I have a great admiration for the concept of the assembly line.

Inputs enter on one side, there’s a series of defined, meticulously-curated actions, and then an output emerges from the other end. It’s a thing of beauty.

You can think of a lot of the processes in your life as working like that, and then you can find it easier to make improvements. If you think of all outside stimuli as inputs – from unwelcome news to challenging assignments to interesting blog posts – you can create a series of tasks to do for each of them.

Where do you put things to keep track of them? How do you devote time to them? Who do you speak to about them? All of these questions are stops on the assembly line.

It might seem a little mechanical, but many of the tasks in your life are just that. You shouldn’t put everything on the assembly line; some things are sublime and deserve to be treated as a whole experience. But not everything – some things just need to be processed.

Keeping them separate leaves you more time for the good stuff.

If you take any major circumstance in your life, you can trace its history back to a point where a tiny change would have made it all different. It’s possible that tiny change might even be before you were born, but it’s still there. Somewhere out there is a man who stared at airplanes flying in the sky his whole childhood and then grew up to become a pilot; if his bedroom had been on the other side of the house he’d have seen the train yard instead and maybe become an engineer.

At some point, you met someone who changed your life. Maybe you’re very aware of it and maybe you have no idea, but it happened. Maybe your parents’ first meeting was quite the chance encounter, and one late bus could have meant you were never born.

We think of the history of our lives as resilient – as if the way it’s unfolded so far is the way it must always have unfolded. But the tiniest changes could have re-written the whole tapestry.

That applies to the future, too. Tiny changes can have incredible, far-reaching impacts if they occur early enough.

Sometimes we get a chance to do a small favor, and even though the effort is low, it’s equally easy to not do it. The reward seems minor, even inconsequential.

Do it anyway. Send that email, make that call, lend that dollar. We can’t possibly predict all the long-term consequences of all of our actions, but I’m willing to bet that if you make more of your actions good and kind and generous than not, that the long-term effects will trend that way too. It might be three generations before it happens, but someday someone will say that you’re the reason their life is good.

Deciding to take action can seem sudden. As a result, people will decide to take action… a long time from now. “I’m definitely going to take that painting course! Next summer.” Somehow, a million things happen between now and then and you don’t do it.

Saying “I’m going to take that painting class – tomorrow!” can seem impulsive. So we’re scared of it, and we buffer our decisions with too much extra time. The reality is that the suddenness only feels that way because you’re measuring the incorrect length of time. The time between when you finally decide to take action and when you take that action should be short – as short as possible. What makes it not sudden at all is when you realize that the time period being referred to is the gap between when you finally decide to take action and the very first time you wanted to.

That gap could be years.

If you take a long time to decide, so be it. That’s in the past. But once you decide, don’t fool yourself into thinking you can decide on behalf of some future version of you that might never come into existence. You can only control the Present Day You, and that’s the person that has to take the action you decided on.

Go forth, and wreak havoc.

I’ve been a bit of a slacker on my workout for the last week or so. But my oldest daughter really likes working out with me, so today she requested that as a daddy-daughter activity. It’s easier to put off your workout when it’s just for you. How can I say no to her?

You can generate a lot of good habits in your life by tying them to other things you want to do. I always invite my kids along with my chores. When my three-year-old says “I wanna help!” while I’m doing dishes or cooking dinner, I always find something for her to do, even if it’s just holding a can of peas or drying a spatula.

I encourage my kids to join in the things I have to do, so they’ll want to do those things. That in turn keeps me motivated to do them, like today. I got a really solid workout in because my daughter just wanted to spend the time. If I played video games with her that’s what she would want to do, so instead I try to tie as much of our activities together to positive things. Reading time, workout time, cleaning time, etc.

Connect the things you want to do with the things you have to do. It’ll help.

I often think about the usability of advice versus its “absolute value.”

For instance, let’s say I ask you “What’s the fastest way to get to San Francisco?” You could answer “fly the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird” and technically be correct. You would also be wildly unhelpful, since there’s zero chance of me doing that. More practical but less “technically correct” advice would be to book a non-stop flight on a commercial airline.

In that example, it’s easy to see the difference between the “best” answer and the most helpful answer. It’s not always that easy, though. One of our big hangups is when we give advice that is both good in an absolute sense, and easy for us to follow personally, but that the person receiving the advice can’t utilize fully for some reason.

Here’s an example: you’ve lost a lot of weight and gotten healthy lately, and your friend asks you for advice. You tell them that you joined a gym with a pool because swimming is super good exercise, and you went swimming every day. This is good advice, and it clearly worked for you. Your friend, however, is deathly afraid of water.

The advice is still good in the “absolute value” sense. But your friend can’t use it. Now, you can try to force the issue by trying to convince your friend that a fear of water is unfounded, that logically they’re in no danger in an indoor pool in a gym with a lifeguard on duty, and that their phobia is standing in the way of their progress. And you’d be wasting your breath.

