Gradual change drags inertia with it. A radical change can achieve escape velocity.

Your life does not separate easily into discrete boxes, independent of one another. Some people are better than others at building those barriers, but no one can create truly impermeable ones. As your income rises, so do your expenses. As your accomplishments stack up, so does your stress. And so on.

This isn’t a good thing, but it often happens. If you got a steady 10% increase in your income every year for ten years, then at the end of ten years you’d be in relatively the same position of wealth as you were to begin with, just maybe (maybe!) with nicer stuff. It takes more discipline than most people realize, and certainly more than most people have, to increase their income year over year but maintain the same level of frugality.

But if your income suddenly doubled in a single year? Well, there are certainly plenty of people who go bananas in that circumstance and even end up worse off. But for many people the system shock can result in a careful examination of your circumstances. You can say, “okay, I’m making 100% more money, but I could be really happy with only a 20% increase in my living standard and be saving & investing a LOT towards my future.” That’s the smart play.

That’s the high-risk, high-reward scenario. The big promotion that can come with plenty of extra stress, in and out of work. The move to a new city that can have lots of rewards but plenty of distractions. The radical shift.

It’s not for everyone. But some people are born to greatness and others have greatness thrust upon them, so it’s good to give some thought about what you’d do if that shift came to your door. And if you do that, and like what you’re envisioning, then maybe you don’t wait for it to knock after all. You go find it.

Yesterday I was doing a variety of household chores, accompanied (as they often are) by a random shuffle of my music. A particularly great song came on – so great, in fact, that I ended up listening to it on repeat for about four passes, letting it wash over me.

The song is “Hey Mama” by Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, and the theme of the song is a mother telling her son that despite his struggles and pains in life, he hasn’t earned the right to quit yet. He hasn’t yet worked hard enough to proclaim with certainty that life “ain’t gonna get any better.”

The song resonated with me – for one, it’s similar to advice my own father gave me. Advice which changed my life, honestly.

Here’s the truth: most people aren’t afraid of hard work. But most people want their perception of their rewards in life to roughly equal their perception of the pain and struggle it took to get it. Most people just want the scales to balance.

They won’t always balance. If no one’s ever told you that, I’m sorry to break the news – genuinely, not sarcastically. It sucks to tell someone that. It sucks as a parent to tell my kids that there are going to be things that just don’t work, things that fail, goals you don’t realize, pain that never pays you back in reward.

But I can tell you this, the silver lining. The scales don’t always balance. But as long as you’ve got a drop of sweat left in you, then you can’t know for sure that they haven’t. If there’s a prize at the top of a thousand stairs, then things can look pretty damned bleak when you’re on stair number 999. But maybe one more drop of sweat will do it.

No matter how badly the odds were stacked against you, no matter how much you had to go through, you haven’t earned the right to complain if you didn’t give everything you have to it. You ain’t worked hard enough.

The world gets better only through effort. Your personal world, the larger one around you, the one in the future for your children’s children’s children. When you get to the very end, the last breath, when you’ve given it your absolute all – on that day, if you want to complain that it won’t get any better, people will listen.

Except they won’t have to. Because if you do that, the world will be better. I promise.

Don’t let it get to you.

Nothing makes you more agitated than already being agitated. Stress begets more stress. That’s why temporary solutions are often a good idea.

Sure, zoning out with some loud music and a drive doesn’t solve any of my problems. But if it resets the stress levels, then I can solve them.

Do the things that make you feel cool. Get in the zone, enjoy it for a bit, then ride it into battle against your problems.

Are you stressed right now? Then shut it all off for an hour. An hour won’t kill you. Be cool.

Anger is like a grenade that you think is a sniper rifle.

When something makes you angry, you virtually never direct exactly the right amount of energy at the subject of your rage nor to various bystanders. In fact, you’re probably not even picking the right primary target. You want to think your anger will accomplish something, like it’s a targeted laser or a precise scalpel. In reality, it’s a grenade that you pull the pin from and then drop at your own feet.

The biggest victim of anger is almost always you. Anger is something that happens to you, as much as you want to believe it’s a tool that gives you energy and strength. You’re not The Incredible Hulk. You don’t get bigger and stronger when you get angry; rage does not become a shield that protects you from future harm.

Anger and pain are, in fact, very similar. Both are signals that your body sends to your brain in order to inform you that something bad is happening to you. Pain is a signal that tells you “Hey dummy, move your hand away from the stove.” Pain is simple to interpret in most cases. Anger does the same thing if we listen to it. Anger is really a circumstantial version of pain – in the same way that pain tells you to take your hand off the stove, anger tells you to change your oil more frequently. It does that by making you mad when your car breaks down.

