Sometimes you have to deeply embed yourself in a “flow state” in order to really rock out some quality work. That’s where I am tonight. Hydration, music, a singular purpose.

What puts you in The Zone?

Hungry or sated? Caffeinated or calm? Background noise or utter silence? Eye of the storm or tranquil garden? Coffee shop or log cabin? Light or dark, hot or cold? I’m always curious what helps people attain that hyper-focus state. Opinions welcome, though I won’t read them until tomorrow.

I’m in The Zone.

Decision fatigue is a real thing, my friend. Many clever people have come up with many clever analogies for it – one I particularly like is “spoon theory” – but one of my own design is the analogy of a car cruising down the road. If you’re moving along a straight road, the drive is pretty easy. It takes very little effort to keep the car on track; things moving straight want to keep moving straight. But each time you come to a fork in the road and have pick a direction, you now have to exert effort on the car. Muscle power, fuel, tires fighting friction, all of it to make a choice.

Going some distance down a straight road is much easier than the same total distance over many forks and turns. That’s a good analogy for why making a lot of decisions is tiring, even if you do the same total amount of work and even if each individual decision doesn’t seem that difficult.

(I just realized I totally could have made a “forks and spoons” pun out of today’s title. Forgive me.)

One way I deal with decision fatigue in my own life is to have a huge number of basic decisions on auto-pilot and a good system for installing ‘defaults’ into other decisions as well. By making a lot of decisions about small stuff in advance, I leave room in my brain for the big rocks.

But another way that I combat decision fatigue is to have a really high tolerance for risk in most situations.

When I’m headed out to a new restaurant, that presents me with some major decision trees. I’ve never been to this restaurant, and the menu presumably has more than one item on it. That gives me a huge number of choices, but the outcome is largely inconsequential – one way or another, the decision won’t matter in two hours. So what do I generally do? I don’t even look at the menu, I just tell the server that I’ll have whatever the special is tonight. It’s a risky move from a foodie perspective – the special could be anything! But I have a high risk tolerance here: I’m not a picky eater, I don’t generally care whether a meal was good, and a story about a particularly bad meal is as enjoyable to me as a good one. So in the absence of a good default, I default to – whatever!

I notice that many people develop a high risk aversion for even these incredibly minor risks. What movie to go see, where to go for a walk, what topping to get on a group pizza. These things have zero impact on your life past the next hour, so roll the dice! I’d rather default to a risk than burn precious decision-making power.

I have an almost infinite endurance against life’s “small disasters.” Oh, the burger joint got my order wrong? Whatever. One of my shirts shrank in the dryer? Doesn’t change the trajectory of my life. Kid spilled milk on the floor? There are paper towels on the counter, honey.

I do not, on the other hand, have infinite spoons – or forks (ha, got there). For me, making decisions is like going to a flea market with only five $100 bills, and no one can make change. In that scenario I (like you, probably!) would only buy items that cost $100 – you’d ignore items that cost $2 even if they were cool, because you’d have to pay $100 for them. Maybe I’d get a slightly better-tasting meal if I actually looked at the menu and decided what to order instead of saying “surprise me,” but the marginal benefit is just so incredibly minor and the cost (for me) is so high that I never do it. If you knew in advance that you could only make five decisions in a day, you wouldn’t waste one on what to have for breakfast.

Enjoy a little chaos in the small spaces, and impose your order on the big ones.

There was an interesting thought floating around the internet a year or so ago that I found pretty insightful. I’ll share it here, though this isn’t original to me:

“Some people take the term ‘respect’ to mean ‘treat like an authority figure.’ Other people take the term ‘respect’ to mean ‘treat like a person.’ And then there are people who seamlessly interchange the two when it suits them – they’re the authority figures who say ‘if you respect me, I’ll respect you.’ What they mean is, ‘if you treat me like an authority figure, I’ll treat you like a person.'”

I find that matches my experience pretty well. Some people like to redefine common terms to suit their personal agendas. Sometimes this is done in a negative way – like saying “meat is murder!” You want to associate a common thing that you dislike with a universally bad concept. But other times it’s done to associate something bad with a good term in order to sell it.

One such word is ‘compromise.’

Most people define it like this – you give a little, you get a little, we meet in the middle of what we both want but still reach a deal that’s better than no deal at all.

But some people try to sneak in a different, shady definition that goes like this: “Compromise means that when I demand something from you for nothing and you don’t want to do it, we agree that you do half of it and call it a day.” That’s like asking someone for $100, and when they say no, saying “okay, let’s compromise and call it $50.”

Superficially, it feels like a compromise. You wanted me to give you a hundred bucks and I wanted to give you nothing, so $50 is in the middle. And if you’re quick enough you might pull that over on some people in many different contexts. You’ll get half of an unreasonable demand instead of a whole one, but you’ll be out the door before they question why they gave you anything at all.

