Some things are in our nature. That doesn’t mean we have to yield to our nature, but it’s always good to know what direction your natural inclination pulls.

For instance, one of the reasons I set so many goals and checklists and daily habits is because it’s actually in my nature to be quite lazy. It’s so easy for me to procrastinate. So easy for me to lose my motivation.

If it weren’t, then it wouldn’t be necessary for me to build all these systems to keep me on track. But it is, because I can’t let my base nature win out over what I want in the longer term.

Even in the short term, a day’s laziness makes me miserable. I don’t enjoy days off and I’m terrible at “weekending.” I recognize the need to take breaks in order to preserve my efficiency but I’m pretty awful at actually taking them. When I do have “time off” from my main task, I usually fill it with smaller productive activities. That’s because I can feel the grip of inertia pulling on me any time I slow down, whispering in my ear how nice it would be to just quit.

That voice is a liar, but it knows how to lie well.

A lot of the point of life is to rise above our base natures. To do more than just survive. Sometimes that means you have to give yourself every advantage you have, and use every trick in the book to beat that tempting voice that tells you it’s easier to do the bare minimum.

Sometimes I get tired. Sometimes I know I’m not at my strongest. Sometimes stress and fatigue wear on me and hurt my ability to make good choices. Those are the times when it’s so important that I’ve built this structure, given myself these rules to live by. The rules were made by me at my best, so that they would be there when I’m at my worst.

That’s my head start. My advantage over my worst impulses. They try to catch up to me in the weak moments, but I’ve already got the jump on them, because by the time they get here, I’ve still got my best self with me in spirit, telling me what to do.

Don’t slack when you’re at your best. Don’t coast. Take the time to put some of that into a structure you can use later when the going gets tough. That can mean saving money when you have it. It can mean writing a schedule when you’re in a good place mentally to do so. It can mean meal prepping. It can take a lot of forms, but you’ll be grateful for it no matter what form it took.

Every day is a race against your worst inclinations, and some days you’re in top shape and some days you’re not. So give yourself a head start as often as you can.

There is absolutely nothing you can’t do in ten years.

We put a man on the freakin’ moon in less than ten years. It’s a ridiculously long time from the standpoint of getting stuff done. It also has the amazing advantage of being a tremendously short time from the standpoint of your overall lifespan. If you don’t think of yourself as “old” right now, you probably also don’t think of (your current age) +10 as “old” either.

So ten years is the perfect time span to accomplish major, life-changing goals. You could become literally anything in ten years, starting from complete scratch. This isn’t just about professional goals, either – ten years ago I was single and childless; now I’m married with three kids. Whatever you want to be different, it can be completely different in ten years.

Now, here’s a caveat: it’s not ten years from today, it’s ten years from the day you start. Those could be the same day! But it’s not automatic.

Here’s another caveat: it won’t happen because you wish it so. It’ll happen with a plan.

Now, I could end this blog post here and the advice would be sound. “Plan for the future and don’t just run along the hamster wheel” is good advice, but it’s not very actionable on its own. So I’m going to lay out a method for you to actually make those plans and execute on them. It’s time to stop saying “I’ve always wanted to…” and start doing it.

Phase One: Set the Goals

In this phase of the method, you’re going to put down in words your actual goals. Here’s how: you’re going to imagine four separate “snapshots” of your life. Quick summaries of your life as you want it to be – one at the 6-month mark from now, another at the 1-year mark, another at the 5-year mark, and a final one at 10 years.

For each snapshot, write about what makes you happy in your life at that time, what things are better than they are now, and what things you’re doing to contribute to the world around you.

It’s okay to take your time on these, but it’s also okay if they’re not perfect or complete. You’re writing them in a notebook, not carving them in stone. Goals will evolve over time, and that’s okay – it’s part of this process, as you’ll see. For now, just put something down.

It’s also extra okay to talk to other people about this. No one is an island, and not being sure about your own goals is natural at any point in your life. Draw inspiration from others and talk to people you respect as you do this if you feel you need to.

Got your four snapshots written down? Awesome, on to the next phase!

Phase Two: Fill A Calendar

For this phase, you’ll need to have a calendar, and it needs to go out 10 years. That means you’re probably better off using an online calendar program, but if you’d rather buy ten physical one-year planners and stack them up, whatever works!

