My eldest daughter, despite all the difficulties presented in her training, has graduated from her youth karate into the full adult classes. She’s 8.

Watching the manifestation of her talent and hard work as she goes through the fluid movements of her forms has me absolutely beaming. She’s put a ton of effort into it, and I’m absolutely at my proudest when she’s worn out but practices anyway.

Watching her two- and three-year-old siblings standing next to her, emulating her movements and cheering with her brings me immeasurable joy.

It’s a good little clan I’ve got.

In the path of any endeavor, there will ultimately be four things you must do in order to succeed: you must reject the bad things the world offers you; you must seek out the good things the world has to offer; you must reject the bad things in yourself; and you must improve the good things within yourself.

You can apply this philosophy to anything. Looking for a great life partner? You must reject the ones that aren’t healthy choices for you, while simultaneously actively seeking people who may be great partners. At the same time, you must work to improve, becoming a better partner yourself by overcoming your weaknesses and building your strengths.

Looking for a great career? You have to reject bad jobs and not waste your time with them, but actively seek out great opportunities. Simultaneously you have to become a better fit for the jobs you want by killing your bad habits and building your skill sets.

All four components are essential. Sadly, there’s a common mistake I see – people focus on just one of those four tasks (and often get it right!) but expect that it will carry them across the finish line.

Most commonly, this is “rejecting the bad in the world.” People will decide which of the world’s various offerings of partners, jobs, homes, lifestyles, mentors, etc. are bad for them, but think that if they just reject enough bad stuff, their life will magically improve.

Let’s say there’s a restaurant that only sells mud. You (correctly) declare that you’re too good to eat mud, and eating mud is beneath you. But you exclusively go to the mud restaurant for food every day. Each time you go, you order nothing, saying “I’m too good to eat mud!” Yet eventually, you’ll cave. You’ll be so hungry you’ll order mud, because you’ve given yourself no other options.

You can’t just reject bad stuff. You have to seek out good stuff, and then give that good stuff a reason to link to you, because you’ve made yourself equally good.

Rejecting all the losers that want to date you is a great first step. But then you also have to actively seek out winners, because they aren’t lining up just because you rejected the bad ones. Then, when you find the winners, you have to be a winner too – which means that right now, during your search, you have to be working on yourself.

I see this with people job-hunting dang near constantly. “I’m too good to work the minimum wage food service job,” says the person who’s been unemployed for 14 months, has zero skills, and never applies to any other jobs.

You can’t build a house by rejecting bad wood, nails and tools. And you can’t be successful in life just by saying “no” to bad opportunities.

Some days you just have to accept that what you accomplished was that you learned a few new ways how not to make a light bulb.

You didn’t finish a project or accomplish a goal. Maybe you didn’t even get closer in the sense that you’re any deeper materially into the problem.

But if your back hurts, your eyes are sore, and your brain is fried, then guess what – you learned something. Maybe it was just where the wild animals are, but you learned something. Some trap to avoid.

Avoid enough traps and you get where you’re going. Get some rest. Plenty more traps tomorrow.

There are no free lunches, only trade offs.

You may have plenty of freedom in an absolute sense, but the cost of exercising certain kinds of that freedom is far too high to be worth it to you.

For instance, despite how often people say otherwise, you don’t have to go to work every day. You can stay in bed all day if you want! It’s just that the cost of doing so might be pretty high – your boss might exercise their freedom to no longer give you any money. If you hate your job enough, you might take that trade off, but for a lot of people it’s a bad deal.

I first started thinking about this the first time I had to explain to my daughter why I was choosing to work instead of play with her all day. Sure, I’d love nothing more than to play with my kids all day every day. But the cost to do that would be very high, since we wouldn’t have a place to live.

The reason I’m thinking about this today is because I saw a conversation about success being defined as the freedom to choose what you do with your life. Someone voiced the opinion that you always have the freedom to choose in that way, and you don’t have to wait for “success” to be able to do that – you don’t have to “earn” freedom, you just have it.

I agree! To a point.

You don’t have to earn freedom. You have it right now. But all choices have costs.

So let me redefine success a little differently: “Success” is reducing the cost of your choices to the point where you can afford the choices you want to make.

You can choose not to work right now – but “success” is being able to make that choice without paying costs you don’t want to pay. Maybe that means you’re “successful” in that you have enough money to not need the income the job provided. Maybe it means you’re “successful” in that you get to make the impacts you want to make on your community even without the vehicle of that role. It can mean whatever you want in practice, but the core concept is the same – you are successful if your important trade offs are also easy ones.

Everything requires some sacrifice, some juice. And different amounts will feel more major or minor to different people, so in this way all success is subjective. That’s a very good thing – no matter how much your lunches cost, you should be the one to eat them.

