Today I heard a great mental model for what to do when facing an unexpected problem, emergency, or disaster. The acronym for it is “VIP,” which I like because it also reminds you that hey, you’re still a very important person even if you’re in some trouble!

Step 1: Vent. Blow off the steam. Clear your emotional cache so you can think clearly. Voice what happened to you out loud, even if only to yourself. Just sweep the table.

Step 2: Improve. How can you improve the current situation? Don’t worry about getting mad or sad or anything else. You voiced your emotions in step 1, but now you need to triage. What can you do right now that will actually stop the bleeding?

Step 3: Prevent. Okay, the immediate emergency is handled. Now, don’t just walk away! What can you do to prevent this from happening again in the future? Was there a critical error you can document so as not to repeat? Was there a structural weakness you can fix?

I love this. Any model that makes emergencies less dramatic is a welcome addition. And hey – you’re important enough to deserve it!

Things must come and go as they will. All the tightest grip in the world will not keep a moment of happiness that is ended, but it can crush the life from the memory. Better to use all your strength to live, than to keep living.

Humans invent things. Sometimes we invent terms for things, or ways to measure things. But those are different from Things In Themselves.

For instance, humans invented weeks, but we merely named days. There is such a thing as a “day,” independent of humans. The Earth will spin its spin, half in shadow and half in light, whether we observe it or not. But a “week” is merely an arbitray grouping of repetitions of that process that we’ve named after old gods to help us organize when brunch with Margaret is.

We didn’t invent whales, though we invented the concept of calling them “whales,” and categorizing them as mammals, etc. There would be whales without us, but that would not be their name.

If you are a leader, part of your job is inspiring other people to be leaders as well. You can measure the success of a leader by how many people they’ve helped move into leadership themselves – or how few.

Some leaders work themselves half to death in order to spare their teams the slightest bit of discomfort. They stress until midnight, burning the candle at both ends. They think they’re helping their people by shielding them, but the reality is that their growth is hindered. So is yours, if you do this. If your team looks at you and thinks that your job (or life!) is miserable, then none of them will want the mantle of leadership, and you’ll be stuck where you are forever.

This means yes, you should brag a little. You should enjoy the perks a little. You shouldn’t take advantage and you shouldn’t make it all about status or personal benefits, but use your parking space! Delegate and take a vacation! Stand up and take a bow when it’s appropriate!

You want your people to look at you and say, “That will be me someday.” You want to do good work, help your people, and be an inspiration. If you’re overworked and miserable, then you aren’t one.

When you’re in the lead, you should expect every trick in the book to be thrown at you. Your competition can and will bring it all to the table.

In some cases, it’s quite fair. Many games and competitions have rules that specifically handicap the leader(s) as a way of keeping the contest competitive and engaging. Sometimes, it’s not fair at all – but you should expect it either way.

Part of the price of being in first place is that whatever game you’re playing becomes harder, simply by virtue of the competition looking for every possible advantage against an opponent who might beat them otherwise.

Forget about whether it’s fair or not. Just be ready for it.

Everything you interact with, whether it’s a person, a concept, a location, anything – changes you. And, if things are working correctly, you change that thing as well. You change a group by joining it, and it changes you. You change a workplace by working there – and it changes you.

This is how people grow and evolve, and it’s a good thing.

But.

Be careful when the changes are flowing too unevenly. In some cases, you should expect (and want!) to be changed more than the reverse. If you’re reading a book, you’re probably changing it very little but you might want to be changed quite a bit by what you learn. If you’re teaching a young person how to do something, you might expect to be influencing more change in them than the reverse.

But be cognizant of that. Know that the things you absorb change you, they don’t just get stored. And the things you teach change the other entity. Don’t do any of it without consideration.

It’s easy enough to say “handle one thing at a time” when you feel overwhelmed. But life is funny. Sometimes, the things you need to handle don’t arrive in such a way that affords you that luxury.

On a long enough timeline, it’s inevitable that sometimes four time-sensitive things are going to get hurled you way at once, and you simply won’t be able to order them. You either handle them all at once, or you don’t handle at least some of them at all.

When that happens, I’m reminded of some great advice I once heard: If you find yourself juggling too many balls, some are going to fall. Your job isn’t to find a way to break yourself to catch them all – that’s impossible, and you’ll just end up dropping all of them. Instead, you need to decide which of the balls are made of rubber, and which are made of glass.

Some of those balls will break if you drop them. Not only will you lose that ball, but you’ll have glass to clean up, too. But some of those balls are made of rubber! If you drop them, they’ll bounce. They’ll roll away, maybe even under the couch. But they won’t break, and you can put them back up in the air tomorrow.

Catch the glass ones. Keep juggling.

I work best when my long-term plans are carefully set, and then run on auto-pilot. Most likely, so do you.

Study after study has shown that constantly second-guessing yourself loses you momentum. If you want a successful long-term financial investment, the best strategy is to sink money into the S&P 500 and forget about it, not try to constantly cherry-pick stocks day by day. In the long run, nobody successfully out-performs a consistent set of rules.

And even if you could, by a few percentage points – at what cost? If you spend an hour day-trading every day and beat the market by 2%, you’ve lost an incredible amount of resources. That hour was more valuable if you did anything else with it!

Any time you want something to impact your whole life, you have to just create a pattern and then let it run. Choose your diet, your financial plan, your activity level, and your family accordingly.

Of all the reasons I’ve ever heard not to put something off, my favorite is this: If you feel good enough to do the thing now, seize that opportunity. You might not have it later.

We are subject to many forces we can’t control. Our ability to predict the future generally leans only on the ones we can. You look at your calendar and see that you have time tomorrow to complete that project, so you decide to do it then instead of now. But your calendar can’t tell you if you’ll feel sick, or if your car will break down, or if any of a hundred other little emergencies will daunt you.

If you have the health of body and mind to do the thing now – especially if it’s a thing you want to do! – then seize that opportunity. You never know what misfortunes you may grapple with tomorrow.