Step 1: Start with your 6-month snapshot. It should be fairly realistic, but this process will help tell you if it’s not. Starting from that 6-month snapshot, count backwards and break it down into monthly milestones; things you’ll need to get done by each month in order to get to that point. I’ll use weight loss because it’s an example that’s easy to understand: if your 6-month snapshot included you being 30 pounds lighter, then you’d need to be 25 pounds lighter when you’re at the 5-month mark, 20 pounds lighter at the 4-month mark, and so on.

For each of these benchmarks, commit to a specific date on the calendar and write it in. Title them as “BENCHMARK: 15 Total Pounds Lost” and put that on a specific day of the calendar. The benchmarks don’t have to all be identical; in fact for many goals that won’t be realistic. If your 6-month snapshot includes you having your house built on the plot of empty land you bought, then there are very different benchmarks at each month. No matter what they look like, however, put them on the calendar.

Next, step back from each 1-month benchmark and consider what needs to happen on a weekly basis for that benchmark to be realistic. What big steps need to occur? It could be “every Friday, go out to community events in order to meet new people,” because your goal is to eventually find a spouse. It could be “every Monday, make sure I get a positive review from my manager, in writing” because you’re trying to advance in your company. These goals might change each time you pass a 1-month benchmark, but they should generally be consistent within a given month. Again, put them on the calendar! Don’t just write “Every Friday…,” etc. Actually go into the calendar, and put that on every single Friday in the relevant period.

Now, break down those weekly goals. What has to happen every single day in order for that weekly goal to be met?

Goals that do not have a daily component will be MUCH harder to achieve!

Daily components keep you from procrastinating, they keep your goals in the center of your focus, and they build your goals into habits that pull you through the toughest times. They make sure that if you get tripped up, you only lose a day and not a week, month or year. You must have something you do every day towards your goal. Just like with every other step, this is going in the calendar! (This is another reason I recommend an online calendar – you can set tasks and reminders as “daily.” Otherwise you’re writing your daily checklist on every day of the calendar!)

The method I’ve described here also keeps you focused on what needs to happen: the action steps. By working backwards, you’re making sure each component is only directly serving the benchmark one “level” above it. You’re not trying to figure out the daily steps to get to the six-month goal, just the daily steps to get to each one-week benchmark.

So at this point you have a VERY full calendar for the next six months! You have something to do on literally every day for the next six months. If you’ve ever wondered how you can pursue your goals with so many other things vying for your time and attention, this is it. You put the Big Rocks in first. When someone says “hey, do you want to go out drinking and partying this Friday,” you’ll have an easier time saying “no” if it conflicts with the goals in this calendar. You won’t have time to lose hours on Facebook if you’re working hard to get your daily tasks checked off!

Each day you wake up, you’ll look at your calendar and it will tell you what you need to be doing. You can then translate that into the specific hourly layout you need that day (or maybe at the beginning of each week, like I do), and your focus will stay on the tasks at hand. You won’t feel guilty or burdened by the enormity of the big goal, because you know you’re doing the right things today to get there. When you know what you’re doing, your actions will have purpose and you’ll be less vulnerable to distractions.

Step 2: Now we’re moving onto the 1-year snapshot. This snapshot should have built somewhat on the 6-month version, and now we’re going to use the calendar to fill in the time between them. Instead of daily/weekly/monthly benchmarks, however, we’re going to go one level of macro up and create weekly/monthly/bi-monthly benchmarks. (There will eventually be daily tasks too, but we’re too far away yet for them to be accurate or helpful.)

Use the exact same method, starting big and working down. First figure out what benchmarks would have to get hit every two months between your 6-month goal and your 1-year goal. Write them down at the appropriate spots in the calendar. Next look at what monthly goals would have to happen to get to those two-month goals (or quarterly, if that makes more sense for your timeline). Then look at what weekly goals need to happen to get to the monthly goals. Don’t go deeper than weekly at this stage.

In the same way that you don’t plan out your actions to the hour until you’re looking at less than a week’s worth of hours, you don’t want to plan out your actions to the day until you’re looking at less than six months’ worth of days. Appropriate levels of focus are important.

