Holy cow, 500 posts on this blog.

Somewhere around post number 200, I started to worry that I’d run out of things to talk about at some point. But now I’ve realized that I probably never will.

The blog itself generates ideas. Every time I write, in order to stay focused on a topic I end up cutting ideas – they become new posts, and the cycle repeats.

People interact with the blog and give me new ideas. The more ideas, the more readers, and the more readers, the more ideas.

The blog changes my focus – I look for ideas more diligently than I have before. I’m more aware of the flow of my life.

If you read any of those 500 posts, thank you. I hope you gained some value. Here’s to five thousand more.

Here’s the idea: a think-tank dedicated to looking back at major decisions, moral panics, and policy choices that affect society years after the fact.

In my head, they would cover a few different things: major federal policy decisions, “trending” news stories with a lot of panic attached (remember “kids eating Tide Pods?”), and big industry predictions, specifically around the idea of corporate influence (remember the Microsoft anti-trust case?).

In all instances, the Institute would collect data, interview primary sources, and chronicle predictions. As much as possible, they’d get people to commit to a specific prediction or admit they didn’t have one. And over time, they’d circle back to each prediction and compare it to how things actually shake out.

I would also imagine a great project of the Institute could be a betting market for such predictions. Nothing holds people to making concrete claims like putting money on them!

Over time, the goal of the institute would be to illustrate several things:

1. Most people are full of baloney.
2. Conviction regarding a claim has zero correlation to ability to predict accurately.
3. Most things don’t turn out as bad as you think they will – the future is generally better than the present.
4. Multiple claims about the future from a single source are more likely to follow a pattern related to that source’s views about the present, rather than their ability to forecast accurately. (Shocking!)

The problem isn’t just that most people can’t predict the future. The problem is that most people aren’t trying – they’re using “predictions” about the future to push a present agenda – and won’t be held accountable for mistakes. Bad news headlines run on the first page – the retraction runs on page 16 three weeks later and no one reads it. No one ever lost a re-election because they didn’t fulfill the promises from their first election. Laws don’t get repealed just because they didn’t do anything close to what it was promised they would do.

I think it would be neat to have a central location to point this stuff out, categorize who actually is good at predictions (hence the Superforecasting-style betting market), and chronicle just how little you should put stock in promises about the future.

Would it help? How should I know – I can’t predict the future, either.

I believe in long-term note-taking. I think that there are certain kinds of notes that you should always have, and that a habit of logging your thoughts on a regular basis, in an organized way, is essential to personal progress.

Integrating organized note-taking into your daily life (and not just as something you do in response to specific and temporary situations) is the only way you can engage in certain kinds of development that I think are extremely healthy.

One of the development projects that’s only possible if you take notes in this way is The Great Big Lists of Stuff You Like and Stuff You Don’t Like.

All the time, you are presented with ideas. Almost instinctively, you embrace or reject them. These ideas can be small – a suggestion for a movie to watch – or very large, like the opportunity to move to a new city.

Whether you make your decision in an instant or you deliberate for a long time, you almost certainly embrace or reject the whole of the idea. But that misses a vital opportunity for self-development and learning.

You see, these aren’t really ideas or concepts you’re encountering, but bundles. Within those bundles are many discrete elements, and you’ll like some and dislike others. But you usually won’t think about it in that way – you’ll just accept or reject the whole thing.

Want an example? Someone suggests a movie to you. Based on what you’ve heard about it, you say “meh, no thanks.” You probably never give it another thought unless the other person is trying hard to convince you.

But let’s say you really wanted to examine your decision. You took out each discrete element of the movie, from its plot, to its genre, to the individual actors & actresses, to the writing team, to the studio… you get the idea. Make two lists – one of the discrete elements you like, and one of the discrete elements you didn’t.

This doesn’t have to change your decision! In most cases, it won’t. But what it does, is examines the decision. Imagine you did this for every movie that was suggested to you. After twenty suggestions (regardless of whether you said yes or no), you look at each list. Now patterns can emerge. You notice certain performers showing up a LOT on one list or the other, or patterns of plot elements that you never realized you disliked to much – or maybe genres that you did! The end result is that now you can seek out more of what you like, because you know why you like it. And you can spot red flags more easily, because you’ve dissected your gut instinct and can articulate what you truly don’t like.

That’s just for movies! But if you keep a list like this for just ideas in your life in general, you can do the same thing. You can evaluate anything in this way, from career options to romantic interests to hobbies to investments and on and on.

There are virtually no concepts that you will love or hate 100% of. Most things are “bundled.” If you don’t want to move to Austin, that’s fine – but there are probably at least a few things you would like about Austin, and maybe a few things you wouldn’t like but you hadn’t realized exactly. Make those lists, and now you can improve your future search.

The most important thing this does for you is it breaks the pattern of just saying “yes” or “no” to things that life randomly throws at you, and starts giving you the tools to proactively seek out the things you want. Imagine that after 20 movies, you looked at the list of things you liked and Paul Rudd’s name was on that list 20 times. You hadn’t even realized it, but you loved every movie he was in and even the movies you rejected, you put his name down as one of the positive elements. Now realizing this, you can have a delightful evening by just looking up Paul Rudd movies and taking your pick!