Instead, just give them the best advice that’s actually useful for them. That might be #4 on the actual list, but if it’s the one they can use, it’s the best one.

A really common version of this that I encounter follows this pattern. Let’s say Bob comes to me for advice. Bob says, “I’m doing X, and I’ve been doing it a hundred times a week for 6 months, and it isn’t working. Help me out here.”

I say: “No problem. Stop doing X; it isn’t working. Instead, do Y and you’ll get good results.”

And then Bob says back: “But that’s really strange! All the standard wisdom says do X!”

I used to get really frustrated. I used to waste a lot of breath trying to explain to people the faulty logic of telling me that X had been failing again and again but then defending it as a good option because the “conventional wisdom” said to do it. I used to try to actually get into all the deeper reasons behind why X might have been a good idea once before, but times have changed, blah blah blah.

That didn’t help me, it didn’t help Bob.

Here’s what I started saying that helped a lot: “Okay, then keep doing X too. Just also do Y. That way you get the best of both worlds.”

In this case “keep doing the thing that isn’t working” actually became good advice, because it was the only thing that made them also do the thing that would work. The sunk cost fallacy and “conventional wisdom” bias are both huge influences on people’s ability to think clearly, so instead of fighting it, just work around it. As long as the thing that isn’t working isn’t directly countering the thing that will work, doing both is fine. They’ll gradually abandon X when they see Y is working all on their own.

Give the best advice someone can use, and help the person they are.

I once had a client who made very good money, but was miserable at his job. Really hated it. We talked for a while about other career paths, but the question of money kept coming back up. Every time we’d come close to discovering something else he might do for a living that would make him happy, he would worry that it wouldn’t make him as much money as his current high-paying profession.

So we started to get into finances a little. The guy was living WAY below his means. He was saving more than 50% of his income (which is awesome!). He was frugal and sensible and more than capable of taking a huge pay cut in order to find something else that didn’t make him so unhappy. But he couldn’t get away from this idea that he would somehow be failing if he did so, especially if he did so willingly.

I eventually framed the question differently. I asked him: “If there was some gadget you could buy that with a push of a button just made you happy and removed the anxiety and stress and anger you feel from your job, would you pay 25% of your annual salary for it?” And he said he would, in a heartbeat, without question. He’d pay more, in fact. Why then, I asked, was he unwilling to take a 25% pay cut in order to just have a job he liked?

Surprisingly, he actually had an answer – and it was telling. He said, “It fundamentally feels different to have a $100,000/year job and spend $25,000 on something you want than to have a $75,000/year job and not need that thing.”

We dove in, and the conversation was enlightening. Many people lack a feeling of accomplishment, and in lieu of internal self-worth we look for external motivations. Your income is a common one. Not because it’s a good measure, but because it’s an easy measure. It’s hard to compare, apples-to-apples, whether you’re happier than you were a year ago, happier than you would be in a given hypothetical scenario, or happier than someone else (not that you should be comparing yourself to others!). Comparing salaries, however, is easy.

Too often we use income as a sort of “points system” for measuring how well we’re doing in life. I’ve fallen into this trap myself.

And listen, I’ll never say money doesn’t matter. It does; my kids have to eat, my bills have to get paid, all these things cost money. But that’s what money is – a means to an end. It’s not the end itself. It’s not my self-worth.

I prize ambition. I think we should be eager and excited to go out and make big changes and work for what we believe in and create value for others, and the end result of doing all of that well is often a solid paycheck. But everything costs something. Be aware of what each extra dollar costs you, and don’t pay more than $1.01’s worth of happiness for it.

There is no gadget. Happiness is hard to buy back once you’ve spent it on a paycheck.

Two men lived in a desert. They both had a large reservoir of water, and both men were generous and altruistic. They both believed that the highest virtue they could achieve was to slake the thirst of others.

The first man loaded his wagon with many barrels and filled them from his reservoir. He traveled to villages near and far, giving away water to whoever was thirsty. Many people filled a cup or two at his tap, and were happy for a time. The man saw this, and was pleased in turn. But each time he returned to his reservoir to refill his barrels, he was once more disappointed; he couldn’t help more people, because the same small group would be thirsty again. He drew ever-larger amounts from his reservoir in an attempt to help more people, but that just drained his reserves faster. He started going without water himself, thinking that each cup he drank was a cup he’d no longer have to give. Despite a lifetime of altruism, his reservoir eventually ran dry, and he perished of thirst.

The second man drank his own water, and dug a well. His first well was a failure, finding no water. As was his second, third, and twentieth. But he drank his own water and persevered. He tried irrigation systems to tap rivers, aqueducts to trap rain, and even condensers to pull the moisture from the air. There were many failures, all while he drank his own water. But before his reservoir ran dry, he found a way that succeeded. Now his reservoir would refill eternally, requiring him only to maintain the machinery. Now he could fill the cup of others a thousand times over. When his long life was at an end, he passed the machinery on to another, and was remembered… well.