Step 3: Now take your 5-year snapshot and look at how it differs from your 1-year snapshot. Start at a high level and fill in the four-year gap, only this time we’re looking at monthly/quarterly/yearly benchmarks instead of weekly/monthly/bi-monthly. The same rules apply, though – actual dates need to go on the calendar! So at this point you’re putting actual dates on the calendar for September 2023, and that’s awesome. By now this is giving you a clear picture of how you’ll get from here to there, which makes there look a lot less distant and unrealistic, doesn’t it?

Step 4: Now go to the big one, the 10-year snapshot. Fill those five intervening years in, but go with quarterly/yearly/bi-annually for your benchmarks. Now you have a complete road map. And guess what? You’ve made mistakes. You’ve underestimated some things, and overestimated other things. You’ve forgotten stuff, and there’s stuff you don’t even know yet. All of that is okay. You have a plan, and a way forward. In the next phase you’ll see how to adjust it and perfect it as you go, but now you have what you didn’t before – something to do.

Phase Three: Execute and Evolve

Okay, so now you’ve got this big plan, this huge road map that leads you from here to there! Not only does it show what you should be doing at any stage, it actually has instructions to get there. You know what you get to do with it now? Ignore it!

Not forever, obviously! (Don’t worry, this wasn’t a trick!) But the only thing you have to pay attention to tomorrow is tomorrow’s action steps. You don’t have to stress about the “big picture” and whether you’re doing the right things. You are!

Tomorrow you tackle tomorrow’s goals. You might fail. That’s okay! The next day you get to try again, and in the grand scheme one day’s failure won’t matter. But these small failures feed big successes. You’ve got a weekly check-in coming up where you can look back at the past week and measure you performance against your goals. If you accomplished what you set out to accomplish, awesome! And if you didn’t, you can review your weekly and daily actions and change them in your calendar going forward – with no more than the loss of a week. Without this plan, you could have been grinding away for years without ever seeing whether you were getting closer to your goals.

So you tweak a little here and there, but always deliberately. If you change something, physically change it in the calendar. Always be committed to daily action. When you hit your first month’s benchmark, check in and review. By that point, you’ll have gotten your daily and weekly actions nicely polished, and if you didn’t hit your first month’s goals, you’ll have a much better understanding why and will probably hit your second. You’ll keep closing gaps and fixing things and getting better all the time.

And then before you know it, six months have passed.

Now it’s time to move the whole thing up! Get out the whole 9.5 year calendar again, and look at the next six months between where you are now and your initial 1-year snapshot. You might be making changes here, and that’s fine! But the most important change you’ll make is now you’ll take the weekly/monthly/bi-monthly goals you wrote and you’ll be adding daily action. You’ll be focusing on a more granular level because you’re close enough now for it to make sense to do so.

Once you’ve done that, you go back to daily execution and checking in at each benchmark. When you reach the 1-year snapshot, take your 5-year snapshot and revise it based on whatever may have changed in your life or plans, and then create another set of 6-month and 1-year snapshots from where you are now, following the same steps. Keep doing that every 6 months until you reach the 5-year snapshot. Then look at the 10-year snapshot, revise, and do it again.

Your goals may change. Even if they do, you’ll have done so much incredible work and personal development that you’ll be closer than you imagined, because you weren’t wasting your time.

Phase Four: Ten Years

Congratulations! But you know what? You’re not old now, and so you still won’t be old in ten more years. Time to set some new goals… and enjoy the trip.

Some updates on my project of writing a book for the first time!

When I first talked about writing a book in that post, I set some goals for myself that included a four-hour block of time each week in September for planning, and learning Evernote.

Good news! I’ve been really successful on both counts, even though I changed that plan substantially. But hey, that’s what you do.

To start with the deviations – I realized early that a four-hour block was less realistic and less effective for me than bite-sized chunks every day. Fortunately, just keeping my eyes open to opportunities I saw an awesome one: a professional editor ran a five-day challenge for planning non-fiction books. Like, that was really on the nose, and not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I joined!