That’s a super-simple example, but the elements of this apply to much more complex decisions. We don’t often know why we like a particular city or hate a particular career field because no one ever asked us, not even ourselves.

Get in the habit of asking yourself, and making a list of the answers. You’ll be happy with what you learn.

Here’s how it is:

Sometimes in life, bad things happen. Sometimes they’re our own fault, and sometimes a meteor hits your house, but in any case, we don’t like to accept it. So we blame others, or we get mad at “life being unfair,” etc. The best case scenario is we take responsibility and improve.

The worst case scenario is we become proud of the bad thing.

That’s the last line of psychological defense for people who can’t accept that sometimes we fail or sometimes bad things happen. We take struggles and pain and we say it was a good thing that it happened.

Looking for examples?

“I grew up poor and it made me strong, so parents shouldn’t try to provide for their kids.”

“I had to work my butt off to immigrate to this country, so I don’t want anyone else to be able to do it any easier.”

“My parents hit me and I turned out fine, so I don’t want to go soft on my kids.”

And so on.

In each case, the person suffered in some way, and now they want to inflict that suffering on a new generation of people – not because it would improve their own situation, but because it lets them pretend that what happened to them was fair and just in the first place. That suffering in that way was actually a good thing.

Do you want to live a noble life? Here is an easy way to focus your goal: find every instance you can of “cycles of struggle,” where the struggle of one person led to the struggle of the next, which led to the struggle of the next.

Break that cycle.

If you had the worst parents, be the best parent – and if you don’t want to be a parent, then be a mentor, a Big Brother/Sister, a youth leader, anything. If you grew up in poverty, then don’t try to be rich – try to make your kids rich. If you were the victim of violence, then become a force for peace, not vengeance. Help others do the same. If you meet an illiterate child with illiterate parents, teach the child to read.

Don’t be proud of cycles of struggle. Break them.

They say the best way to learn a foreign language is immersion. Don’t download an app or sit in a class – move to the country. Spend three months in France and you’ll speak French better than you ever would from another method.

Most people have heard this advice; it’s both relatively common and mostly intuitive so we understand it fairly easily.

And yet, many people think this applies only to language.

“Language” can have a pretty broad meaning here – it doesn’t just have to mean Italian or Farsi. Go hang out with a bunch of skaters and tell me they aren’t speaking their own language. How about any random computer lab at MIT?

That “language barrier” can feel daunting. But the way to overcome it is to embrace it.

When I first developed an interest in economics, I picked up a few books and cracked them open based on a few casual recommendations I’d heard. The first few pages seemed like they were in ancient Greek. Not only did I not know what half the words meant, I didn’t even know which half, since a lot of economics terms are actually just regular words used in totally different ways. (For example, normal people think the word “real” means “actually existing,” but economists use that word to mean “adjusted for inflation!” Quite the trip for the self-taught economist hitting that for the first time.)

So I didn’t even know which words I needed to look up, and I was confused as heck. But I was still interested, so I kept on. Soon my ignorance didn’t decrease, but it at least started to take shape. That meant it had solid edges I could chip away at; words I could now define, concepts I could understand, contexts I could apply to what I read. Before I knew it I could blast through one of those textbooks in a few days and grasp everything I read.

The trick to learning something quickly is to be very, very comfortable with being extremely uncomfortable. You have to just dive in and be confused. You have to have some confidence that the confusion will fade quickly.

Go find people talking about the thing you want to learn and just read or listen to all of it. Don’t worry if you don’t understand most of it; in fact, don’t try at first. It’s more important to observe. To gather familiarity around you.

Fluency will come.

For more than a year, this blog has been written pretty exclusively for an audience of one – me. It’s been my place of self-improvement, and benefits gained by others have been purely coincidental.

However, whether you realize it or not, you – my audience of anyone who reads this besides me – have been essential to my process. You see, this could just as easily have been a journal, rather than a blog. I could have written this on my own computer, never posted it publicly. But if I had, it wouldn’t have been nearly as good. If I’m being honest, it probably wouldn’t have lasted.

I’ve relied on knowing that someone might read this, even though I wrote it only for myself. I rely on that to keep me honest, keep me positive, and keep me consistent. Knowing a hypothetical audience exists meant that I couldn’t go to dark places that my mind might tend to wander if it knows its alone. It meant I had to find progress every day. And sharing it with people who know me (family, friends, and co-workers all read this blog) meant I couldn’t bullshit. It would be easy to write something positive about my ascent up Mount Everest, except I haven’t done that.

So you’ve provided tremendous value to me, just by existing. Hopefully I’ve provided value in return, but I think the scales are severely tilted to my advantage.

What I hope to give back is a certain clarity of thought. I am stumbling around in the dark, often questioning my place in the world and how I can best navigate these strange waters. This blog is a way to leave trail markers behind me for those who follow, and to shine a signal light for those who have already gone before.

If you have questions that are like mine, even adjacent to being like mine, then you may find something to work with here. I won’t say “answers” because I’m not sure I’ve ever provided any. But maybe I’ve given what I’ve tried to give – which is a new angle from which to look at the question in the first place.