Happiness is something that you both must sacrifice, and something that you will sacrifice almost everything else for.

At many, many points in your life, the correct decision will be to sacrifice immediate happiness for some “practical” reason. It will almost never be the correct decision to sacrifice long-term happiness for any reason.

We sacrifice immediate happiness all the time. I love my job, but yesterday as I was about to log onto a meeting my doe-eyed three-year-old batted her adorable eyelashes and said “will you play with me a wiiiiittle bit?” It would have made me roughly a bajillion times happier to have done so, but I still logged into the meeting (and played with her a wot later). So we recognize that we can’t always make the decision that results in the most instantaneous happiness – we have to pay bills, do chores, and so on.

The only problem with that is that day in, day out it can make us convinced that happiness is always trivial. That it’s not practical, not something we get to make a priority. That it’s something that maybe happens sometimes, or maybe is a by-product of doing all the work, but it’s not something we get to actively choose.

Bunk, I say.

You have to choose it. Happiness isn’t something you lay at the altar of productive, practical work and success. It’s what you do all that stuff for.

That’s a big thing to grapple with. It requires a lot of faith – faith that in the long term you’re capable of happiness and capable of building the world in which you get to feel it. It can seem very far away at times. Sometimes the “struggle years” get dark, and you’re as broke or overworked or unhealthy as you’ll ever be in your life. During those times, it can be very difficult to believe that happiness is an actual, concrete thing you can build.

But it is. If it wasn’t, nothing else would be worth it anyway. You can carve out a happiness homestead for you and the ones you love. You might have to sacrifice a lot of happiness along the way, to put in the work you need. Some days just surviving will be an amazing feat.

The farmer needs faith. The farmer looks out on a field of nothing but dirt and has to have faith that all the hard work put into that dirt will yield bounty. That’s you – no matter how much things around you look like dirt, you can reap great things from it. It will take work, it will take sacrifice, but it’s there.

Sometimes you just have to start at the top and slide down – you’ll go back up again, and down again, and up again. It happens.

Sometimes you have to just start moving forward, even though in a while you’ll circle back to where you began and even further around.

Sometimes you have to just start at the top and plummet straight down.

Sometimes you’ll do that again.

But if you did all that and you had a pen, then congratulations – you wrote “well.”

I think the phrase “time is money” has it exactly backwards.

Money is time. From the very first time I paid a bill, I realized that what money really represented was the length of time before you had to worry about anything again.

Time is what I really want. I’ve never been a “fancy toy” kind of guy. I’m a material minimalist, so I’m not generally racing to have the shiniest sarcophagus. So when I hustle, I’m looking at my hustle in terms of the hours I buy with the hours I put in.

When I was 20, I briefly worked a temporary gig in on a factory assembly-line making eyeglasses. They had a process I loved – every day when we came in, we had a quota of orders that had to be filled that day. We got paid for a full eight hours, regardless of how little time it took us to complete the day’s orders. So if we got all the orders out in 3 hours, we got paid for the full day and got to leave. This sounded ideal to me, but there was a snag.

I, and a good friend Scott that worked with me, recognized the value in working our butts off to get out early. We’d work as hard as we could, skip all our breaks, and hustle like madmen because what we really wanted was time, not ease. An easier job that took longer was (obviously, to us) strictly worse than a harder job that was done faster.

But here’s the thing about assembly lines – it’s a team effort. And not everyone bought into our concept. Some people just didn’t get it. We couldn’t understand why people even wanted breaks – why stop for 15 minutes that you still have to spend in this building, when skipping it would mean getting out at least 15 minutes earlier and doing whatever you wanted? But despite our frustrations, we discovered that there were some people that would genuinely rather work in a low effort way for longer than maximum effort for minimum time.

One person really maximized our frustrations when they told us why they didn’t want to work as hard as us: “Why work harder? We get paid the same no matter what.” We were practically pulling our hair out. Yes, we get paid the same amount of money. But if we work harder, we earn more time.

But then – I had a breakthrough. One of the biggest epiphanies I’ve ever had, in fact. I asked the person what they were planning to do after work. Their answer explained everything – they had no plans. Doing nothing. Sitting around, drinking a few beers, watching TV and waiting for the next day to start.

That has never been my life (and it wasn’t my friend’s, either). We did stuff. We absolutely always had some project, some activity, some engaging thing we wanted to do. I can genuinely never remember a time in my life where I was bored, waiting for something to happen.

I learned a lot that day about what people will pay for time, and how not all hours are equal. It guides many of my personal decisions – I value remote work very highly because I hate wasted commuting time; those are hours I can spend with my children, my own projects, and so on.

So my time was more valuable to me than theirs was to them. They valued ease; I valued freedom.