It’s been absolutely incredible. I just wrapped it today, and I have a chapter outline, writing plan, sample chapter, production timeline and numerous refined ideas ready to go – ahead of schedule! So there’s one of many lessons – pay attention to your own goals and how the world wants to help, and then embrace it when you get an easy serve.

I’ve also been LOVING Evernote. Not just for this book, but now I live in there and I already don’t know how I got along without it.

So, updated goals!

My goal now is to write for 30 minutes each day (that’s a little more time than I usually spend blogging, but not much), and I’m not going to force myself to do it all in one go as long as 30 minutes actually happens. Evernote makes this WAY easier; I can write anywhere more easily now. Based on projected word counts, that gets my first draft done by Christmas.

(Side note: Did you know I wrote over 15,000 words on this blog just in August? Cool!)

I’ll also give myself an extra hour on Sundays for research, review, organization, that kind of stuff. Poking around in my notes just to keep a macro view of the project.

As I get chapters into their deliverable stage, I’ll post them on The Opportunity Machine!

After that, I still don’t know anything about the editing, design, and publishing process. But guess what? Now I know an industry professional who’s been great to work with and who does know all that stuff. You definitely don’t have to know how to do everything yourself. Ship what you’re good at, and work with others on the other stuff. And keep yourself open to the world so you find those people!

I’m excited to see this continue to take shape!

What’s worth more – a thousand dollars, or the promise of a million dollars?

A lot of that depends on the reliability and timeliness of the promise, but right this second, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The thing is, we usually get that when we’re on the receiving end. If you’re hungry, and someone says, “I can make you a PB&J sandwich in 30 seconds or a steak dinner in 60 minutes,” it’s easy to pick the sandwich.

It’s a lot harder when you’re the one delivering, though. Let me paint you a picture: You’re working on a project for someone – a client, a friend, doesn’t matter – and you have a lot of pride in your work. You value your reputation, your work ethic, and the respect that comes from a job well done. You won’t be satisfied with B+ work, no way! It’s got to be perfect. So you keep at it, days turning into weeks, until you finally hate the thing you were so happy to begin.

Ever happen to you?

I’ve heard that story a thousand times. You want to do something and you don’t want to half-ass it or phone it in, so you become obsessed with it being perfect. But the marginal benefit of perfection is really, really low. If you got 95% there in a day and it took three more weeks to get it to 99%, then you wasted three weeks. You should have just delivered at the end of that first day, because 21 projects at 95% are way better than one project at 99%.

Plus, that last five percent is often subjective as heck. You think it’s only 95% because you’re a perfectionist who knows the subject so well you spot every detail from a mile away. For the person in receipt, it’s a miracle already!

And true perfection isn’t an attainable goal. You’ll spend the rest of you life on a project if you want it “perfect.” What you want to aim for is “deliverable.”

You shouldn’t half-ass it. But there’s a lot of wiggle room between 50% and 100%! And if given the choice between “pretty darned good, today” and “theoretically perfect, but never,” you can guess which one anyone with sense will pick. You can always revisit later, you can always revise if someone asks for a specific detail, and you can always improve the next iteration. But just ship the dang thing already!

I’m not sure what I’ll want to do tomorrow.

In a very literal sense, I have a pretty good idea of what I will do tomorrow. But you never know what new goal you’ll come up with. What new idea will strike you as worth pursuing. I probably won’t become a dentist tomorrow, but I’m at least open to the remote possibility that by the end of tomorrow I’ll want to become a dentist.

That thought doesn’t worry me. It doesn’t worry me that I might not have a handle on what I want to be when I grow up. It used to, but it doesn’t any more.

I used to have an odd quirk in my teenage years. Even then I wrote a lot, but it was marble notebooks instead of blogging. But when I would first get a new notebook (and boy did I go through them), I had this little ritual I had to do. I’d open the notebook, and I’d write or draw or tape something on every single page. It didn’t matter what. Newspaper clippings I thought were interesting. Comic pages I thought were cool. Bits of poetry or short stories or quotes or jokes. Stupid sketches. But I had to put something on every page, right away. Not in the corner or off to the side, either – usually somewhere near the center of the page. Then the terrible buzzing in my brain would get quiet, and I could use the notebook as normal, filling in the empty space around each page’s initial entry with whatever I decided to write as I went.