Be careful of people trying to pull this trick. People who want to “compromise” often want to pull you in their direction without actually offering anything back. That’s not a compromise – it’s swindling.

Imagine you’re conducting a very narrow “focus group,” with only ten members. What you’re trying to discover is whether or not you should sell chocolate or vanilla cookies.

You ask each of the ten people whether they prefer chocolate or vanilla and have them check off a box. 9 vote chocolate and one votes vanilla. So you should sell chocolate, right?

Well, maybe.

Let’s say that those 9 people have a very slight preference for chocolate; they’ll buy a chocolate cookie over a vanilla one if both are in front of them, but if they want a cookie and no chocolate option exists they’re happy to buy vanilla. Almost never would they choose not to buy a cookie at all if there wasn’t a chocolate one. And on top of that, they’re also not big cookie fans to begin with; they desire maybe 1-2 packs of cookies a year.

Meanwhile, the Vanilla Guy is obsessed. If a store carries only chocolate cookies and no vanilla, he won’t even shop in that store any more. And on top of that, he buys ten packs of vanilla cookies a week – a major consumer.

Assuming these ten people were a representative sample of the population, the company should absolutely make and sell vanilla cookies. The 10% of the population that prefers them buys more in two weeks than the other 90% of the population buys in a year, meaning that even though the market is niche, it’s deep.

The problem with a lot of the measurement of choices is that it doesn’t reflect this kind of depth. Most choice-measurement is very binary. Even most attempts to measure strength of conviction are pretty feeble – if you give someone a five-point scale instead of a binary choice it’s mostly junk, based on impulse and emotion rather than actual conviction in the long term. It won’t translate to action.

If I really wanted to measure overall depth of opinion (and not just how many people were on each side of a debate issue), I’d want something to truly measure depth. And since talk is cheap, I’d charge for it.

What people will pay money for is very, very different than what people will vocally support. Talk is cheap. Not only does it cost nothing to say you want to help some particular social cause – in many cases you actually benefit just by saying so, in the sense that you gain social capital with your peers. Ask people whether or not they support preserving a national park and most will say yes. Ask them to sign a petition and you’ll get a smaller number; ask them to donate a dollar and you’ll get fewer still.

Imagine asking the chocolate/vanilla question again, but this time giving 4 choices instead of two:

1. I prefer chocolate.
2. I prefer vanilla.
3. I prefer chocolate so much that I’ll give you $10 to demonstrate my conviction.
4. I prefer vanilla so much that I’ll give you $10 to demonstrate my conviction.

If you asked the original group this question, your focus group would have actually given you the correct answer – sell vanilla cookies. You’d have gotten 9 answers of “Number 1” and one answer of “Number 4.” If you weighted the answers based on dollar gains, you’d see the real answer.

If you’re uncomfortable with money being used as a proxy for strength of conviction (and I could see why), then you can replace $10 with anything that isn’t nothing. For instance, the four choices could be:

1. I prefer chocolate.
2. I prefer vanilla.
3. I prefer chocolate so much that I’ll sit here for an extra hour to demonstrate my conviction.
4. I prefer vanilla so much that I’ll sit here for an extra hour to demonstrate my conviction.

or they could be:

1. I prefer chocolate.
2. I prefer vanilla.
3. I prefer chocolate so much that I’ll let you stab me with a needle to demonstrate my conviction.
4. I prefer vanilla so much that I’ll let you stab me with a needle to demonstrate my conviction.

or whatever you want. The point isn’t to use any particular cost, it’s just to impose some cost on an answer. Otherwise, the answer should be taken as the mildest possible version, with the understanding that a single very strong preference might be more influential on the potential outcome of a decision than even a large number of mild preferences.

Consider that carefully any time you have to base a decision (even in part) on what people say they prefer. Try to find another way to figure out how much they prefer it – because talk is cheap.

“In the long term, what I want to do is…”

And then the person finishes that sentence by saying something totally different than what they’re doing right now and have done for the past several years.

When, exactly, does “the long term” start? It’s not a date on a calendar. “The Long Term” doesn’t officially begin on September 20th, 2024. The Mayans didn’t predict its coming on a big stone disk. It’s not discrete.

In fact, “the long term” only exists in the past. You can only figure out what you did in the long term by looking back on it. When looking forward in time, the long term is just whatever you do in the next five minutes, over and over again forever.

There’s no year that isn’t made up of the days within it. There’s no space between those days where “the long term” happens. Your destiny is just you showing up for a great day, over and over.

You can make one day great. You can absolutely nail the next five minutes. You have so much control over those short bursts that the only reason you don’t exercise it is because you think it doesn’t matter.

“Sure, I’ll lay around and drink beer and watch TV today, but in the long term I want to get healthy and work on restoring that classic car.” That’s what people say – what they think. That “today” is somehow separate from “the long term.”

