If you are a young, single person, here’s some advice to you: don’t hit on food service workers while they’re at work. Your server, your bartender, your barista – be polite, but don’t try to take it any further than that.

Let’s take a step back and look at the larger case here, and then we’ll come back to that specific advice as an example. In general, you want people to be honest with you. Your life is better if everyone gives it to you straight, trust me. But honesty is not just a matter of the character of other people – you also can create the conditions for both honesty and dishonesty in how you conduct your own affairs.

Let’s take an extreme example. Point a gun at someone and ask them if they like your haircut. You’re very likely to get enthusiastic approval, but how much could you trust it? The person was backed into a corner, given very little choice but to give you the answer you wanted. Even if they genuinely liked your haircut anyway, you put them in a position where the statement is meaningless.

Now, hopefully you abstain from pointing guns at people – and hopefully you don’t abstain from such behavior just because it benefits you to do so! People deserve respect and that’s reason enough not to “corner” them. But often we corner people without realizing it (it’s not always as obvious as a pointed pistol!) and thus we often build a Liar’s Hall around ourselves without even knowing it.

So let’s get back to the friendly barista at your local coffee shop. Here’s the thing – their job is customer service. They’re at their most nice to begin with, and some of it at least is probably artificial, so right off the bat you’re probably over-estimating how interested they might be. But beyond that, they’re also implicitly cornered – they can’t just leave, they can’t just ignore you, and at least some part of them has to worry that rejecting your advances will result in trouble for them professionally. That means if you hit on someone in that environment, you’re creating the conditions to be lied to. You should avoid this purely out of respect for the other person, but the side benefit to acting honorably is that you also excuse yourself from the Liar’s Hall.

People inadvertently enter the Liar’s Hall all the time, and smart people always look for the exits. Company and political leaders who exercise a lot of power are almost always trapped there, which is why it’s so important for them to find ways to get honesty regardless.

Always be aware of when you might find yourself in the Liar’s Hall. Whenever you ask for other people’s opinions, make sure you note any reasons they may have to feel like they must lie to you, and diffuse those reasons to the best of your ability.

Personally, I have to navigate this almost every day. People literally pay me for my advice. On the one hand, they’re paying me to give them feedback they couldn’t receive anywhere else, but on the other hand, they are paying me. I learned very early that I have to set the expectation with my clients that I’m going to be brutally honest with them and not sugar-coat things, even if they get information they don’t want to hear. I don’t want them to be in the Liar’s Hall, so I make sure right from the start that I set the groundwork for honesty.

If you frequently give or solicit opinions, you should do the same.

Tonight my father and I were reminiscing about old trips we’d taken in the days of my youth. He was telling story after story, starting each one with “Do you remember the time…”

I noticed an interesting phenomenon. My father’s memory of my childhood years is naturally more acute than my own recollection of it. I honestly didn’t remember a lot of the stories he told. But the pattern that emerged became clear – I remembered all the “good” stories and didn’t remember all the “bad” ones.

He told me about a family road trip where I apparently had an absolutely miserable time, and I didn’t recall it at all. But the story of the camping trip when I was eight and caught a snake all by myself I could see like it was yesterday. The times my father and I got in screaming matches – all forgotten. The times we looked at the stars by firelight and when we built my tree house together – vividly recalled.

So in retrospect, I think back very fondly on my early years, even though they had the same ups and downs as anyone’s. It’s possible that the natural way of things is like that, except I know lots of people that seem to only remember the bad stuff. Miserable or misspent youths, failings in their adolescence and early adulthood, even slights from last week. Those same people will callously dismiss a gentle reminder of a good event in yesteryear, as if it attacked their perception of their own misery.

The reality is, of course, that our lives are filled with good and bad. Taken in a true accounting, there is less distance between the most miserable life and the most joyous one than we care to admit. That leaves you today with a choice.

The past has brought you to this moment, but the ship only sails one way. It has no further power over you, so you can become the kind of person who dwells only in the darkness or you can draw strength and power and inspiration from your moments of light, however few they might in actuality be.

I know, in a general sense, that my father and I had rough years. I am very grateful that my memory of those times is faded and indistinct, but I can remember with great clarity the time we built a wooden race car together.

I absolutely hate hunches.

An enormous amount of your subconscious mind is your enemy. Bent on your destruction. Your impulses are generally horrid. Your instincts are bigoted, biased, lazy, hostile, egotistical, defensive, greedy and craven. The Mr. Hyde lurking within all of us, the personification of all of those traits, is an opponent to be constantly battled against.

So why would I ever trust sudden bursts of “insight” from that creature?

Here’s the problem. Human brains don’t have good self-diagnostic capacity. Gut can give me a sudden flash of epiphany that’s entirely based in superstition and that would lead me to ruin if acted upon, and I have no way of differentiating it from a brilliant insight gleaned in a moment of connection between multiple thoughts in my higher reasoning. They “feel” identical.

