amount that would have been inconvenient to even get together (i.e. more than was just sitting in my checking account) and would have represented significant hardship for me had I not gotten it back promptly. So I said no. He seemed shocked because I hadn’t asked him why he needed it. But I had no reason to ask – my answer of “no” was based on my conditions, not his. Any additional information he had to give me would have been pleading or lies, so I didn’t need to waste either of our time further by indulging. His need could have been very genuine, but that wouldn’t change my ability to meet his request.

It all comes down to this: you are the captain of your life. You don’t need to surrender decision-making authority to a constant stream of carefully-tailored information from others. You can – and should – just decide for yourself what you can and want to do.

Sometimes when you first start making progress on a task or a problem, you reach an early point where the problem seems much much worse than before you made any progress at all.

You look out at your back yard, overgrown with weeds. You decide to get it under control. After an hour or two of pulling, cutting, and hacking, you’ve cleared a section of your yard – and the remaining task seems more insurmountable than the whole thing did when you began.

That’s because there wasn’t just a task in front of you. There was also a wall of delusion, where you imagined the task to be much simpler than it actually was.

We often, ironically, use this delusion to justify not doing the task. We say “oh, because it will be so easy whenever I decide to do it, it’s not a big deal that I haven’t done it yet.” We’re lying to ourselves.

Then, when we finally engage, we realize the lie. The wall crumbles, and we are faced with the reality that this task is actually pretty hard, and will take more juice than anticipated.

That’s okay. The wall has to come down at some point, and the regret, shame, and demotivation it was holding back will wash over you. Many people are washed away by this flood, and that’s why you’ll see plenty of abandoned New Year’s Resolutions and half-painted garages. But you won’t. Because when that happens, you’ll remember that the wall was there, and that what you’re feeling now is only the discomfort that comes from a better understanding of reality. You’ll realize that this is just the last hurdle before you align your effort with the task and complete it in its own time.

And you won’t leave anything half-finished again.

I often see people talking about experiencing fear as if it represented something externally wrong with the world. As if fear, by itself, meant something was amiss.

Fear is a response to things that we don’t feel prepared for. There are only two ways to reduce fear in your life, and zero ways to eliminate it completely. Of the two ways to reduce fear, only one is healthy.

Method One – the unhealthy way to avoid fear is to reduce new events in your life to the point that you never encounter something you’re unprepared for, because you never encounter anything new. This is called a cage. You can’t even eliminate fear in a cage, because your agency is removed, and at some point the people who control the cage will change something. Ask yourself if people in prison live without fear.

Method Two – the healthy way to avoid fear is to increase your own agency so that you are more prepared for a variety of situations.

“The world,” as a static entity, is never safe nor unsafe. It’s unsafe for me to try to walk a tight-rope wire forty feet above the ground with no net. It may be much more safe for someone else, if they’ve trained to do that and are prepared for the challenge.

No one is going to save you. No one can make the world more “safe,” because that’s nonsense. People can change the world or aspects thereof, but that only shifts around relative positions (and often in favor of the so-called savior). The only way to increase your own safety, to reduce your own fear, is to prepare from within.

People often say they want a customized, personalized solution to their problem. They say that because it sounds good, but the reality is that most people want a one-size-fits-all solution.

That’s because a universal solution comes with no blame, guilt, or work. If it works for everyone, then everyone has the problem – my individual effort (or lack thereof) wasn’t the cause. And if it works for everyone, then I won’t have to work especially hard (or at all) for my problem to be solved.

Those kinds of solutions are scams. Solving your unique problems will always require unique effort. Anything else is a con.

“A Bad Thing Might Happen!”

You’re sitting at a gambling table, and the stakes are high. If you win, you win big – but if you lose, you’ll lose your house, your car, all your savings, everything. The Fear Voice says “don’t do it, something bad will happen!”

Notice what the fear voice doesn’t ask. It doesn’t ask the odds. Change it up so that you have a 1 in 1,000 chance of losing and a 999 out of 1,000 chance of winning. The voice stays the same. It imagines the bad thing; it doesn’t calculate the odds.

But it’s even deeper. The fear voice gets so deep that it doesn’t even know what the bad thing is, it just assumes there could be one.

That same game could have a 999 out of 1,000 chance of winning and the other 1 in 1,000 you just don’t get anything – in other words, it’s win or neutral, with no chance of actually losing anything. The fear voice still doesn’t want you to play. It might get drowned out at that point – but it might not.

Fear is something that wants to keep you safe. That’s its only goal. It doesn’t care about what you gain; fear can’t see those things. Fear is binary – you’re alive or you’re not. If you’re alive, fear is doing a good job. Which means fear doesn’t have your best interests at heart, even though it believes it does and tries to convince you of it, too.