The long term starts at the end of this sentence; go get it.

Hahaha, I love humans. They’ll find the silliest little bit of humor and turn it into a whole movement. They’ll use one spark of joy to create culture-wide “in jokes” and then whole layers of subculture will surround them.

Today is ‘Pi Day.’ Why? Because it’s March 14th… or 3.14, like the first three digits of pi. Haha, I love this!

It’s like how May 4th is “Star Wars Day.” Because, get this, “May the Fourth be with you.” Ha!

I absolutely love the whole concept of shared, culturally-embedded jokes. Think about ‘knock-knock’ jokes. They’re amazing. Not because they’re particularly funny (though one or two definitely are), but because you just instantly know how to interact with someone if they start off by saying “Knock, knock.”

A perfect stranger could walk up to you on the street and say those words and you’d probably respond correctly. Even if you chose not to, it wouldn’t be because you didn’t know what you were supposed to say. Shared humor constructs give us a way of immediately connecting with our society.

That’s why I never worry too much about “screen time” for kids. I watched a fair amount of television as a kid. It didn’t ruin me, and it certainly didn’t turn me into a “television addict” (seriously, this was a concern for kids growing up in the 80’s); in fact, I barely watch TV at all now. But what it did do was give me a shared connected language of quotes and jokes from all of these culturally-relevant shows that enabled me to engage in conversation with a huge number of people. Conversations that didn’t have a natural starting point were instead enabled because we both knew The Simpsons well enough to quote it at each other. Humor is cultural studies.

So remember as you and your family (and your kids!) are all trapped indoors for the next few weeks, that a little television never hurt anyone, and shared cultural jokes are worth their weight in gold.

Anything worth doing is worth doing visibly.

If you’re pursuing a path of self-improvement, write about it. Talk about it. Vlog about it, whatever. But do it in a visible way. This has tremendous benefits:

1. It will organize your own thoughts. If you can’t explain your plan to a stranger, you probably don’t have a great plan. Chronicling your journey while you’re on it keeps you focused.
2. It will give you accountability. There’s just something about announcing your goals that makes them real. Put them out into the world, and people will see them. That can lift you up.
3. It invites encouragement and collaboration. There is a vast wealth of great wisdom out in the world, and being visible is a way to invite it.
4. It provides credibility. There’s nothing like actively living a journey to prove you can do it.

So often we engage in our best efforts and most worthwhile thoughts in secret while blasting out our chatter and noise at full volume. Switch it around a little and see what marvelous doors may open.

Everyone has some negative feature of themselves that they’d like to work on. A personality flaw, a vice, a failing, a lack in some area. Collectively, let’s just call these “bugs,” and for the rest of this post, that’s what I mean when I use the term. Anything about yourself and/or your life that you’d rather improve or eliminate.

My personal theory (backed up by plenty of personal experience) is that it’s not the bug that’s really that hard to get rid of. It’s everything else that’s attached to the bug.

You see, bugs have a way of insidiously burrowing into many adjacent (and even not-so-adjacent) aspects of your life. Partially that’s your own doing – on some level you know the bug is a bad thing, so you create justifications for it. But those justifications, over time, become foundational to big parts of your life if you don’t catch them. You start to identify with the bug, instead of with the person you’d be without it.

Take drinking, for example. Like probably most Americans, I know lots of people who have had unhealthy relationships with alcohol, ranging from full-on addiction to just problematic interactions. For some percentage of these people, the physical dependence on alcohol is the primary factor preventing them from killing this bug. But that’s actually a small percentage! For the larger majority, the problem isn’t physical dependence – it’s how much of the rest of your life becomes centered around drinking.

You drink when you party. You drink socially. You drink to relax. Someone buys you a bottle of wine as a present. You share drinking-related humor on social media. You might not be physically dependent on it at all, but you have zero idea how to interact without it. Maybe quitting drinking was easy – but dealing with the fallout of quitting was ten times more stressful.

Drinking is an easy example to visualize, but it’s everywhere. Take my friend Steve* (*name changed to protect the innocent… me, from backlash). Steve was in bad shape, overweight, unhealthy. Fixing this was tough, so instead he started to identify with it. He made in-shape people his “outgroup” and made fun of people for being “meatheads” or “gym-rats” or whatever, implying that anyone who worked out had to be a “dumb jock.” As a result, he had no in-shape friends and his social circle was all other unhealthy people who felt the same way. Now getting into the gym and cutting out the pizza and soda wasn’t his problem; his problem was that he’d systematically eliminated any possible support group for that. He could have hit the treadmill any time, except now it’s not about the physical difficulty, but the fact that his entire social life was built around being fat and unhealthy.

People do this all the time. They let their bugs take control of the system. Some people spend a few early years in a minimum-wage job and decide to learn more skills and work harder and get out. Other people start identifying with being poor and hating people who aren’t, and now suddenly your identity is as someone who can’t succeed no matter what.