I rely on those higher insights. That’s the problem.

Usually, when people say “trust, but verify” they’re referring to outside sources. But I apply that to all of my own “bright ideas,” just in case they’re not so bright after all. But like I said, we’re not good at self-diagnostic – so how do I do it?

Here are a few of my methods:

1. Have a few people that you’ve generally vetted as being pretty smart, and make sure you’re open with them about your biases. This can be tougher than it seems. Often the very biases we’re trying to shake are biases that it’s pretty socially damning to have, so this person has to be trustworthy. And YOU have to have the courage to admit your flaws to them. But once you do this, you can say to that person, “Hey, this idea has been really persistently knocking at my brain, but I’m worried it might come from my high level of risk aversion regarding relationships. Can you tell me what you think?” That person can then adjust their opinion of the idea in a vacuum based on what they already know about your particular tendencies to one side or the other of any particular line and help you correct for it.
2. Time Delay. One method I’ve discovered that seems to be pretty good at sifting the higher insights from the base impulses is time. No matter the level of conviction with which they first hit my brain, the vile impulses fade much more quickly than the truly good ideas. If I have what seems like a “good idea” but actually is coming from that place of fear or rage or anything else, it won’t last long. If the idea is still nagging at me more than a week later, it has a good chance of being grounded in something beneficial to me. As a result, I put all “sparks” away from the tinder. I don’t act on them. If they’re still burning from internal fuel a week later, I’ll give them more serious consideration.
3. Measure against principles. Mr. Hyde didn’t have any rules to obey. The worst of the damage he inflicted might have been mitigated if there were some internal laws that he couldn’t break. We have some version of this imparted by our society – we have the impulse to steal something or hurt someone to get what we want, but we deny that impulse because of a prior principle we’ve considered. But we fall short – the number of vile ideas we will have far exceeded what most people have built principled walls against in advance.

(There’s a great bit by the hilarious comedian Burt Kreischer where he’s telling the story of how he got tempted into robbing a train. He suddenly goes on a tangent about how he’d never cheat on his wife because one day he was having a beautiful morning with his family, and he realized how good it all was, so he had a conversation with himself about how important it was to never ever mess that up, and what he would do if he were ever tempted by another woman, etc. He then returns to the main story by saying “Here’s the problem, I never had a conversation with myself about robbing a train.”)

Hunches are easy little monsters clawing up your back and whispering what you want to hear into your ear. Make sure you have a rigorous machine built into your life that allows you to test all of your impulses. Some will come from places of higher insight and be gold – but just like prospectors looking for the real thing in the riverbeds of the American West, there’s a lot of dirt to sift through.

There’s a certain kind of learning mode that I think of as not only really effective, but super fun. When it comes to pure knowledge absorption, I don’t think you can beat it. I love going into this “learner mode” but I seldom see other people really detail their process for doing the same, if they do at all.

Information is different than knowledge. Most people actively learn for information. If something goes wrong with your car and you want to figure out how to fix it yourself, you target your search very directly. You look up that exact problem and how to fix it. Along the way you’ll certainly pick up a few other tidbits, but people frequently forget those if they don’t actively use them very soon after.

A lot of the learning we’re exposed to, especially early in our lives, is rote memorization. We don’t really learn how to process and store information for long-term application. What’s funny is that in the very very early stages, we do! We learn to read and do math not by memorizing specific books or equations, but by learning the tools. Once you know how to read, you can read anything. That’s a good outcome for learning. And that method can be duplicated, but we don’t!

When you’re learning to read, you can do that learning with anything. In fact, that’s best! Just pick up book after book and don’t worry about the subject matter or specific targeted vocabulary words, just read and read and read. That’s the deep end, as elemental as it might seem.

The best way to learn for knowledge, is to ignore information entirely.

Sometimes I will pick a topic (often it will pick me) and I’ll just go. I have no agenda. I have no specific problem I’m trying to learn to solve. I’m not taking notes or worrying about retaining any particular pieces of trivia. I’m just letting the waves crash over me.

I’ll read articles and books and scientific papers on the topic, not understanding more than 10% of it when I begin. Doesn’t matter, I’ll keep reading. Not letting the frustration of ignorance take hold is key, but this is a lot easier when you aren’t learning for a grade, or because you have a deadline, or a project.

A few years ago I became really enamored with the idea of complex math. I’m not a mathematician – I think 10th grade geometry was the last serious look I had given it. And that was why I was interested! So I looked up famous mathematicians who were working on awesome stuff and had published books, and I bought them. They were astronomically above my level, but who cares? No one knew I was learning it, no one was grading me. I just absorbed.