Fear doesn’t calculate odds. It can’t. Fear doesn’t evaluate risk versus reward. It just imagines the risk, as big as can be, and tells you to run the other way.

There are moments when you need that fear; these are the moments when fear accurately describes reality. If you ever find yourself alone in the northern Canadian wilderness at night, you go ahead and let fear drive for a bit while you find shelter and avoid bears. But fear isn’t tuned for the job market or the stock market. Fear isn’t calibrated for online dating or recreational sports. In other words, fear doesn’t accurately describe reality as most of us experience it.

If there were an actual person following you around, verbalizing the things your fear voice tells you, you would quickly think that person was insane. So don’t give that voice any more control over your life just because it’s internal.

We are biased, emotional, irrational, borderline insane creatures.

It’s good to recognize it.

It’s good to work against it in yourself.

It’s not good to complain about it.

Look, you can gripe all day long about how other people are all of those things, wishing all day long that your fellow humans were all perfect calculating machines (and along the way, not-so-subtly implying that it’s only other people who are like that, not you, nuh uh), but the reality is that you’re not going to un-program a few hundred thousand years of evolution and biological impulses.

But you can study those things, learn their patterns and trajectories, and then move out of the way.

You can complain about the rain while standing in it getting soaked, too. Or you can have enough sense to read up on the common signs that rain’s a’comin’, and go inside when it happens. If you get really savvy, you can even learn how to put out a few buckets to collect rainwater. Now we’re talking.

People have feelings and they act on them, news at 11. Control your own as best as you can, and then learn the patterns of everyone else’s. That’ll do a lot more for you than complaining.

Would you give me a penny if I asked you? If the answer was “yes,” then would you give me all of your money?

Seems like an odd jump, but this is just the heap problem in reverse. If you would say “yes” to giving me a penny, then in theory you’d say “yes” again and I can just keep asking until you’ve given me all of your money.

Of course, this is absurd. But it’s kind of important to identify the mechanism that makes it absurd, because that mechanism teaches us a lot about other, more realistic interactions.

First, in order to say “yes” to giving me a penny, a few things have to be true. The transaction cost has to be so minimal as to be almost non-existent. For most people, that would mean that you had to have a penny already on you, maybe even already in your hand, and the person asking has to be pretty much directly in front of you. Even if you’d say “yes” in that circumstance, it doesn’t mean you’d agree to giving someone a penny via Venmo, or that you’d agree to go to a local bank and make change for one. In fact, if you would theoretically agree to give someone a dollar and they ask for a penny, you’re more likely to just give them the dollar than to find a place to extract a penny from it.

That’s actually a trick that some panhandlers use: ask for a small-but-inconvenient amount, like 3 dollars, for “bus fare” or something. People are more likely to have fives, tens or twenties than exactly three ones, but by asking for less they seem more reasonable while still likely getting a higher amount.

Which brings up the next point: every time you ask someone for something, you expend social capital just for the ask, regardless of whether they agree. The larger the ask, the more social capital you expend. If I ask you for a thousand dollars, I radically diminish my social value in your eyes, even if you don’t give it to me. On the other hand, if I ask you to “spot me a dollar,” that’s barely any capital at all. Asking for a penny seems like such an inconsequential ask that for most people the curiosity alone would outweigh the miniscule social capital loss. (And of course, it depends on how much social capital you have with that person to begin with – strangers on the street have very little beyond the baseline that you give all humans, which of course varies from person to person.)

But as soon as you ask for a second penny, I see the grift. Now the social capital loss is the same as it would be if you ask for whatever number I eventually expect you to build up to. That’s why being willing to give me a penny doesn’t automatically mean you’ll give me all of your money. The subsequent asks change the equation.

This translates to how we interact with others in a lot of circumstances. Some people will (intentionally or not) take advantage of others to great degree, but hide it behind never asking for anything big. They’ll hit you up for $10, but they’ll do it 15 times a month. And when you refuse, they can paint you as the unreasonable one: “come on man, it’s only ten bucks!” This is especially effective if you’ve already agreed to the ask in the past, because they’re penny-ing you. You agreed once, so it’s unreasonable for you to refuse now. And if you don’t realize all of this, that trick can be really convincing.

My little personal filter for this: whenever anyone asks me a favor, I quickly ask myself: “would I do a favor ten times as large for this person?” I’m mentally multiplying the social capital cost of their ask times ten before agreeing. If I would do a favor ten times as large, I’ll do the small one.

Of course, this implies that doing the favor has no value to me – but in most cases, doing favors benefits me tremendously. First off, I’m good at getting value one way or another. Secondly, I know the power of social capital, and so I’m always happy to increase my own.

But don’t let yourself be taken advantage of. Giving to the world is wonderful – but pouring juice down the drain isn’t. Know the difference.