Someone can be wrong about something without their incorrect belief being unjustified.

Information is rarely perfect, and lots of signals can be misinterpreted. Even assuming charitable, intelligent observers, those observers can still get an incomplete picture.

If you wear a yellow shirt only two days in your entire life, and some by some coincidence you interact with a particular bank teller only on exactly those two days, the bank teller might have the impression that you frequently wear yellow shirts. They’re wrong, but they’re not unjustified. (Sure, they might be savvy enough to know that two data points isn’t enough for such speculation – but few honestly think this way intuitively.)

Now imagine that you see the bank teller on a third day, only this day you’re wearing your trademark red shirt that you always wear because you love it, and you only wore that yellow shirt those two days because your red one was being mended. Bank teller sees you and offers a friendly hello, and then maybe makes a comment like “Where’s your famous yellow shirt today?”

Now imagine you got mad. How dare this person! You’re not some yellow-shirt-wearing person! You’re a tried-and-true RED-shirt-wearing person! Everyone knows that! You don’t ever think of yourself as a yellow-shirt person. How could anyone think that?! Oh, you’re so mad and frustrated and upset!

Look, you might take it as an insult to be associated with yellow shirts. You might really want to be known as a red shirt person. And you might even BE a red shirt person – the bank teller was wrong. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t justified in their assumption.

You shouldn’t be mad. Instead, you should reflect: “What made this bank teller think that I, noted red-shirted person, was a yellow-shirt?” And if you’re smart, you’ll realize the limits of other people’s information about you compared to your own self-perception.

Someone can be wrong about you, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong about the information they received.

Okay, so obviously yellow and red shirts here are metaphors. Stand-ins for, honestly, whatever you want them to be. If you’re one thing, and someone else thinks you’re something else, don’t get mad. Reflect on why they think that. Even if it’s not true, you have to take ownership of that information. They think that for a reason. If the person is intelligent and charitable, they might even think it for a very good reason, so you shouldn’t just brush it off.

That’s something a yellow-shirt would do.

Some people are just naturally very negative. They hear an idea and immediately jump to a reason why it won’t work. “Why don’t you apply for that job,” you ask. “Oh, I’ll never get it, they want someone with blah blah blah,” they respond. These kinds of people aren’t evaluating risk versus reward, they’re just reflexively reversing whatever idea is presented to them.

This habit, once you let it take hold, is very hard to overcome. If your first instinct is that something will fail, chances are good that you’re far too risk averse and you’re missing a lot of areas where you could positively impact your life with small changes in effort. That can eat away your life, but once it’s there, that poison is hard to cure.

So what if you just turned it to your advantage? If your first instinct is to reject ideas, why not give yourself bad ideas to reject? Push the needle hard in the other direction, and let your instinctual rejection cause it to bounce back into the positive.

“Hey, you should throw out your exercise equipment. Just put it on the curb,” I’d say to you. Maybe without even realizing it, you’d say “No way, that equipment is useful, I’m going to work out right now.”

You’re a pessimist? Fine. Be a pessimist about pessimism. Assume you’ll fail at failure. If tricking your mind is what it takes to get started and begin to work the poison out of your system, I certainly won’t hold it against you. Whatever it takes to make that first spark.

It’s good to surround yourself with challenge. It’s good to have people around you that will question you, give you adequate push-back, and run your ideas through the crucible. You should strive for that. (You should also strive to surround yourself with people who are doing that to be supportive, not people who just actually oppose your success.)

But no one has the capacity to check your ideas like you do. You have one huge advantage and one huge disadvantage over all external auditors.

The Big Advantage: No one truly knows your biases, flaws, hangups and priors like you do.

The Big Disadvantage: Nobody ignores them like you do, either.

At our core, we begin every project and action with this foundational thought: “I am right.” We need to, or we wouldn’t get started. Our brains aren’t great at internalizing thoughts like “I’m probably right, and even if I’m not, it’s a good idea to move forward anyway because statistically it’s a good plan and I can course-correct as I go.” Nope, the brain simplifies: I am right.

But the brain’s simplification can quickly become resistance to new data. Confirmation bias turns “I am right” into “I cannot be wrong,” and that’s dangerous.

Here’s a quick way to remove (some of) that bias – The Fictional Other.

Isolate your problem down to a single sentence, and remove any pronouns or names: “A high-paying client is being very difficult to manage.”

Then, think about another person whose only problem is this one. And ask yourself:

What would that person do, if they wanted to solve this problem and cared about nothing else?

What, if.

That person has no other problems. They don’t have any other agenda. No tribe to impress, no status to seek, no biases to serve. Just a single problem.