Unfortunately, we often miss that message. Our car breaks down, and instead of “moving our hand from the stove,” we pound on the stove harder – and kick the refrigerator, too. We don’t listen to the message.

That’s misplacing your anger – and it’s about as effective as trying to reduce the pain of your burning hand by punching someone else in the face. You don’t reduce your anger by throwing it at other people. You reduce it by listening to it. Let it talk to you, track its path to your door. Then take your hand off the stove, dummy.

The world is unequal in nearly every regard.

From the moment you’re born (in fact, a good deal beforehand), there are already weights on the scales. You don’t come into this world with anything close to a blank slate.

On a micro level, that persists. You will never be exact as “X” as your neighbor – exactly as wealthy, exactly as healthy, exactly as wise. Exactly as happy.

But you will also never be exactly as “X” as you were today, and will be tomorrow. Time exists. We are not static, we are lines flowing through the years.

Some people want to tear and shred when they witness some unequal measure of anything. Your car is nicer than mine, so I’ll flatten the tires and smash the windshield. You’re in better shape than me, so I’ll cut your hamstring. You’re happier than me, so I’ll make you miserable.

Don’t fall into that trap. Every second you spend destroying is a second you could have spent creating. Better to help the future version of you than hurt the future version of someone else.

You can’t build a house out of the ashes of someone else’s.

There’s a great mental heuristic I like to use whenever I’m deciding if I want to purchase something. I visualize a table with both the thing I want to buy on it, and an amount of cash equal to the purchase price sitting next to it. I then decide which I would take, if I could only take one.

That gives me my answer. Shiny new things are shiny and new, but money is pretty dang versatile, despite not being terribly interesting in comparison to some new trinket. So it’s worthwhile to give them both an equal shake.

This trick also works if I’m deciding whether or not to keep something. I can visualize the object I already have next to either a.) the cash I could get for it, or b.) the empty space I’d free up if I got rid of it. That helps me decide which things are worth keeping. (For me, very few things get kept in this instance – I value versatility in my objects, and few things are as versatile as money and empty space.)

Taking those two concepts together made me realize that there’s an additional question I should very often be asking myself, but seldom do.

If I’m looking at, for example, a new tool and I decide not to buy it because it doesn’t pass the heuristic above, I should then immediately ask myself: “should I sell any of the tools I already have?” I mean, if the tool I don’t have doesn’t pass the “better than money” test, then maybe the tool I do have wouldn’t pass, either. If I don’t allow myself to be fooled by status quo bias, then there’s no difference between two objects just because I own one of them and don’t own the other.

The same applies to the reverse – if I’m deciding whether to sell something or not and I decide to keep it, the next question really should be: “should I buy more?” After all, if an object is worth more to me than its cash equivalent, that might still be true for the next one.

Of course, diminishing marginal returns keep this from being a universal rule. The second identical hammer is a lot less valuable to me than the first. The third is virtually worthless. Not everything maintains the same per-unit value if I get more than one.

But that means that for any given category of item, there’s an optimal level – the number where the one I have is worth more than its volume in space or amount in cash, but the next one wouldn’t be. I don’t always know if I’m at the correct level, and certainly I err on the side of less. But asking the question is a good idea.

This goes well beyond personal effects. It’s probably pretty easy to figure out if I own the right number of spatulas. (Even if somehow that number were more than “one,” which it certainly isn’t, the ease at which money can be converted into spatulas means I can probably hold off.) But what about investments? Those are trickier. I think the question helps.

Certainly it doesn’t hurt to ask, and asking unusual questions can help refine your thinking in other ways. So the next time you decide not to buy something, ask yourself if you should sell something similar. And if you decide not to sell something, ask yourself if you should buy more of it. You never know what strange insights these kinds of questions can bring.

If you see a car stalled on the side of the road, you’re likely to drive past it. If you see someone pushing their car down the street, you’re more likely to stop and help.

This phenomenon translates in all sorts of scenarios, and works for a few reasons. First – why do you drive by when you see a car stalled on the side of the road? It’s not because you’re a bad person or callously indifferent to the suffering of others. No, you drive by because there’s probably not a lot you can do, and it’s probably not an emergency. Cars stall and break down all the time, and in most cases you call a tow truck or a friend or whatever and you solve it. Unless you can do something special that the driver can’t, there’s seldom anything meaningful you can contribute.

Now, let’s look at the other example – someone pushing their car.