When I was a little kid, apparently one night we had stuffing with our dinner. For totally unexplained reasons, I referred to this as “conrad.” My family cracked up and it became canon; stuffing in our house just always got referred to as conrad from then on.

A few months ago, my oldest daughter (for equally unexplained reasons) referred to mashed potatoes as “matesh.” Similar laughter, similar adoption of the term.

Now her younger siblings call it that, too. Why not correct them?

Because inventing words is awesome. Life continues to change and evolve, and we often don’t have words for new concepts or experiences. Sure, we have a good word for blended up potatoes with butter on them, but it’s good practice to be able to impose your own terms on a wild and chaotic universe.

Someday everyone will encounter something that they have a hard time defining. Being able to put your own definition on it can be a fantastic way to add clarity to your communications. Thus evolves our shared language, and we get better at sharing ideas with one another.

That makes the world go ’round.

Don’t try to say something profound. Try to have something profound to say.

You can be a thousand monkeys, banging on a thousand typewriters and hoping to produce brilliance. Practicing your writing, honing your craft – these are vital elements. But you can’t just write forever.

You have to go find the novel arrangements of words. They’re not in your fingertips. They’re in the world.

I’ve noticed that the people with the least to give are often the ones most guarded about giving it away. People sitting on a lot of value have no problem sharing it.

There are plenty of reasons for this. First, it’s impossible to give away a lot of value and not get something in return. There are better and worse trades, but it’s not possible to make the “value flow” 100% in one direction. If you took every possession you owned, liquidated it all, and started handing out money in the street until you were broke, someone would notice and something good would happen. You would learn something. You would make friends. Now, you might not think those things were worth your entire worldly net worth, but the point is you’d still have gotten something.

So people with a lot of value recognize that you can give a lot of value and create feedback loops. People with (even in their own perception) very little are much more guarded about it.

I have a friend who’s a personal trainer and who was also in charge of hiring personal trainers and fitness consultants at his gym. He told me a wild story about an applicant once – as part of the application process, he would have candidates create a sample fitness plan for a client.

This particular candidate, he says, turned in a “plan” that basically amounted to “tell the client to eat less and do cardio.” Perfectly fine advice as far as it goes, but certainly nothing revolutionary or that they weren’t doing already, and in more complex ways. But here’s the kicker – when the candidate was turned down for the job, he came back to the gym and wanted payment for his ‘consulting,’ since he said the gym had stolen his ideas!

“Look, you’re telling your clients that want to lose weight that they should eat less and exercise more! That’s awfully coincidental, hmmmmm?”

On top of being patently absurd, this also misses a huge opportunity. Reciprocity is real. If you share a fitness plan as part of an application, and you don’t get the job, asking for some advice on your approach is very likely to be well-received. My friend is a great guy, and he’d be happy to help an aspiring trainer improve his craft, even if he didn’t hire him. That could be a great contact for many years – and instead, you learned nothing, burned a bridge, and made yourself look silly.

The least you could do is learn. Don’t discard that value.

The traditional advice is “ask and you shall receive.” That’s not terrible advice, as far as it goes – people don’t magically know what you need or want, so step 1 in getting anything is being able to communicate.

There are ways to ask more effectively, though!

When I was just a kid, I picked up on a marvelous pattern with my parents. If I said, “Dad, can I have twenty dollars to buy something,” I’d either get a flat “no” or I’d get a long list of arduous chores to do in exchange for the funds. Not only was this usually a low valuation of my time comparatively, but I was never able to refuse – for one, saying “Nah, not worth it” would make me look lazy in my father’s eyes (an absolutely cardinal sin), but for two, even if I wanted to refuse it was too late – now that my father had itemized the list of chores, he’d make me do them whether I wanted the money or not.

However, if I instead came to him and said “Hey Dad, if I do all the dishes and pots before I go out, can I have twenty dollars,” I’d get it 99% of the time. Washing a day’s worth of dishes and pots wasn’t worth anywhere near twenty bucks, as it would take me about 15 minutes and was low-effort, but coming to the table with an offer first would both show the right attitude (always a winner) and create a tangible value trade, albeit a skewed one. Occasionally he’d throw in something extra like “take out the trash too and it’s a deal,” but the strategy was definitely a great one.

This is true in everything you do. Don’t say, “Hey, can you give me a ride to the airport on Thursday?” Try: “Hey, if I buy you breakfast, can you give me a ride to the airport?” A good friend might not even cash in the breakfast, but showing that you value their time is a great way to endear someone to you.

Don’t just ask for a raise. Say what new task you’d like to take on in exchange. Don’t just ask for an interview. Say you’d like to create a project for someone and then ask for time to review it together.

Not only does this strategy work from a psychology perspective, it’s also fantastic because it lets you set the starting terms of the negotiation.

If you just ask, you might get a yes. But you are also likely to get a no, or a conditional yes with the conditions set by the other person. And you’re in a bad spot to negotiate, because you’re the one who was asking for the favor in the first place.

Get help by giving it, and your world will drastically improve.