(I think this is why “What Would Jesus Do” is actually a great mnemonic device for people attempting to live better lives. It’s not just that Jesus was exceptionally moral, it’s also that He was unfettered and had great clarity of purpose. He didn’t have your chains. You put yourself in His state of mind not just to remind yourself to act well, but to quiet all of the other voices from your life that tell pull you in directions otherwise.)

But whether you’re religious or not, the “What, If” model can provide a great check on your actions. Once you’ve got an idea of what the hypothetical other person would do, hold that up next to what you’ve actually been doing. Do they match? Are they even close?

No one can answer that like you can.

There’s a difficult point in our lives where we realize that no one, no matter how much we respect them, is infallible. The reason this is so difficult is that we’ve held certain people to impossible standards and then we’re disappointed when they fail to meet them – even if we’re not perfect, we want to believe someone can be.

It happens with your parents. You grow up around these mythic figures who know everything, but then one day you start spotting the cracks in the veneer and see their mistakes and it can make you unreasonably furious (and it doesn’t help that this usually happens around a time in your life when you’re more prone to unreasonable fury than normal anyway). But true maturity is recognizing that they weren’t fallen gods who failed to deliver on a divine promise; they were ordinary people trying their best and figuring it out as they went, same as you. And if you reach that level of maturity, it means they probably did a pretty great job.

It happens with your living idols. You see someone at their very best in their athletic performance or their business acumen or their political convictions, and then you start to see that outside of that very narrow spotlight they’ve got messy, difficult lives, just like you. They make bad choices and do bad things and fail even at the good things a lot of the time. But that doesn’t mean the good can’t outweigh the bad. Good deeds don’t absolve you of bad ones and they’re not an excuse, but if a person messes up and grows and learns and even pays penance for the mistake I think we can let their good deeds stand on their own.

It happens with past heroes. There are a lot of statues in the world, and if we dig around inside the flesh and blood that bore those visages we’ll find, without exception, some kind of rotten jerk in some sphere or another. Some were far more bad than good, some were far more good than bad, but no one was all of one or the either. We don’t necessarily owe those people respect just for their good deeds and can (and should!) admonish the ones that were bad. But that doesn’t mean we have to disrespect the good deeds themselves. We can respect a noble act, independent of the person – however ignoble they might have been.

It happens with mentors. It happens with bosses. It happens with significant others. People are human – they have human flaws. At their best, they do incredible things. We need those incredible things, and we need them whether you do ten incredible things before breakfast or whether you’re a rotten jerk your whole life and you pull out just one incredible thing right at the end. We don’t have to ignore flaws – in fact, we should pay close attention to them. Remind ourselves that we all have them. Engage with them. Work on them, try to fix them, strive to be better. Leave a better world.

No one is infallible. If that means you don’t idolize anyone – good. Let humans be humans. Celebrate wins. Enjoy good deeds. Emulate virtue, and learn more about it. Don’t try to force people to be infallible, for you’ll chase away great merit.

I don’t like making mistakes. I imagine I’m not alone in that regard, so this post might have some useful advice for you!

One of the ways I’ve managed to reduce the number of mistakes I make in my day-to-day life, work, and other activities is to take active stock of the weak points in my decision-making and the “blind spots” in my actions.

Here’s a very basic example: let’s say I’m moving about in a crowded store with breakable things on the shelves. First, I recognize that this requires me to actually act differently than if I were walking around outside. Second, I recognize that if I’m going to knock something over and break it, it’s probably not going to be with my hands. Why? My hand-eye coordination is good, my hands are always in front of me and thus in my field of view, and there’s usually more clear space in front of me than behind me. No, if I’m going to knock something over, it’s almost certainly going to be with my elbows.

My elbows only have to move a small amount back to be outside of my field of view, they have less sensory input than my hands, and the space behind me is often more limited (when we feel crowded or cramped, we tend to back up as a general rule). So, since I’m aware of that, I correct for it. I bring my elbows into my sides and lock them there. I don’t step backwards at all. I look over my shoulder and check my distances as I move around the crowd.

In other words, I looked for the weakness in my process, realizing that mistakes would likely come from there if they come from anywhere.

This applies to… well, just about everything. In just about any process, you have “hands and elbows,” meaning areas that you’re naturally very well attuned to and competent in, and areas that are in your blind spots. Mistakes more often come from the elbows.

When mistakes aren’t very costly, focus on your strengths. If I were out doing yard work in my own yard, there aren’t many things I could hurt with a stray elbow. So it would be silly to waste effort constantly checking them; in that instance, I should be focusing on my hands and doing my best work. But when mistakes are costly (like being in a crowded glassware store), it makes sense to be more aware of my weaknesses.