I’m still not a brilliant mathematician, but I know a ton more about set theory and concepts of infinity and even the landscape of current mathematical thought than I did before. It was fun!

The brain is a wonderful sponge, but we usually apply learning to it with an eye dropper. Just throw it in the river and see what happens! When you pick the sponge up a huge amount of knowledge will just run out, but what you retain will be tremendous – and fun.

Every time an unexpected problem, hardship or dilemma arrives, a race begins. The starting gun fires, and you’re now in a race against your own negative reaction.

All the bad emotions, the panic response, the anger, the fear – they all coalesce into an entity that takes off like a shot. The finish line is the machine that controls your actions, and that entity is trying to get there before you do.

That entity is fast.

People lose this race all the time. On the outside, other people see you reacting poorly, lashing out, yelling, or making foolish decisions. Then, usually a few hours to a few days later, you “catch up” to the finish line and take over the controls, but you often then have to do a lot of damage control. Apologies abound, sheepish admissions of overreacting, etc. It’s not the absolute end of the world, but it’s not great. And if you lose that race a lot, you’ll find your credibility – both professionally and personally – eroding along with your social capital.

So how do you win the race? Here are three strategies:

1. Train to be faster. Getting better at getting to the “controls” faster is often a matter of “planning your route.” It means deciding what you would want your reactions to be in a stressful situation, and making them the default. Practice them even if there’s no emergency so you know how to do it when there is. If you want your reaction to be to write in a stress journal instead of yelling at people, then write in that journal on a regular basis, especially when you have very small stresses, so that you know the way. That’s the equivalent of an athlete training to sprint faster.
2. Hamstring your opponent. Not very ethical in a real race, but this is an opponent you can feel good about disrupting. What feeds the Negative Entity? Loud noises? Alcohol? Social media? Take those things away. Make a list of things that empower the Negative Entity and make sure that when the emergency arises you block access to them. If a certain person in your life always fans the flames of stress and panic, don’t talk to that person in an emergency. Don’t give the Negative Entity the best running shoes. Instead, trip them.
3. Start the race early. Like I said, no sportsmanship necessary here – if you can leave before the starting gun, you have a better chance of arriving at the finish line early, too. That means giving some thought to the kinds of emergencies that might happen and mentally preparing for them. If you’re starting your own business, it might fail. Give that some thought and decide in advance how you’d like to feel. Recognize that the Negative Entity will try to make you react poorly, but the Negative Entity is nothing if not predictable. If you say “If my business fails, I’ll feel angry. That anger will make me want to blame my spouse, but that won’t be correct. So I’ll recognize that and immediately go to my very calm friend’s house and let them talk me down for a while, eat dinner, then come home and hug my spouse for supporting me.” If the business does go under, you’ve got a reaction already pre-planned. You’re already at the finish line.

These aren’t perfect or flawless strategies. The Negative Entity is predictable, but it’s also strong and fast. Sometimes it gets the better of you. But the more races against it you can win, the better your life will be overall, so it’s absolutely worth trying.

Before I had kids, I used to lament the various subjects that I felt should be taught in schools, but aren’t. Now that I have kids, I don’t lament – I just figure out how I’ll teach those things myself.

I’ve thought of an exercise I’m going to start doing with my kids (for now, only my oldest can read, but they’ll all eventually do it) in order to teach them a few things about the importance of skepticism.

Here’s the exercise. I’ll write out three paragraphs, one on each of three different topics. Two of them will contain true information about say, the weight of certain metals or the life cycle of a kind of frog or whatever. One will be total made-up hogwash, but I’ll make it sound as good as the other two. I won’t use information that is obviously untrue; it will be stuff that you’d have to actually know about to disprove. (A good start for examples would be the List of Common Misconceptions.)

Then, I’ll tell her that one of the paragraphs is baloney, and she has to independently figure out which. When she thinks she knows, I’ll make her put $1 to $5 of her own money on her guess (her choice) as a bet with 50/50 odds. If she’s right, she’ll get paid. If she’s wrong, she’ll lose out.

One of the best ways to be a good critical thinker is to bet on your thinking. I want my kids to be able to someday say “Daddy didn’t raise no sucker,” and so I want to set them down the path early of recognizing that not all information presented to them will necessarily be true, and that being able to discover which is which can be a vital skill for independence.

I can’t wait to see how she does!

When I was in middle school, one day we were learning about bees and I expressed amazement at how bees could know how to make honeycomb in the shape of perfect little hexagons like that. A hexagon seemed like a pretty complex shape for a bug to know how to make, as far as I was concerned.

My teacher laughed and took out a stack of cardboard tubes (the kind from inside paper towel rolls) for just this demonstration. Bees don’t make hexagons, you see. They just make circles. But if you stack a bunch of circles on top of each other and apply pressure, they shape each other into hexagons.

