I like it when small, useful objects make my life better. My favorite kind of object is any that lets me get rid of two or more other objects, thus reducing my overall level of stuff-having while maintaining the same utility.

I appreciate smart phones in particular, because I’m of an age where I once owned, separately, a camera, calculator, flashlight, CD player, address book, notepad, alarm clock, Dictaphone, camcorder, and of course telephone – plus probably other stuff I’m forgetting. At the utility of the smart phone keeps increasing without the device taking up any more space, so that’s a big plus.

I’m usually on the lookout for such items – things that replace other stuff, add utility, etc. One thing you have to be careful of is when an item combines the utility of two or more other things, but sacrifices quality on them in such a way as to eradicate any efficiency gains. There’s no point in having a combination spatula/flashlight if it isn’t as good as a regular spatula or flashlight would be. (By the way, patent pending on the Flashula, that’s all me. You’ll see!)

So sometimes, I build my own thing. Sometimes I’ll want two or more things to be combined, and I’ll actually have a lot of fun tinkering until I get it exactly right because my use case is so specific that the market doesn’t have such an item. There’s a certain thrill in knowing you’ve crafted something truly unique, that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Even if it’s use is incredibly narrow, it’s useful for you.

Many problems that you think of as unsolvable actually just need the right combination of two tools. App and software developers are great at this – they listen to complaints like “I always have to make this certain kind of document in THIS program, but then when I want to send it to someone else I have to use this whole OTHER thing” and they make a combination platform that lets you both make AND send that thing. Hooray!

Think about two things you need to do regularly and see if there’s one tool that could replace the two you currently use. You might make your life a little better. You might invent a million-dollar product.

You might just have fun.

Imagine that no matter what you chose to do for a living, you would be paid the same amount. Not free money – you still have to work a more-or-less full-time job, but the income is fixed no matter what you pick. And let’s say that the amount of money is small – enough to live on, but not much more. No wolves at your door, but not a life of luxury.

What would you do? I think the intuitive answer is that you’d seek to maximize your happiness with your work. You’d do work you truly enjoyed with people you liked. You’d seek meaning and purpose in your work, perhaps. Maybe you’d just do something easy so that you weren’t stressed. These all seem like viable answers.

A lot of people seem to think that they’re actually in this situation, but don’t do the obvious things. People seem to think that no matter what they do, they can’t “get ahead,” but instead of accepting the fact they think is so immutable and maximizing the other aspects, they just keep working at jobs they hate and complain about them. They hate the grind, their bosses, their environments, the actual work they do, and yet they keep at it – even though they’ll loudly tell you that they think it’s all for nothing.

Maybe this is just an example of actions speaking louder than words. Maybe for all their grousing, these people really do believe that if they grind long enough they’ll catch their lucky break. Or maybe they’re just in a sort of permanent “survival mode,” afraid to make any change at all for fear it will be a negative change resulting in an even worse situation.

I’ve always thought of ambition as a good thing. I still do, but I’ve been re-defining the word a lot lately. I used to think of ambition as applying only to money and status – more impressive titles, more money, “climbing the ladder.” I put a lot of myself into that way of thinking.

But maybe that’s not the only way to look at ambition.

I’ve always thought of someone’s level of happiness as innate. People just have a certain baseline level of happiness, and the only way they can adjust it is mentally – just “be happier,” maybe by ignoring bad things outside of your control. But maybe happiness is something you can actually change through external factors that you build into your life.

What if the original hypothetical scenario I presented in this post applied to happiness instead of money? What if you had a certain baseline happiness that couldn’t improve as long as you maintained a more-or-less active life. (In other words, it could decrease if you just sat around in the dark all day, but as long as you generally did stuff a normal adult would do, your happiness level would reach a baseline level, but never improve.) This happiness level was enough to keep you from breaking down during the day, but not much else – not joy, but call it “survival happiness.” What would you do then?

Would you maximize money by working in high-stress, high-danger roles, realizing that you wouldn’t get any happier if you were less stressed and safer? What would you do with the money, if the rewards couldn’t make you happier, either? Purpose matters – I think intellectually it’s worthwhile to make the world a better place even if you yourself don’t get joy from it. But what would that look like?

There’s a tremendous amount of research that says past a certain point of material success, you don’t get any happier from it. And that point of material success is pretty low! Basically as long as the wolves aren’t at your door and your bills are paid, people’s happiness is more or less completely unaffected by increases in living standard. If Bill Gates is happier than me, it’s not because he has more money.