Identifying the difference between the two scenarios, and then identifying what to do in each, can reduce your mistakes considerably. And it’s better advice than a generic “be careful.”

When my daughter is climbing a tree (a frequent occurrence!), I never say “be careful.” That’s about as useless a piece of advice as you can give. Instead, I say “look at your feet.” She, like most people, looks at her hands while climbing. But you’re not going to fall because of your hands – if you fall, it will be because you weren’t watching your feet and you got a piece of footing that wasn’t secure and it slips out. That’s the weak point, and falling out of a tree is a costly enough mistake that it warrants mitigating.

80% of the time (at least), you’ll be in situations where it’s more correct to go all-in on your strengths. But in those 20% of times where mistakes can be severe, reduce them – watch your feet and elbows.

When you make bets with someone, you might lose. That fact alone is why betting is good for you – you’ll be more careful and you’ll tend to interact only with more serious people. Talk is cheap, as they say, but if you “make it interesting” it gets… well, interesting.

A few losses when there’s something on the line will make you smart. Very quickly.

My oldest daughter made a wager with me tonight – she gave me 10 to 1 odds on a dollar that I couldn’t exactly duplicate a series of actions she’d take. The scheme is that one of the actions involved pretending to take a sip of water but actually holding it in her mouth – a later action in the series would be spitting it out and hopefully I wouldn’t be able to do the same.

I was born at night, but not last night. Daddy got his $10.

And you better believe I kept it! I even made her take my money to the store and buy stuff for me. She learned a powerful lesson.

Don’t talk trash if you won’t bet; don’t bet unless you’re sure you can win; and you’re never sure you can win against Dad.

Happy Father’s Day, y’all.

Here’s a thought experiment for you: imagine you could make any changes you wanted to the fabric of our society. Blank check! You can create or remove or overhaul institutions, alter prevailing social trends, make ideas more or less popular, change the scope of civic leadership, etc. But (of course) there’s a catch: you have to put all your changes down on a list, and they all take effect the day after you die.

No changes happen during your lifetime, but the day after you shuffle off the mortal coil all your sweeping ideas go into effect.

Tell me – as you were reading, did your ideas change when you got to the catch?

I could be remembering wrong (the human memory is notoriously fallible), but it seems to me that when I was a very young man, the prevailing sentiment among good-hearted people when confronted with societal ills was “I want to work to make this better for my kids. I don’t want the next generation to have these same difficulties.”

I’m not sure if that attitude has largely departed or if it’s simply drowned out by noise that wasn’t there when I was younger (either is equally possible), but I think it’s a better attitude than attempting to change the world for yourself alone.

There’s still plenty of conflict to be had – what I think a better world for my kids looks like and what you think a better world for your kids looks like might be very different – but the conflict becomes more civil, less heated. We’re no longer attacking each other. We’re building.

Forget about you for a moment. What do you want the world to look like for those that come after? The real beauty of this is that time has tremendous leverage. If you say, “I want a shady back yard right now,” that would take a lot of work. If you say, “I want my kids to have a shady back yard,” all you have to do is plant a seed.

My youngest kid is super strong and extremely adventurous, so today I had to install various counter-measures throughout the house to keep his zone of destruction relatively isolated.

My middle kid, who is on the most adorable kick ever of wanting to help everyone do everything, was practically salivating at the idea of getting to dig around in my tools with me to install these new features. She changed my name to “Tool Daddy” (instead of regular Daddy) and amended her own name similarly – complete with insistence that I refer to her this way.

She was quite diligent! The entire time I was installing, she was right next to me with a tool of her own, mimicking my actions. Every ten seconds or so she’d stop to say “Wow Tool Daddy! You’re doing a great job!”

There’s an explicit understanding I’ve had with all of my children, and I think it’s a good bargain to strike. The bargain is this: yes, my kiddos, you can help me or accompany me with absolutely anything, as long as you’re not deliberately hindering me. Of course I understand that the work goes slower with a kid on each leg than it would otherwise – but it’s also not really “work” at all if my kids are laughing and learning and we’re all enjoying the time. The hard rule is just that they’re not allowed to “goof off” in a way that is counter to the activity. My kid can take a screwdriver and poke at what we’re building all day, no matter how ineffectually – but if she pokes me, or starts digging in the grass with it, etc. then she’s on her own.

This works well. Even at a very young age, it makes my kids want to learn what I’m actually doing, makes them observe, teaches them a little more focus and discipline each day while still preserving the fun. That’s a good lesson for everyone – have fun, but stay focused.

You can build a lot that way.