This is a long way of saying “don’t light yourself on fire to keep others warm.” You cannot – cannot – help someone else if your own foundations aren’t built. If you can’t hunt, then the only way you can feed others is with your own body. Self-sacrifice might be noble, but it’s also woefully inefficient.

Here’s the trap: sometimes you look at an altruistic person who is doing good for the world and you think, that’s the kind of person I want to be. So you think that selflessly helping others will make you that kind of person, but the altruism is an effect of having your own life together, not a cause of your life coming together.

Let me repeat for the people in the back: Altruism is an effect of having your own life together, not a cause of your life coming together.

If you want to be the kind of person who makes a difference in the world, make sure you have a way of filling your own reservoir. Self-sacrifice is naturally limiting. Working to make the world a better place in a way that also sustains you, instead of drains you, means you can do it as long as you want.

Someone I used to know was having a problem with her two kids. They were about 2-3 years apart in age, with the boy being the older; they were roughly 9 and 6. The problem was that the boy was constantly hitting his little sister (specifically, slapping). No matter what punishment the parents levied, the boy simply would not stop, and he protested every punishment as unfair.

One day, this mom overheard her two kids arguing in the playroom, and fearing it might lead to another slapping incident, went to step in. However, the kids were arguing loudly enough that she inadvertently snuck up on them, with neither being aware that their parent was just outside the doorway.

So imagine her shock when her six-year-old girl smugly ended the argument by clapping her hands loudly a single time and then instantly bursting into very convincing waterworks and yelling “Mooooooom! He slapped me again!”

Turns out, every instance was faked. Punishments weren’t correcting the son’s behavior because he wasn’t actually striking his sister, and his protestations that he was innocent were actually true. The mom looked back and realized she had never actually once witnessed the incident herself, she’d just trusted the claims made by the sister (supported by some convincing sound effects!).

There are plenty of parenting lessons there, but today isn’t a parenting blog post. It’s a post about sources.

Because we all, at various stages, make the mistake the mom made. We take a reaction to something as evidence that the “something” happened. Now, I’m not saying all reactions are fake or malicious. But they’re not good primary sources for a lot of reasons.

Social signaling is a real thing. We have a thousand things putting pressure on us to react in different ways to different things. Even without that, people over- or under-react. And even those terms assume there’s a baseline “correct” way to feel about something, but of course there isn’t.

Back when I was managing salespeople in the financial industry, I once fielded an escalation call where a customer felt she’d been wildly disrespected. The way she was yelling and almost sobbing would give you the impression that the rep she’d been speaking with had dug up her mother’s grave. She wasn’t faking, either – she was clearly very genuinely upset! So naturally I wanted to help as much as I could, so I asked if she’d mind if I pulled up the recording of the call to review while she was on the line.

The rep had… wait for it… slightly mispronounced her surname.

That was literally it – the recording of the call wasn’t more than 15 seconds; she’d answered, he’d asked if Mr. Surname was available (our client), and she’d lost her top. Now, being the diplomatic manager that I was, I didn’t push back against a hysterical woman, I just engaged her in some dialogue and it turned out that Mr. Surname was actually in the hospital, it was pretty serious, she was stressed out of her mind, and he normally took care of this sort of thing and so on top of everything else just hearing an unfamiliar voice ask for him was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

We resolved it, everything was fine. But what was important in that moment was to realize that in no universe would it have been correct to give her reaction any sort of weight in my decision on how to handle my employee. Her reaction was genuine from her perspective, but just because she reacted as if he’d run over her dog didn’t mean he’d actually done that.

We are especially susceptible to this when we don’t have access to the primary source. We see people’s reactions to political speeches and agree or disagree with the reactions based on a lot of things, but “going and listening to the original speech in its entirety” isn’t usually one of them. We hear a loved one complain about a relationship and get mad on their behalf, even though we’ve never even met the significant other and certainly weren’t present for the event being described.

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t trust people. You have to, to a degree. It’s good to believe someone when you first hear their reaction, in the sense that you accept their reaction as genuine and the feelings they’re feeling as valid. But before you act on that belief, especially in a way that’s going to impact others, you need to dig into it a little yourself.

People say “ouch” for all sorts of reasons, and not all of them are because they got hit.

How many things can you filter out of the truth before it isn’t the truth anymore?

I’ve been asked by a few people what the differences are between how I use my three major social media outlets – this blog, my LinkedIn profile, and Twitter.