Just like in the first scenario, though, lots of people think they’re in exactly this situation but don’t do what it seems like they should. Lots of people think they can’t get any happier, but they don’t seek out meaningful things besides happiness, such as purpose or meaning or even money. They just keep doing what they’re doing, perhaps thinking that if they grind long enough, they’ll suddenly hit this moment of enlightenment and their baseline happiness will shoot up and sustain itself at that higher level.

Two things I’m realizing more and more, day by day:

1. Absolutely nothing is automatic. Nothing just happens if you do the same thing day after day. If every day you make ten dollars, then after a thousand days you’ll make ten thousand dollars, that’s it. You won’t suddenly make a million. Likewise, if you’re stressed and anxious and miserable today, you’ll be stressed and anxious and miserable for the rest of your life unless you do different things.
2. Absolutely nothing can change from inside your head. You can’t think your way into wealth, you have to act. But you also can’t think your way into happiness. It’s not a matter of a different perspective or reflection or choice, except in the sense that different perspectives or choices can lead you to different actions. Actions which build a different life.

If you want the room around you be more green, you can either paint everything in the room green, or you can wear green-colored glasses. But when it comes to happiness, there are no glasses you can put on to make the exact same life make you happier. You have to get out the paint and paintbrush and get to work.

I admit that’s scary. It’s scary to me. Just like the people who are in a survival mindset with money, afraid that any change may actually wreck the delicate house of cards they have and make their situation worse, many people can be “survival happy.” They have just enough happiness to not jump off a bridge and they’re afraid that anything they change will make things worse.

But you can’t think like that. You can’t. It’s scary. It’s terrifying. But you can’t protect and shelter a candle flame forever. You have to risk moving away from it to build a bigger fire you can light with it. Otherwise you’ll just watch it slowly burn out.

How long would it take you to double a dollar?

It’s not as easy as it sounds. To really “double” a dollar, you have to make $2 by using nothing but the original dollar. You can’t just reach into your wallet and pull out a second bill; that’s cheating. You can’t even drive anywhere – that’s using resources beyond the original dollar, like your car and gas, etc.

And you can’t just sell something you already own, either. If you start with nothing but the clothes on your back and a dollar, you don’t really win the challenge if you end the day with two dollars but no shoes. Now, if you manage to sell your shoes for $30, and then find an identical pair that you can buy from somewhere else for $29, you’ve won. You ended the day as you started it, except with an extra dollar.

When you think about it that way, it’s more of a challenge. But you could do it. I believe in you.

My oldest daughter recently asked me for help with some task that she was more than capable of completing on her own. In very typical-dad fashion, I admonished her for relying on me when she was more than able on her own, but the off-the-cuff comment I made stuck with me. I rather liked it, so here’s what I said to her:

“You have brains, eyes, hands and feet, and those are the only tools you need to solve every problem.” (And truth be told, you only really need #1 on that list – plenty of people have solved plenty of problems without one or more of the other three.)

So I believe you can double your dollar – you have brains. You might even have other assets. Once you double your dollar, you can do it again. And again.

Don’t let anyone tell you it’s more complicated than this. It’s not. I believe in you.

Remember learning about the atom in grade school science? I do. Even though I never did a thing with it, the model of the atom made a big impression on me.

I found it weird. In the middle, you had protons (which are positive) and neutrons (which are neutral). Then circling WAY outside of that were these tiny electrons (which are negative). First, I found the naming convention really weird, but I got over that. What made me intensely curious was why protons and electrons didn’t seem to be mirror images of one another. Protons are much bigger, stationary, and hang out in the center with neutrons. Electrons were tiny, fast, and circled way outside. Neutrons were just… there.

Okay, this isn’t going to be a post about actual atoms because, to be frank, the above paragraph represents more or less my sum total of knowledge on the subject. But that model IS a great analogy for a good method for living your life, and I love analogies.

You see, when we “put ourselves out there,” and talk about our interests or our skills or our passions, we come up against this wall of fear that says that for every person we find who agrees with us, for each kindred spirit who will support and encourage us, there will be ten times as many “haters” who will detract and admonish. We’re searching for a few positive “protons,” but we fear we’ll find many negative “electrons.”

But that’s not what happens! In reality, there are mostly two kinds of people you encounter – people who support you and think you’re awesome, and people who are indifferent and don’t care either way. That second group, the neutral “neutrons” won’t get in your way, won’t stop you, won’t interact with you at all. They cost you nothing in your journey, even if you gain nothing from interacting with them.

(This is a sales lesson, too – you might only win 3 deals out of a hundred pitches, but the other 97 didn’t cost you anything but time. They don’t detract from your success, they just didn’t add to it. They were neutral, not negative.)

The negative “electrons” – the haters – are waaaaaaaaaaaaaay over there. Far away, in a distant orbit. Repulsed by your positivity and the positivity of those you seek to engage with. No one wants to hang out with them. And you’ll rarely have to deal with them at all.

