Tonight was the first chance my daughter and I have had since my New Month’s Resolution this month to go out and put it into practice. And she had an absolute blast!

This was easily one of my favorite days as a parent. I explained to her the differences between capital expenditures, inventory, and operating expenses (she even correctly guessed what “operating expenses” meant after I explained the other two!), we got to sell side-by-side, and we celebrated with pizza.

I’m on cloud nine, I really am.

We started with her idea – after telling her of the man I met who made a very brisk trade reselling water, that’s what she wanted to try first. So we bought a case of 40 bottles of water for 4 dollars, and in an hour of selling at a local park she’d made $16 back, selling bottles for a dollar a pop. That even more than covered the ice (the aforementioned “operating expenses”) we used to keep the bottles fresh and cold.

She danced while she hustled. She sang while she sold.

When it was time to go, she actually said to me “Wait, let me just do three more pitches…”

My daughter can break wooden boards with a punch, tells strangers that they’re beautiful, confronts bullies twice her size, sings children to sleep, performs in musicals, designs video game levels, and can sell like a champion.

I am so proud my heart might burst.

There are lots of numbers in a game. But only one is the score.

The pursuit of better data is good. Lots of things can be clues towards where you want to go. But there’s a certain corruption that can happen, and we call it “vanity.”

Imagine a basketball game. Some scientist is in the crowd, and he notices that the cheers seem louder when the home team is scoring more points. So he goes home and pulls up archived footage of hundreds of games and lo and behold, the data fit. It turns out that loud cheers correlate to home team wins strongly enough that you can predict who will be the eventual winner of the game even if all you have is the volume measurement of the crowd’s noise.

This scientist publishes this in an interesting if (it seems to him) inconsequential paper. But then major NBA franchises pick it up and start doing something that seems to make perfect sense to them, but is actually absurd: they start trying to get their crowd to be louder as if it mattered – maybe using extra mascots, t-shirt giveaways, slogans on billboards, etc.

They see the clear science that says “louder cheers = more wins,” but the reality is the reverse – and only the reverse. “Decibels of Cheering” is just a vanity metric. It doesn’t actually affect the outcome, even if it’s measurable and people care about that measure.

It’s easy to get distracted by things you can measure and improve because you can measure and improve them. But “measurable and improvable” doesn’t mean “relevant.” Just because some piece of information is a clue to the real outcome doesn’t mean that changing it artificially can change the outcome itself.

Listen to the cheers all you want, but keep your eye on the scoreboard.

I am a very strong proponent of cheating yourself.

Inside of you there is an enemy. Call it whatever you want – Mr. Hyde, the “bad wolf,” use whatever analogy you desire. The point is that there is very much an entity inside you that wants things that are bad for you.

In most cases, this entity doesn’t think of itself as your enemy. In fact, it’s usually fantastic at justifying its actions as being in your own self-interest. It doesn’t tell you to lay in bed all day eating cookies because it wants you to be fat, lazy and unemployed – it tells you that because it wants you to be happy. It just has no concept of happiness beyond the immediate.

It’s not a good long-term thinker or strategist. But in the immediate term, it’s very, very strong. You can rarely beat it at its own game, but it can rarely beat you at yours. That’s how you win – you cheat.

What do I mean? Well, a short-term battle, one that’s on the bad wolf’s home turf, looks like this: you’re sitting at your computer working, but you have an XBox sitting right next to you. It’s plugged in. It’s on. The TV is on. The game controller is sitting within your reach. Your favorite game is in there, and its already on the home screen, all fired up. In that situation, it’s really, REALLY easy for Mr. Hyde to get the better of you, to convince you that you can play for just five minutes and then get back to work, and don’t you deserve a break anyway?

In that situation, you’re trying to fight the devil with will alone. Some people can win that; most can’t. I rarely can.

But you know what your bad wolf will rarely (if ever) do? Decide to drive to the store, buy an XBox, buy a game, come home, plug it in, install everything, get it set up, and then decide to play games, all while you were trying to work. The bad wolf is bad at long-term planning. It can win battles, but only the battles you let it fight.

So cheat. Get rid of the XBox.

You don’t necessarily have to throw it away. But pack it up and put it in a high closet. When you want to play, climb up there, get it down, install it, and play – and then pack it back up when you’re done. You can have your cake and eat it too, then. Just don’t let the bad wolf tell you, “it’s okay, you can leave it out this one time.”

Pick your battles. Relax when you’re tired, work when you’re not. Don’t give Mr. Hyde the space to get a grip on you. Cheat him if you have to.

What do you have too much of?

I like having the one right tool for the job. But I won’t do every job in my life, so my life doesn’t need every aspect available.

Neither does yours. Discard the things (and “things” doesn’t just mean objects) holding you down. A belief can be a chain, a person can be a prison, a motivator can be an anchor.

We often keep totems of our worst traits. Which ones can you discard?

You are capable of amazing things, and that inherent talent exists regardless of changes in your external environment.

“The bird does not trust in the branch for its safety. The branch may break; the bird can fly.”