The answer itself is clear to me – this blog is for whatever I want. I don’t design it to be a specific thing, so the proportion of topics I write about is roughly equal to the proportion of topics I think about. And I don’t write for a specific audience; rather, I want to attract exactly the audience that wants to read this blog. If that audience is just my Aunt Karen, then that’s awesome (and I love you for reading, Aunt Karen!). If more people read it (and I suspect they do), then that’s cool too – but I’m not writing for anyone else. I’m writing what I want, and trying to become a clearer thinker and more developed person as a result.

Even so, I don’t write everything that comes to mind. I have bad days, and times when I want to just pour that out. But I don’t. My main reason for that decision is I know that all things are temporary, but I want to make my negative spaces more temporary and my positive ones more enduring. So I preserve the positivity here, and let the negativity have its moment, but then pass away. Like tears in rain.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, has a much more narrow purpose. Yes, I do link my blog there, but that’s mostly for visibility. The stuff I put on LinkedIn that I don’t put here is very topical and tailored to my professional life. I’m not writing for posterity there, I’m interacting with my professional culture and peers in our day-to-day existence. I advertise there whereas I don’t here, for example.

Twitter, lastly, is my even-more-ephemeral thoughts, but it’s also more likely to be a quick thought, joke, emotion, opinion, or something light. Thoughts that don’t necessarily add value outside of a little entertainment (I hope!) or opinions I’m just trying on for size. I don’t argue anywhere, but on Twitter I do occasionally poke the bear a little.

None of these three things are lies. I don’t present a version of myself that’s false. But each is incomplete.

My blog shows a version of me that is relentlessly self-improving. I want to be that person, I strive to be, but my blog rarely shows my dark days. My anxious days, my can’t-get-out-of-bed days, my so-stressed-I’m-not-sure-I-can-handle-it-much-longer days. They’re temporary, but to you they might as well not exist, dear reader.

My LinkedIn shows a 24/7 professional who only thinks about work and never raises controversy or thinks thoughts outside the Overton window.

My Twitter shows someone who is light and silly, carefree and fun.

I am all these things, but I’m also their opposite. Their balancing factors all exist in me.

I don’t change my thoughts for LinkedIn. I don’t post things I don’t mean, or tailor thoughts to fit the audience. I just only post there the thoughts I have that already feel appropriate for the medium and the brand I present there.

I don’t lie. But I omit plenty. We all do – and in fact, we require it from others. From classic advice like “don’t talk religion or politics at the dinner table” (incidentally, I hate that advice – that’s the one place I do want to talk about those things, in the comfort of a safe environment with people I trust and feel close to) to frequent admonishments to “leave it at the door” with “it” being anything relating to your personal life and “the door” being the front door of your professional life, as if those were completely separate existences.

Omission can be dangerous if we don’t recognize it. It’s not bad, but the human brain fills in the blanks. And with no other information, we fill in the blanks with essentially the same information we already have, over and over. That’s why when you see an Instagram post of a celebrity on a tropical island, you assume they spend the 364 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes you’re not witnessing each year also gallivanting around on tropical islands, but they’re probably not. You fill in the blank space with more of the same, but what you don’t see of someone is more likely to be very different than what you do. It might not be the opposite, but it will be a balancing factor.

If you see someone writing about wealth, that doesn’t mean they’re actually poor. But it probably means that when they’re not posting, they’re working – earning that wealth, rather than enjoying it. If someone posts a picture of themselves where they look gorgeous, that doesn’t mean it’s a trick of the camera and they’re secretly hideous, but it does probably mean that in the invisible spaces they’re working out, dieting, getting good at makeup, etc. They’re earning what they show.

So when you see me posting things that are positive, insightful, or clever (and I sincerely hope I’m pulling that off), it’s not that I’m not those things (hopefully!). It’s that in the spaces in between, I’m earning those things. I’m earning insights through struggles and failures, I’m earning positivity by surviving negative moments. The cleverness really is just me, though. I’m funny.

Whenever you only get glimpses of someone – because you only see them on various social media platforms, or because you see them in person but only in specific and narrow contexts, think of those moments as trophies. If you see someone get a trophy, you don’t assume that they spend all day every day getting trophies handed to them, right? No, you assume that the trophy is a culmination of both hard work and then application of that work, and you’re just witnessing the moment of reward. If you see a gold medal being hung around the neck of an athlete, you can imagine in broad strokes the years of effort in a general sense, the months of training for specifically that event, and the intense burst of effort leading to that moment. You’re imagining correctly.

So keep that analogy in mind every time you see a great post on Facebook. It’s a trophy. It’s true, it’s earned, it’s genuine (in most cases – assuming otherwise is usually just sour grapes); but it’s a culmination of a lot of other things. They don’t just stand around having gold medals hung around their neck 24/7.

Celebrate with them. And when you show off your own shiny new trophy, don’t feel like an impostor just because you know it’s a snapshot that doesn’t always reflect everything that built that moment. Because that’s true of everyone.