(In fact, if I really want to stretch the analogy, I think we’re not even sure where they are? I like that, even if I got the science muddled.)

The point is, you have nothing to fear. Everyone will either support you or ignore you. Haters are rare, far, and safely ignored. Be positive!

So often the greatest ideas languish in the minds of their creators for want of a second voice to echo the thought, modify it and amplify it. We fear not only the rejection of the idea, but the noisy push-back. Not only will this person reject my idea, we think, but they’ll reject it so vehemently that their own voice will drown out mine, and all we’ll have is more chaos and noise than we would have if I had just stayed silent.

If there is one tactic I soundly reject in virtually all its forms, it’s “shouting down.” Dismissing an idea or argument simply by being louder in your disagreement. Doing more than disagreeing – mocking, belittling, and attacking.

It’s terrible for the person who offered you the gift of their idea – and their respect, in showing it to you. But it’s terrible for you too, if you do it. “Shouting down” is loud, and others hear it – that’s the point – and it doesn’t take long before you find yourself bereft of new ideas because no one wants to share them with you. This is how echo chambers form.

Some ideas, even at their core, are abhorrent. But shouting down someone who shared an abhorrent idea with you doesn’t eliminate that evil – it hides it, forces it into other channels, and hardens the heart of the person who carries it. That hardened heart becomes armor against others who might try to win over that person with the power of better ideas. If you shout someone down, you just add a brick to their fortress. You can’t bully someone into goodness.

Listen to those ideas. Understand the people that have them, and why those ideas found root in that person’s heart. Only from that position can you influence.

I will listen, if you’ll let me. Anyone, everyone. I won’t shout you down. I encourage everyone to do the same.

I think many problems are fundamentally unsolvable. But I don’t think that means there’s no way around them.

The reason I think many problems are unsolvable is because solving a problem takes time and effort and thought and those are all finite things. It’s possible that a problem might be solved on an infinite time scale, but we don’t have that. And what often happens before solve a problem (either as individuals or as a society) is we outgrow it.

For instance, allow me to engage in wild speculation for a moment. Take all this with an enormous grain of salt – I’m not an expert here in any sense, so this is just me musing about the unforeseen. That being said, here’s my prediction: we won’t ever solve any of the problems relating to renewable resource use on Earth. We won’t ‘solve’ climate change, non-renewable resources, etc. Because long before we get to the point where we would solve those problems, we’ll just figure out how to live in space and on other planets instead.

Someday all of Earth will be a preserved, historic park. Tourists will come here and take pictures of the “birthplace of civilization.”

Today a private company brought humans to the International Space Station for the first time in history.

We’re going to be okay.

Here’s how I made up a recipe for campfire hash browns. It was a nice day, the kids wanted to do outside stuff, and I wanted to cook.

Step 1: Get a big piece of tinfoil, and put a big pile of potatoes, onions, corn, cheese, and bacon on it. Put a half a stick of butter in the middle and put some paprika and whatever other spices you happen to like on there.

Step 2: Wrap it up, then do that two more times.

Step 3: Put it on a fire that your three kids help you build. If you don’t have three kids, just get any kids to help, they all want to build fires anyway:

Step 4: Move them around so they only burn a little and not all the way. Keep moving them around on occasion for maybe half an hour? Whatever:

Step 5: Open those bad boys up and scrape out the delicious heart attack you’re going to eat along with a can of beans you cooked hobo-style in the can and some hot dogs your kids gleefully set on fire and then ate:

This was so ridiculously good.

What? You want a deeper lesson or something here? Okay, it’s this: learn the basic principles of a category of knowledge (such as the basic principle “butter + potatoes + pretty much anything else will probably be good”) and then experiment. Involve your kids if you have them, or just anyone you like, because learning together is fun. You’ll burn the edges a little, but you can always scrape that off, and there will be something delicious in there. And if that’s not an analogy for all of life, I don’t know what is.

Be wary of people who tell you that you need to “live in reality” whenever you propose change.

In fact, forget “wary.” Tell those people to go jump in a lake.

By its very nature, change requires a vision of a world that does not exist. A fantasy, a dream. If you’re trying to change anything at all, you’re “not living in the real world.” So that’s a foolish complaint for someone to levy against you just for proposing an idea that doesn’t yet exist.

Whenever someone tells you to “live in the real world,” they’re always proposing a reactionary, grueling endurance of life’s woes. Your job sucks, and you want to start your own company? “Live in the real world,” says some jerk, by which they mean “go to your job that you hate and be miserable every day.”

Create a reality without that jerk. And once you’ve made that improvement, keep right on going.