Often, we make the mistake of thinking our talents are tied to our circumstances. That we can only be who we are if we’re where we are. That isn’t the case – you are you. On a boat, with a goat, in a car, near or far.

Other people may change your circumstances, even if you don’t want them to. They can’t ever change what you know how to do.

If you built a house from scratch, pouring your blood, sweat and tears into it, the house itself is a nice reward. However, even in the worst of circumstances – a fire or a hurricane destroys that house – those circumstances can’t take everything away from you.

You still learned how to build a house, and can build another. Keep flying.

There is a fantastic situation you can sometimes find yourself in quite by accident, and that is being the person who barely knows anything about a topic in a room full of people who know literally nothing about it. You can also engineer this situation pretty easily – just find a subject that no one around you knows anything about and learn about it a little.

Why is this such a great scenario? Because the knowledge gains you can make in a short period of time are incredible in this circumstance.

Let’s say you and 9 friends go on a fishing trip. You know a tiny bit about fishing, and everyone else has never caught a fish in their life. You all decide you want to give it a shot and have some fun anyway, though, so you’re off to the lake! Now here’s what will happen – despite the fact that you know next to nothing about fishing, your friends all know literally nothing about fishing, so to them you’re still the expert. So they’ll ask you a million questions every time they come up against something they don’t know. And you’ll be slightly better-equipped to figure out the answers than they will be. So assuming you aren’t a jerk, you’ll be solving problems left and right – far faster than if you were limited to only the problems you encounter yourself.

It’s like practice by proxy.

You will get good, and you will get good fast.

I’ve seen this happen a lot in a business environment. I remember once taking a sales team I was managing and giving them all iPads for the first time as a sales tool. Out of my dozen or so team members, all but one had never held an iPad before, and one guy had used one maybe twice. But by the end of the day, he could practically work at the Apple Genius Bar, because he’d fielded every single question everyone had about setting up their device, etc. and in so doing had learned an enormous amount.

It’s easy to dismiss. It’s easy to say “look, I don’t really know any more than you, so go find an actual expert to ask.” But honestly, these will be level-one questions, nothing so difficult you couldn’t figure it out. And if you let your tiny amount of experience give you the confidence to stand up, lead, and tackle those problems, you’ll hit knowledge at a far higher level before you know it.

In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king.

The person that most effectively breaks the rules is the person that understands the rules flawlessly.

In order to customize, modulate, or personalize within a system effectively, you have to know that system better than anyone. You don’t want to end up with a Chesterton’s Fence scenario, where you’re breaking rules that you don’t understand, because sometimes those are load-bearing rules and you’ll bring a world of pain down around yourself.

Here’s a classic example that I witnessed the other day: I was driving on a highway that was several lanes wide. Traffic wasn’t bumper-to-bumper, but it was slow. The far right lane, however, was wide open. So a particularly impatient driver swerved into that lane and sped up – only to nearly rear-end the police car that was occupying that lane, guarding construction just beyond it. (The problem with particularly low-to-the-ground sports cars is that they really limit your visibility in traffic.)

A more reasonable person might have looked at the empty lane and said, “yes, I can’t see an obvious reason why no one is spreading into this lane, but the fact that no one is suggests that there may be a non-obvious reason, and I should wait until I have more information.”

That’s an example of someone who flaunted the rules of a system without fully understanding them.

Now, if you’ve read any sampling of posts on The Opportunity Machine, you know that I’m no fan of rules and I recommend testing them thoroughly and breaking as many as you can get away with. But that “get away with” part is important, meaning that you need to fully understand the consequences of what you’re doing. I hate rules, so I study them constantly. Only a fool would, as a consequence of despising rules, ignore them. I break rules aplenty, but I never ignore them.

As soon as you are confronted with a new dilemma, there become many versions of you.

At the moment of divide between the present and the many futures, there are suddenly multiple copies of you – the one that gives up early. The one that runs screaming from the challenge. Ones that try and fail a thousand different ways.

And the one that succeeds.

You – the version of you reading this right now – can step into the shape of any one of them. You just have to outlast the others.

Success is just failure over time.

As any parent knows, meaningful conversations with your children are incredibly important. I happen to believe that just about any conversation with your kiddos counts as “meaningful,” but there are definitely times when you want to solicit actual information on a particular topic, and that isn’t always as easy. Once your kids start doing things without you – school, activities, hanging out with friends – you want to hear about it. Sometimes that requires a little direction.

“How was your day,” so often elicits little more than “fine” unless there’s some particular event that they really want to tell you about – and if that’s the case, you probably didn’t have to ask. So I’ve heard lots of advice on more specific questions to ask. If you keep up with this regularly and know what’s going on in your kids’ lives it gets easier to do that, but there are always times where we want to know more, but lack a good idea for a conversation starter.

Today in a conversation with my team at work, my boss presented a fantastic question. She asked us all “what surprised you this week?”

My first answer: that question!

I love it. It’s not only a good conversation starter, but it really helps you focus on aspects of your life that maybe you don’t on a regular basis. Most people don’t try to be surprised – quite the opposite, in fact. But unexpected events can trigger all sorts of growth and opportunities, and that’s a great thing to have more of.