Why do you stop? Well for one, if someone is pushing their car (as opposed to sitting around waiting for a tow truck or a ride), then the need seems more immediate. You don’t push a car unless you have to. Maybe this person genuinely can’t afford a tow or a taxi. Maybe they don’t have a cell phone so they can call someone. This is someone with a more genuine, immediate need, and the good in us demands we help.

But there’s another reason. We stop and help because there’s an obvious way we can do so. I don’t have to be a mechanic or own a truck. Almost anyone can help push.

And there’s even one more big reason, maybe the biggest – the person pushing their car isn’t just sitting around waiting to be rescued. They’re doing what they can.

What’s the lesson? People are more likely to help not just when it seems like a more severe situation, but also when it’s obvious that they even can help, and when the person they’re helping looks like they’re putting in their own best effort. In any situation, you can do those things as well.

If you have a difficult situation and you want help, making it easy to figure out how to help you and showing that you’re doing your best already are both excellent ways to foster good will among the good Samaritans. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking for help when you need it. But don’t ask and then sit around – get out and push.

Take consolation prizes when you can. Don’t be so bitter about missing first place that you also miss third.

You really wanted to get to the gym today. Wanted to spend at least an hour there. But call after call, emergency after emergency. You didn’t make it. The strongest thing in the world now – in some ways stronger than making it to the gym in the first place – is dropping to the floor in your kitchen and doing ten push-ups.

Better than nothing.

People aim high and then quit. Don’t do that – don’t use missing that last 1% as an excuse to not put in the 99% tomorrow, or even five minutes later. You planned to dump your whole bonus into your investment account, but most of it went to an emergency medical bill? Put the last scraps in anyway.

Better than nothing.

Don’t end on a goose egg (sales slang for “zero,” if you didn’t know that one). Get on the board, somehow. Even if it doesn’t affect today’s outcome, it affects tomorrow’s hope. You still lose the game whether the final score is 35-0 or 35-1, but that one point can be the bottom rung of the ladder you need to climb up tomorrow.

Better than nothing.

Tesla isn’t a car company. They’re a technology company.

McDonald’s isn’t in the restaurant business, they’re in the real estate business.

When I was 19, I worked for a little while as a salesman for a car company. Though we were a large chain franchise, we were in the secondary market – which means yes, I was the classic “used car salesman.” (Though as a 19-year-old kid, I was hardly the classic stereotype, I’m happy to say.)

Our particular company specialized in buyers with terrible credit, repossessions, bankruptcies, etc. I learned some fascinating things about the business while I was there. One of the ones that stuck out to me was my manager, Steve, telling me what kind of business we were really in.

“We don’t sell cars. We’re a credit repair company. Cars are just the mechanism.” See, the appeal of our particular brand was that we did a lot more reporting to credit agencies than the minimum required by law, so if you were on time with your payments you could substantially improve your credit by completing a car loan with us. Many of my customers didn’t even need a car – they either already had one or they lived in a part of the city where it wasn’t necessary, etc. Instead, they needed credit, and credit can be hard to build when you don’t have any. If your credit is so bad that no one will lend to you, it’s tricky to prove yourself credit-worthy again. So many people came to us and bought the cheapest car imaginable but financed it so they could boost their score back up.

The reason I learned this lesson is because in the early days of my employment there, I sucked. Steve explained to me that I sucked because I was trying to sell cars, and I was doing a good job of it – but people weren’t there to buy cars. I was talking up the features of the cars, trying to get people to take test drives, etc. When I became successful was when I learned to take people right to the desk to talk finance terms. Half my customers picked out a car after the paperwork was signed, because they hadn’t really come in to buy a vehicle. They’d come in to trade cash for credit.

That’s the lesson – understand what your audience really walked in looking for. Whether you’re selling, leading, flirting, speaking, anything – the other person wants something, and if you don’t have a good handle on what it is, you can’t help them.

If you’re like most people, you probably have any number of things that cause you to have Bad Feelings.

Events you don’t like. Activities you’d rather not perform. States of being you don’t want to exist in.

For each of these things, there is an opposite. In a neutral state, away from the poison, you could probably think about what the antidote is. And prepare for it.

A clean example – maybe you hate being thirsty. It gives you headaches and makes you irritable. The antidote? A convenient-to-carry water bottle, or strategically-placed water near your workspace, etc.

Maybe it really annoys you every time you get in your car and start driving, only to realize you forgot your sunglasses. Your antidote? A spare pair to keep exclusively in the glove compartment.

Your poisons aren’t infinite. Most are repetitive. Take the time to find their antidotes and place them strategically. Free your mind from those poisonous distractions.