Why did I do this? Because I absolutely hated the idea of things being not finished. I loved the look and feel of a new, empty notebook – so full of possibility and opportunity! I also loved the look and feel of a full notebook – pages warped and worn, something on each page jumping out at you as you flipped through, forming the outline of an impression of the person who filled it. But I couldn’t stand the look and feel of a notebook that was some part of each. Some pages filled, others blank; it used to make me shudder. It represented to me this possibility of abandonment; this idea that I might have started something that I wouldn’t finish because of my flaws or failings.

Some part of me is still like that, but it’s quieter now. Blogging helps; unlike a notebook, this blog doesn’t have neat marbled covers marking arbitrary amounts of knowledge that added together equal “done.” Devil take “done.”

This is the endless marble notebook.

I’m making my life like that, too. I’m not done anything. I’m doing things I love doing, that I’m good at, and that in turn bring me further towards more of the same. I’m able to make money and spend that money on other things I care about, like taking care of a family I love. Every day my life changes a little, but I’ve taken a lot of steps to ensure I have a lot of control over most of those changes, so they mostly happen in the direction I want.

All of these things I do – my work, my writing, taking care of my health, my learning goals – they’re all goals in service to being ready. I don’t think I’ll want to become a dentist tomorrow. But I know that if I did, I would be able to. I’d be able to figure out how to proceed and do so. I’m good at planning, and good at executing on plans, because I practice. I’m good at setting daily goals, because I practice. I’m good at not marrying myself to one spot in life, because I practice.

No matter what I want to do tomorrow, I can. Today’s work serves tomorrow’s goals.

Your early life is nothing but big milestones, and that’s a shame.

In your early years, everything is a major, transformative event that creates these clear bright lines between your old life and your new life. Ask any 7-year-old how different they are now that they’re no longer 6, and they’ll tell you of the vast differences. Every new year is a new grade in school. Then it’s graduating from middle school, then high school. Maybe college and maybe grad school. All these big things with clear end points where you get to say “Done! Now my life is fundamentally different!”

And then suddenly it’s not.

No wonder adults feel so lost. For the first couple of decades of your life, you’re crossing finish lines all the time, and then suddenly the rest of your life is just an endless series of gradual transitions. You don’t graduate from anything anymore.

When you’re working towards something specific, something with an end goal, your capacity for endurance is incredible. You can sacrifice immensely, work incredibly hard, and make positive trade-offs for your future – as long as that future is brightly defined.

We do that because we tell ourselves that just over the next hurdle is the promised land. If we just complete this one more thing, cross this one last finish line, we’ll finally be able to relax. To be content and happy and safe and secure and wealthy and loved.

If I could promise you $100,000,000 at the end of a year of grueling labor, you could probably do almost anything in that year with a smile (I’m not talking about immoral things, just difficult or painful ones). But what if I offered you 50 times that amount for 50 years? Why isn’t that a good deal any more?

Because what would be the point? You won’t have any time left to enjoy the fruits of your labor – you’ll have sacrificed your whole life, and all the joy and wonder and love it could have contained.

It’s a very good thing to sacrifice now for benefits tomorrow. It’s good to delay gratification and serve your future self. But to some extent that service has to be itself enjoyable or you miss the point.

I work out today because I want to be healthy tomorrow. But my workout routine isn’t super intense, and I enjoy it. If it took 3 hours every day and I absolutely hated it, it wouldn’t be worth it no matter how healthy it made me in the long run or how many years it added to the end of my life.

You can (and should!) make your own finish lines. Set your own big milestone goals and then sacrifice to accomplish them. If you do that, you’ll strike a good balance between what’s important tomorrow and what matters today. You don’t want to live entirely for the present or entirely for a day that will never come – those are the extremes of unhappiness. Instead, you want your present and future self to work as a team to make both happy.

Love your life, today and tomorrow.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is thinking that asking a lot of questions will make you appear stupid or uninformed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you feel this way, I get where you’re coming from. You’re presented with some new information and there are parts of it you don’t understand, but you feel like you should understand it. You get this sense that everyone else must absorb this instantly on the first go around, so if you don’t get it then there’s something wrong with you. So you clam up.