It’s amazing how all of the things in a group can affect each other and change the shape of the pattern. You think you’re just making circles and then bam, you step back and you’ve got a bunch of hexagons. Or you think you’re learning a bunch of neat trivia about baseball and then bam, you’re a professional sportscaster. Or you think you’re just collecting a bunch of junk in the woods behind your house and then bam, you’ve got one of the best World War II museums in all of Italy.

(That’s a real one – I have a friend in Italy who grew up collecting odds and ends that he would find in the mountains near his home, until his mom made him rent a separate space to keep them in because, you know, she didn’t want un-detonated grenades in her house. So he put them in a warehouse and then people wanted to pay him to look at the stuff and now he has a museum.)

While you’re collecting your individual things, whether they be pieces of knowledge or people you know in an industry or tools or whatever, every once in a while step back and see how they might be changing the shape of one another into something even more interesting. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Sometimes when you have a task in front of you that you don’t really want to do, you put it off by watching TV, playing video games, taking a walk, or some other leisure activity. You get lazy and you procrastinate.

But sometimes people do what I like to call “positive procrastination,” where they avoid the task at hand by doing something else valuable. They don’t want to draft that report, so they clean their home. They don’t want to fix the front door, so they clear out work emails. The guilt competes with the laziness, and you justify putting off the main task by saying that at least you’re doing something.

Here’s the thing – I love this!

There are a few reasons I love this. First, when you have more than one thing to do, doing literally anything is good. It’s all got to get done eventually, so at least you’re making progress instead of wasting time.

But perhaps more importantly, there’s a second reason I love this: positive procrastination can be very directional for us. If you’re constantly avoiding a certain task by engaging in a different one, then the chances are very high that you would be much happier if you restructured your life around the task you want to do.

If every time you should be working on a new logo design you instead go tune your car’s engine, then maybe you should consider switching from a graphic designer to a mechanic. Listen to your brain!

A long time ago, I was sitting in the lobby of a company, waiting for my interview there. A man younger than I was, early 20’s at the oldest, was also there waiting for a different person to interview him for a different position within the company.

He looked like he was about to pass out from stress and nervousness, so I chatted with him a little. He was a good lad, but he was woefully unprepared for the interview. He wasn’t wearing appropriate interview clothes, he hadn’t brought anything like a notebook or copies of his resume, etc. The thing was, none of this seemed due to lack of care – just lack of knowledge.

He was called into his interview and it was over so quickly I was still in the lobby (as was my habit, I was pretty early for my interview) when he came out. The outcome was clear, and he dejectedly called who I overheard to be his grandmother to pick him up. He then sat to wait, and I chatted with him again.

I tried to offer some words of both support and encouragement, but mostly what I did was listen. In times of pain some people get very open, and this young man was one such. He told me he’d been striking out a lot on the job front, and while he really appreciated my advice, he also just felt even more lost. He said there was so much he didn’t know. Neither of his parents were in the picture; he was raised by his grandmother, who was already a widow when she took him in at a young age and had grown up in an era where she didn’t work a full time job at any point in her life. As a result, he didn’t grow up around any role models that had jobs, let alone went on interviews.

He was a good guy, but he had no pattern to emulate.

Learning by instruction works a little. Learning by experience works a little better, in my opinion. But both are absolutely dwarfed by how most of us learn most things – by observation. We are blank slates, and from the second our eyes open the world pours information into them. The moments of your life that contain deliberate instruction by well-meaning and intelligent mentors will be the tiniest fraction of the overall time your sponge-like brain is absorbing the sequences of the world around you.

A really fantastic manager once told me, “Your people will have 80% of your good habits, 120% of your bad habits, and retain roughly 5% of what you actually tell them. You have to just always be the kind of person you want to employ.”

It’s true with my kids, too. I often tell my oldest: “You’re always going to have it a little different than your younger brother and sister. You’ll get more freedoms earlier, you’ll get to set a lot of the rules, you’ll get to be the commanding officer a lot of the time. But you also have more responsibility, because they idolize you, and they will emulate you. You have to be a good person, because you’re being good or bad for three people.”

Of course, that lesson applies to me even more.

And there’s the heart of the lesson – “be the change you want to see in the world” is really fantastic advice, because in conducting your affairs according to honor and principle you do more to teach others than you ever will by instruction. I’m reminded of the time earlier this year when I saw a man show kindness and support to a young child he didn’t know, and even though that man had no intention of teaching anyone anything, what he really did was scream at the top of his lungs “be kind, be kind, be kind.”

Live well, and live out loud. Be kind, be good. Show the evils and despairs of the world that they are no match for honor and principle. If someone else isn’t living that way, don’t admonish them – just live your life even better, even harder, even louder. Drown out the bad in a chorus of excellence.

They will see. And they will do.