The rain would hit the windows in great waves, bursts of wind throwing buckets at the side of the house while the dark horizon threatened lightning. The streets would become rivers, waterfalls into storm drains while the lakes and creeks rose to meet them, washing out the clear lines of demarcation that we’d built between us and nature.

I would stare out into it, my boots already on, my rattiest jeans and most ancient hoodie. Pockets empty, hand twitching over the phone. It would ring, like phones used to do, telling me that it was carrying a voice through wires from another window looking out at the same storm. I snatched it up before the first ring had ended. Hello?

“Pummel Ball. It’s on, Miller’s Park, see you in ten.”

And I was out the door and into the rain.

We’d play every time it rained. “Pummel Ball” was basically kill-the-man-with-the-ball, but with points. My high school mates and I invented it as an alternative to the organized sports we didn’t like to play. We liked play, but we had a strong distaste for tradition – everything we did, we liked to build ourselves.

Pummel Ball was played exclusively in the worst weather imaginable – a non-negotiable rule. We needed the mud and the soft grass to combat the violence of the sport. We’d pick some park or playground and someone would bring a ball – usually a football, but often a “Nerf” one or something similar. We’d arbitrarily pick a “goal,” which could be a nearby set of monkey bars or the hood of a junker car – all that mattered was that you could spike the ball into it with a resounding finality, as was the point.

There were no teams. Every man for himself. We’d crouch in a circle maybe 20 yards from the goal, and one person would throw the ball into the air. The goal was then to be the person who took control of the ball and spiked it onto or through the goal. It had to be spiked, not thrown. Everyone else’s goal was to keep you from doing that, by any violent means. It was savage. The play ended if you hit the ground still in possession of the ball, and we’d throw it again from the starting point.

By the time the game was over, with scores like 8-6-4-4-4-2-1-0-0-0, we were monsters. Blood and mud covering shredded clothes, sometimes but not always returning with all the shoes we came with, we would laugh and limp our way out of the park and back to our homes.

Another reason for the weather – no one else in their right mind would be there. We couldn’t play this game with kids around or nice families out for a stroll in the park. Only once did our game get busted up by the cops, but we had no fear of arrest or anything like that – after all, they no more wanted us in their cars in our state than we would want to be there.

There was no set number of plays or minutes. We played until our bodies gave out.

The point of all play is to test. To push. Clever strategy board games push your mind into new pathways, ways of thinking that you don’t use otherwise. Poker pushes your social skills, makes you read and scan and monitor (both others and yourself) in ways you’ve forgotten how to do. Athletic games make you strain and challenge. Betting games test your ability to think about money and odds and statistics and probability. Some social games just give you the freedom to push the boundaries of polite interaction and social mores. But good play always tests.

We must test, we must push. From the day you’re born, the world starts to shrink around you. There are invisible bonds all around you, and they tighten a little more every day. Push at those walls with all your might, test their weak points and seams, and so you can break them when you really need to.

Don’t always hide from the storm. Sometimes you need to match its strength and show it what you’re made of.

WordPress helpfully reminded me today that I registered a blog with them eight years ago. Astute and consistent readers may note that as of this writing, The Opportunity Machine has been cranking out hits for just a little over a year, so what gives?

Well, this isn’t my first attempt at a blog. I absolutely love what this blog has become for me, but it wasn’t a “hole in one” – I swung and missed before. That blog gained no traction and quite honestly wasn’t very good. I want to talk a little about why.

1. It wasn’t daily. Yes, I think that’s one of the most important components. I’m a strong advocate for the philosophy that you aren’t serious about something unless it has a daily presence in your life. My posting schedule for that old blog was “whenever I have a truly fantastic idea for a post,” and you can guess how often that was. Which brings me to:
2. I edited myself WAY too much. I felt like posts had to be grand works of literature and philosophical insight in order to be worthy of my signature. Ha! The best work I’ve ever done, in any sphere, came because I just made myself work no matter what, not because I waited for lightning to strike me and then expected that expertise would naturally follow.
3. I tried to stick to too narrow of a topic. I wrote about political philosophy, and since I’m an armchair enthusiast at best on that subject, actual insights from me were few and far between. Sometimes really interesting stories would happen to me (I will say this for my life, it’s virtually never boring), but because I was trying to maintain “purity of theme” I didn’t write them down. If you only ever stay in a single lane, you don’t get many chances for adventure.

Put the work first. I really do believe that you should start gathering wood and nails and tools before you even have a blueprint. You can plan yourself to death and never swing a hammer once, but starting to work forces you to make a plan as you go.

When I started this blog, I literally had only one criteria: I would write in it every day. I had no plan beyond that. And because of that, it’s worked.