But from the point of view of the other person, nothing makes you look more foolish than not engaging at all. The reality is that everyone learns differently and so no single approach can perfectly teach everyone – so everyone should have questions. The person that doesn’t have questions just looks like they’re not engaged; like they don’t care enough to ask for clarification or they’re not thinking critically about what’s in front of them.

You signal intelligence and ambition with lots of questions, not with few.

One of the reasons that questions signal intelligence is because you can’t even ask questions without at least elementary critical thinking and basic knowledge of the topic. If you dropped me into an archaeological dig in Egypt and started telling me high-level stuff about the rock samples, I’d probably just nod along – not because I understood everything so fully that I didn’t need to ask questions, but because I’d be so lost I wouldn’t know what to ask. I don’t know the first thing about archaeology or Egyptology or any of that stuff. I’m not even sure I used those terms correctly.

So ask away! I promise you, no one has ever said, “Gee, that person sure had a ton of intelligent, challenging questions and engaged with us on the answers. What an idiot.”

You have to know what you’re selling.

If you’re in automotive sales, you sell cars. You convert the physical features of your product into vibrant stories in the minds of your customers (if you’re good, that is), and you differentiate your product from the competitors’. Your primary obstacle is convincing your customer base that your car is better than the other guy’s.

If you’ve only ever sold cars, you might not realize that there’s an entire extra step that is absolutely crucial to the sales process, but that you are fortunate enough to get to skip. Because before you can get into why your car is better than anyone else’s, your customer has to believe they can benefit from a car, any car, in the first place.

You get to skip this step because, at least in the United States, the benefits of a car are well-established and most people would like to have one. There are exceptions, like NYC (where nobody drives because there’s too much traffic, haha), but for the most part you don’t have to start your sales process by convincing an automotive skeptic that there are benefits to car ownership.

That’s not the case with every product or service, though! In today’s modern world of fast and awesome innovation, lots of companies aren’t just improving on existing stuff, they’re creating whole new categories of stuff.

Sometimes, though, really brilliant innovators sell their product or service like they’re selling cars. They go right into comparison sales, trying to convince prospective customers that their widget is the best of all available widgets, and it’s so much more effective and a better value and so on. But the customer doesn’t care about widgets yet, so the sales falls flat.

It’s a tempting trap for the first-mover to think “I’m the pioneer in this field, so I have no competition! So sales will be easy!” But you do have competition: Your competition is inertia. The status quo. Ignorance.

Before you sell a product, you have to sell the concept.

That’s a totally different sales process. On the macro level, it involves a lot of “awareness marketing,” which most likely includes lots of free content, lots of helpful information, and lots of market engagement where you show off helping people. People will not beat a path to your door if you build a better mousetrap – the world has too much noise.

On a micro level, it involves really digging in to the problems your customer is facing. Finding out what issues they have, what difficulties they’re trying to overcome. If you can illuminate their problem and highlight that you have a solution, then selling the concept is selling your product, because the sale is going to be made at that point.

This can be very emotionally difficult for the innovator. That person has spent a large portion of their life immersed in this; he or she lives and breathes the value of their product and how it can help people solve an essential problem. To them, it’s crazy that the whole world doesn’t immediately see the benefits. But in general, the masses are slow to adopt and skeptical of these things at first, and that can feel very frustrating to the innovator. They want to help people, not convince people that they need help.

Almost every salesperson I’ve ever met has had that particular moment of frustration at some point in their career. “I don’t get it – the thing I’m selling would be great for them, it would literally save them money and make their life better, it’s perfect for them. I just don’t understand why they wouldn’t want it.” It’s a frustrating moment. But the reality is that it’s on the shoulders of the salesperson to show that there’s a problem worth solving.

The concept comes first.

When my first child was born, I made some ambitious resolutions in terms of how I would behave as a parent. One of the promises I made to myself was that I would never be the kind of parent that just said “Because I said so!” when my kid asked difficult questions.

Allow me a moment to say: Bwahahahahaahaha!

I feel like a lot of new parents make that promise, but the problem isn’t what you think it is. You think the problem is going to be that your child’s endless intellectual curiosity will overwhelm your patience and in frustration you’ll be a tyrant. So you decide in advance that you’ll always discuss things rationally with your child, welcome open inquiry, and encourage their love of learning.