There is such a vast chorus of voices out there that it can be tricky to decide who you should pay attention to. “Do your own research” is good advice, except that research will still put you in contact with a lot of different sources of information; discretion is required. So here are my criteria for how I decide who at least is potentially worth my attention:

1. They face consequences for being wrong. A surprising number of people ignore this very important criteria, but I want to listen to people with skin in the game. This pretty much eliminates any politician and most people in the media right off the bat. They might point me towards topics I want to research, but they shouldn’t be the final step of anyone’s investigation because they almost never face consequences for being wrong or even outright lying.
2. They spend a lot of time in their field. Journalists don’t give information; they write about information. But if a journalist writes an article about an interesting new discovery made by astronomers, that doesn’t make them an astronomer. So they probably got a lot wrong, or oversimplified, or sensationalized, etc. That means if I care about the information, I can use the article as a starting point, but I have to go deep. I might as well ignore it as noise otherwise.
3. They can talk like a human. There’s an old adage that says if you can’t explain it to a ten-year-old, you don’t understand it. The more you try to build a barricade out of jargon or ultra-specific industry terms, the more likely I am to think you just don’t want to be scrutinized. That’s not me saying “anything I don’t immediately understand must be voodoo” or anything silly like that. But if you’re simultaneously talking to me and seemingly trying to prevent me from understanding what you’re saying, I’m going to assume you’re more concerned with looking smart than with imparting information.

Those aren’t the end-all, be-all of my list. Just those three things doesn’t automatically mean I’ll trust everything you say; I’m eternally a skeptic at heart. But if you don’t at least check off those three boxes, I’m almost certainly going to assume you’re all smoke, no fire.

Note that a very big, very absent criteria is “agrees with my priors.” In fact, having these three criteria always at the forefront of my mind helps me avoid the echo chamber. If I look at something and say, “okay, this is from a person who clearly has a decent amount of time in their sphere, they’re not being deliberately obtuse, and they’re in a position where being wrong would be very costly to them,” then that immediately tells me that any natural inclination I have to dismiss them is likely to be confirmation bias at work and I should give it a more serious consideration.

There’s a lot of noise out there. Be a skeptic, but be a principled one.

A fable:

Once upon a time there was a bridge across a mighty river. The river was wild and couldn’t be crossed any other way; even this bridge had to stand against many floods and surges and often there were times that it seemed it might not make it. But each time, the keepers of the bridge explained to all those who dwelled nearby that there was no other way to cross the river – if the bridge were not kept in good repair, then this way would be lost, and so people contributed their time and wealth to the bridge’s upkeep.

After weathering enough storms, people stopped questioning the bridge – it had proven its worth many times over and stood the test of time.

The bridge was so stable, however, that it eventually outlasted the river. Time and water have a way of eroding the landscape, and what was once a mighty but well-defined river slowly became a wide, meandering wetland. It now stretched over many miles but was no more than a few feet deep at its deepest; the bridge still stood in the middle but connected nothing to nothing.

An enterprising young person one day proposed the building of a ferry, broad and stable, which could easily take people from one side of the wide wetland to the other. Because her idea was new, she anticipated that many people would attack it, but she had an answer for all their misguided objections. The ferry was a good idea; it was simply unusual and she understood that people wouldn’t comprehend the value and she would have to convince folks of it.

Some of the people began to be convinced of the idea and liked the prospect of the improvement it would make to their lives. And then one of them spoke out and said “We could easily afford the ferry with the money we save not paying for that bridge’s upkeep any more.”

Though this was a wise idea, the man that spoke out was savagely ridiculed. Stop paying for the bridge? Was this man insane? The bridge has stood the test of time, it has proven itself over and over, all those who questioned it in the past were proven wrong until eventually they stopped questioning it, and the bridge has remained the same all those years!

The bridge had remained the same. But the river had changed. Changed so much that the bridge was a useless institution, but time is a stalwart guardian. The man who spoke out and the woman who dreamed of a ferry both raised this point – that the bridge had earned the respect of history but was no longer needed – but were once again shouted down. The people who did the shouting had no arguments in favor of the bridge, but their loyalty was unshaken nonetheless.

The bridge had existed so long as an institution that people had forgotten how to defend it; they simply knew that they should, because they always had. It had been so long since anyone questioned it that no one knew the answers anymore, but they answered regardless – with shouts and insults. None shouted louder than the bridge keepers, who had long built lives and livelihoods around maintaining a monument to a world that no longer existed anywhere but in the minds of those that paid.

There is no end to this story, because it repeats again and again forever. There is always an old bridge to nowhere defended by those who have forgotten reason and replaced it with tradition, and always a new ferry going somewhere unexplored and captained by people ready to defend it.

Pick the ferry.