At times, it might feel like life has placed an impossible choice in front of you. Two vital things compete for some essential and limited resource – your time, your energy, your focus. Perhaps the night your biggest client is flying in to close a year-long negotiation is the same night your daughter stars in the school musical that she’s been working on all semester.

This isn’t about clever solutions (though hey, find them if you can – maybe the clients want to see a bunch of 8th graders perform Anything Goes!), but rather, it’s about the path forward, the Third Choice.

That choice is this: Do not allow life to do this to you a second time. At least, not in the same way.

When I was younger and had no children, I had the kind of career that featured frequent major make-or-break meetings like the one above. Things I couldn’t reschedule or miss without dire consequences. But since my career was my major focus, that wasn’t a conflict. I didn’t miss anything… until my first child was born. Then, suddenly, those conflicts were happening all the time.

And because I’m a little thick, it took me a bit before I made the necessary shifts. I replaced that job with one that didn’t have those kinds of meetings. One that better fit the life I wanted to live, and the impossible choices I wanted to avoid.

If you find yourself being forced to choose between pursuing your passion and giving energy to a romantic partner, just remember – a good alignment between those two means you don’t have to make that choice. It might be painful, but one of those things doesn’t serve the life you want to live, even if it once did. (And the answer isn’t obvious, nor always the same! And if you think it is, then maybe that says something about the element of your life that you should be reconsidering?)

Don’t hold two magnets together by their North sides, trying to force them together. Flip one around, and find harmony.

I will sometimes interact with people who will prejudge someone based on their belief system. These same people wouldn’t dream of prejudging someone based on their skin color, gender, or nationality. “Belief systems are different,” they’ll say. “It’s not a fact of your birth that you can’t change; it’s the moral philosophy you choose to live by. So it’s fair game!”

Allow me to present to you two very good reasons not to assume anything about someone just because you know what religion they follow:

1. Your experiences with that religion, especially if they’re negative enough to generate prejudice within you, were probably at the hands of people who were not following it correctly. If you got screamed at by the Westboro Baptist Church, and that caused you to automatically dislike Baptists, then you’re doing everyone (including yourself) a disservice.
2. Even if the majority of the followers of a belief system actually practice whatever actions you find so negative, this person might not know that. If you want to bring someone into your religion, it’s bad recruiting to start with the hateful stuff. So usually that comes later, after they’re loyal. If someone is in that early stage and you attack them, you drive them toward the more extreme fringes. If instead you simply talk to them, you may find lots of common ground – and save them.

If you’re on the outside of any group, then most of your knowledge about that group will come from the most extreme (and therefore most vocal and newsworthy) fringes. That’s a bad way to evaluate anything.

Some days you just don’t have it in you to do a lot. Or there isn’t a lot to do, and that’s okay! You’re allowed to have lounge days.

…I keep telling myself.

In reality, I always feel like a slug if I don’t accomplish something. So I try to have a little principle for “slugging:” Keep Costs Low.

Slugging is okay if I don’t impose a lot of costs that outpace my productivity. That means when I slug, I don’t overeat or spend a lot of money. If I’m taking a day off, at least my costs are, too.

You should mark the things you love, whether or not you’ll always love them.

If you love apples, go ahead and plant an apple tree. “But what if I don’t still love apples in ten years?” So what? You will always have loved them when you planted the tree, and we don’t need things to be permanent in order to celebrate them.

Language is a wonderful thing. Using the power of language, mankind has been to space. We’ve built incredible civilizations and wonderful art. I love language!

But now and then, it’s helpful to remember that language, and the civilization it carries, puts layers and layers of occlusion over fundamental truths.

We so often follow the words, and we stop looking at anything else. Want a real trip? Watch a foreign language film – or even better, TV show. Don’t put the subtitles on. Let yourself be totally lost in terms of words, but leave yourself every other element. The visuals, the tone of voice, the setting. Let your gut instincts tell you what’s going on.

You won’t pick up every nuance. But you’ll notice things you never did before. You may not know what the bad guy did, but you’ll know who the bad guy is, for sure. If it’s a secret, you’ll probably figure it out before someone who understands the words!

Go to a part of the world where you can’t understand what’s being said, and just observe. You’ll see who leads social groups, you’ll see who’s in love, you’ll see all sorts of things that the words hid from you.

Keep that observation sharp. Even with the words, those are helpful skills.

My father admired anyone who would sacrifice for freedom, and anyone who would defend others. May you always have the spirit of rebellion within your heart, planted next to your compassion for all humanity.

The littlest thing becomes the biggest thing in the world when you’re experiencing it uniquely for the first time.

Are flowers a big thing? Objectively no – but if no one has ever surprised you with flowers before, it might be the thing that makes your whole month.

A text from a friend telling me how much they enjoy spending time with me, a partner going out of their way to bake me something from scratch, a child’s trophy for their best dad ever.

These are my moon landings.

Today I discovered that an app I’d been using to order from a restaurant for years was accumulating rewards points the whole time. Suffice to say we had a feast with numerous neighborhood kiddos and it didn’t cost me a dime.

Earlier today, something I wrote on this blog years ago became a helpful tool to communicate an idea; it was better, in fact, than the way I was trying to phrase it before doing a quick search of the archives.

What other secret treasures do we leave in our wake, waiting for the day they become just the thing we need?

Happy New Month!

My resolution in July is almost always some variation of “be more free.” Here’s the most important thing about freedom to remember: It requires work.

You (should) start learning this at a young age. Don’t like the food your parents cook you? Cook your own. The rules in their house becoming stifling? Move out.

Hard work and personal responsibility are the price you pay for the freedom to live the life you want. I will aim to remember this myself, and for my resolution, I’m going to give my children all more opportunities to be more free in exchange for some added personal responsibilities. They’ve always stepped up when I’ve done this before, so I’m excited to do it again.

Be more free, my friends!

There is a vast machine out there that feeds on your rage. A long time ago, the various people who profit from the machine made it immune to being raged against by figuring out how to make vitriol the very fuel that powers it.

This machine exists to make you angry, because you being angry at it makes it more powerful. It then has the power to make you even angrier, growing ever mightier with each spike in your blood pressure.

Do you remember the advice in the earliest days of the internet, “don’t feed the trolls?” The wiser among us recognized that some people got pleasure out of baiting you into arguments and getting under your skin. The only winning move was not to play; ignore, block, and move on with your life.

Well, the trolls are behind the wheel, now. Entertainment and politics alike thrive exclusively on your attention, and the most reliable attention is angry attention. So the machine has learned to make you angry, not as a side effect, but as the main objective. This means you cannot ever win. You can’t ever beat the machine, because it feeds on your very attempts. It isn’t a person that can be intimidated, reasoned with, or overpowered. Your anger does nothing but spin the flywheel, and that’s why it spends so much of its power directly trying to make you angry.

Don’t feed the trolls, and don’t feed the machine. Whenever you get angry about anything that isn’t within your arm’s reach, remember that your anger is worse than impotent. It’s actually feeding the thing you hate.

Ignore, block, and move on with your life.