But that’s not the problem at all! The problem is that these little weirdos are absolutely insane and the things they ask make no freakin’ sense.

Things my kid has asked me:

1. “Where is the place that doesn’t have chicken nuggets?” Uhhh… what?
2. “Can I have some?” Pointing at absolutely nothing, nor was I holding/eating anything. When I asked “Some… what?” she had no answer.
3. My favorite: “What does something else look like?”

What does something else look like?

I was not prepared to answer questions of this level of existential severity.

But it’s all part of the process. Kids get language in such weird and interesting ways. They’re just collecting little bits and pieces and assembling them in different ways until it works. They don’t know the rules, so they’re just trying to get across their point. Interestingly, I discovered what each of the above nonsense questions actually meant with a little detective work:

1. When asking about the place that doesn’t have chicken nuggets: I realized that whenever we went out to eat as a family, we only went to one of two kid-friendly restaurants. One was Chik-fil-A, and the other was a local pizza place. She couldn’t remember the words for “pizza” or anything like that, so the best way she could describe what she wanted was “the place that doesn’t have chicken nuggets.”
2. Because we were always introducing her to new foods, whenever we ate anything, we’d always offer her a bite and say “Do you want some?” We said the word “some” approximately a billion times more often than we said the word “food,” so she thought the word for “things you eat” was Some. She was just hungry.
3. She had overheard me describing a family friend, a bit of a zany character, and I’d described him thus: “He’s something else, all right.” I hadn’t even realized my daughter heard me, or that she would so heavily imprint the term.

So while they’re absolute maniacs, there is a method to their madness. They’re collecting bits of pieces of the world around them, mashing them together until they fit. They get better at it.

What I love about this is it’s almost totally free-form. Kids pick up their native language with no formal instruction. They make a TON of mistakes, but so what? They make it work. They learn everything that way – one of my favorite parenting moments was watching this time my daughter was playing with a cup under the bathtub faucet. She was filling the cup, turning it upside-down, and filling it again. The look on her face would make you think she was watching the moon landing. She was learning all these facts about physics and gravity and how her environment worked for the first time and I could just see the gears turning in her head, and it was wonderful.

Don’t lose that now that you’re an adult. That is still absolutely, 100% the best way to learn things. Just jump in and pick up pieces and gradually mash them together with other pieces you pick up. View each individual piece as a happy success. Don’t worry about the end goal as much – kids don’t know what full command of the language looks like as they’re learning it.

We’ve been conditioned to feel this formalized, credential-based way of learning is the only way to get good at something, to pick up anything new, and it ends up being a huge barrier to us. We think we can’t learn anything new because we don’t have time to take a course or money to pursue a degree. But that’s such a terrible way of looking at the wonderful chaos of facts and knowledge. The better way is immersion, jumping in and using the mistakes to make better ones until you’re making what you want instead.

That’s what something else looks like.

My oldest daughter is at that perfect age where curiosity about what her dad does has transformed into an active desire to participate. I love it.

When I work out, she can’t wait to spot me or help or work out alongside me. When I’m blogging, she wants to talk about what I’m writing or even type a few words. She wants to type work emails and read them back to me. We read together, side-by-side, drinking the smoothies we made together.

I am so, so grateful for this. I tend to be a bit of a workaholic, so if my daughter wants to participate when I’m working, then we get great daddy-daughter time as well. We get to engage intellectually in a meaningful way.

I’ve made a commitment to say “yes” to as many of these requests as I possibly can. It’s so easy to reflexively say “no.” To try to keep your kids out from underfoot while you’re busy, and then to try to dedicate some specific corner of your schedule to “spending time with the kids” specifically. But that little corner shrinks and shrinks, and soon you’re listening to Cat’s In The Cradle and sobbing. I don’t want that.

I’d rather have a sidekick. An awesome little mini-adult that exists in my world, instead of a child that I force to stay in her own. A smart, rad human that learns to be a good person by helping me be a better one.

Plus, you’ve never had an accountability buddy like a seven-year-old that’s decided that your workout is daddy-daughter time! No skipping for me!