We all have bugs. Bugs aren’t themselves a moral failing – each and every one of us will have things we want to improve, escape, or change. But there are two critical things you need to do in order to kill the bugs:

1. Don’t let the bugs become your identity. Always make sure that the person you see yourself as is the person without the bugs. See yourself as fundamentally a sober, healthy, successful, whatever person who is working always to become that.
2. Don’t surround yourself with people who do let their bugs become their identity. They will drag you down, reinforce your bugs, and prevent your empowerment.

Those are both very, very hard things to do. But I’ll give you a great tip for how to start: meet someone new.

Before you do the incredibly difficult work of changing your self-perception and cutting negative people out of your circle, meet just one new person. Make sure that person isn’t someone who identifies with their bugs, and make sure when you first meet them, you tell them who you’re trying to be. I know a lot of great people like this and I’m happy to introduce you.

Why is this important? Because that one person can start the process of turning the tide. They can pull you up, because they know who you’re trying to be. They can give you positive encouragement when you need it. They won’t already be a part of your negative circle. They can be the first person in your new in-group that will start to outnumber the old. It’s easier to eliminate your bad influences if you don’t feel like they’re they only people you have.

This person could be a boss, a mentor, a person in an organization you belong to (or join!), or even a very old friend you haven’t spoken with in years and re-connect with. Or they could be a complete rando you meet in a coffee shop that seems cool. They could be someone I introduce you to, like I suggested. But they do exist – which can be hard to see when all your existing people are so negative.

The journey of self-improvement can be lonely, and the very desire to have people near us can attract us to exactly the people preventing that self-improvement. So it’s good to have someone to talk to who isn’t, if you need it.

I’m here if you do, my friend.

We can all get in the weeds sometimes.

It’s often hard to spot, because “in the weeds” isn’t the same as wasting your time. Usually when you’re in the weeds, you’re doing things that actually do need to be done, and that’s the trap. Often (especially around the house) I’ll find myself making small tweaks that are definitely improvement gains, but that aren’t necessarily big ones. But if the option is that or nothing, isn’t it better to make some improvement?

I think the answer is yes, but that makes the weeds that much more dangerous. Like real weeds, they consistently re-grow no matter how often you cut them down. In order to really get out of them, you have to either make the choice to do a lot of harder, real work to completely dig them out and treat the ground so they don’t grow again, or to just walk away from them.

Both are valid options at different times.

Putting in the extra work is often difficult because in the short term, it’s easier to just run the weeds over with your lawnmower – cut them down, and then at least they’re done for today.

Walking away means just abandoning a project. I think that we don’t do that enough, honestly, but of course it’s not a good idea in every circumstance.

So given that the weeds mostly need to be dealt with in some capacity, how to we give ourselves the tools to deal with them in healthier, long-term ways?

I like metrics. Tools I can use to evaluate my decisions. I usually trust them more than my instincts. My tragic flaw is that I often find myself making tweaks to the metrics!

One way I deal with the weeds is this: I let myself wander there for a set amount of time each week. Sometimes pulling weeds is satisfying, and sometimes doing literally anything can be a source of inspiration and motivation. The trick, I think, isn’t to never deal with weeds. It’s to get in there and get your hands dirty a little bit, so that you know what you’re dealing with. But put a timer on it, and then come up for air and use that information to design a better plan.

It’s a hard process – if it were easy, the phase “in the weeds” wouldn’t be in our minds so often. But it’s worth the work.

It’s tough to observe yourself being objectively good at something from the inside.

Some things are binary – if you try to chop down a tree, it either comes down or it doesn’t. In that case, it doesn’t really make sense to say you’re “good at chopping down trees” just because it came down – because everyone who brings down a tree is therefore “good” at it, and “good” is by nature a relative measure.

So already, in order to be good at something, it needs to have a sliding scale of success. But in addition, that success has to be observable in some way. I could say I’m really good at imagining what apples look like, but how could anyone know that?

To be “good at” something, it has to have an effect on the world. That could mean it’s measurable, but it might not be. Am I good at writing? What does it even mean to be “good at” writing?

It could mean that it persuades people to a certain point – shifts their opinions, entices them to buy something, etc. But I’m not really trying to do that here, so I can’t really measure that. I’m not selling anything on this blog (though feel free to send me money if you like), and I’m pointedly not concerned with whether or not you agree with my thoughts here.

It could mean that people enjoyed reading it, but people enjoy reading a lot of stuff that’s bad. Or do they? Is the fact that someone enjoys it the only real measure of whether or not something is “good?”

Some people have recently told me that they enjoyed reading something I wrote; that it made them feel good or boosted their confidence.

That’s worth doing this whether I’m good at it or not. I hope your day is a little brighter, my friend. I hope you share what you’re good at.