Immanuel Kant says that we need to always treat people as an end in themselves, and not just a means to an end. I think that’s extremely true, but I also think that will often mean violating the ol’ Golden Rule – “treat people as you’d like to be treated.”

First, I’ve never liked the Golden Rule. I think it should be “treat people as they’d like to be treated,” because I’ve discovered that treating people the way I’d like to be treated often makes them very upset. I’m weird and I don’t like a lot of the same interaction patterns as other people, so imposing that on others doesn’t seem very kind. But I’m all for treating people the way they’d prefer.

Except, of course, that lots of people would prefer to be treated as means to and end rather than as the ends themselves – even if they don’t know it.

Imagine a young man who spends a disproportionate amount of his income on a flashy car in the hopes of attracting mates. He doesn’t want to be seen as an end in himself; he wants to be seen as a means to wealth and status and prestige for the people he’s attracted to. Or a less negative example: A doctor doesn’t want everyone to treat him only as an end; they probably wouldn’t pay him very well for that. For at least some people (his patients), he wants to be treated as a means to better health – and he, in turn, wants to treat patients as sources of income, not as dear friends.

Being treated as an end in ourselves means that we have to accept that the buck stops with us. We aren’t conduits towards something better for the people who choose to share parts of their lives with us. We don’t add value to them because we make them richer, or healthier, or wiser – we simply are. Take us or leave us.

Sometimes when you look at someone as an end, that end is found wanting. We can easily find ourselves frustrated or upset because the end isn’t what we want it to be.

If you have to put a nail into wood and you pick up a wrench by mistake, it’s natural to say “this wrench isn’t very good at pushing nails into wood.” But it makes no sense to be upset with the wrench for not being a hammer. It never was a hammer – it never could have been, and it can’t become one now.

So you either love it as a wrench or you get frustrated. But what does it mean to “love it as a wrench?”

We are the sum of our actions, and we work every day to meet our needs and desires, and of those around us. We need means for that. If people are deserving of love and respect simply because they’re people (and I believe they are), then that must naturally apply to all people – all the many billions of them. That doesn’t then help you much when deciding which of those people you’ll go to in order to get your car or your kidney fixed. You can be a phenomenal wrench, but that doesn’t mean I have any bolts that need tightening.

Maybe Kant just meant that we should never reduce someone to only being a means; even if that’s the role they play for a day or a year in our lives, we should always remember that there’s a person of intrinsic value behind the white lab coat or flashy car. We should take a moment with every cup of coffee we buy or phone call we make to reflect on the real, breathing, complex person on the other end of that interaction. And treat them as they’d like to be treated.

Travel and exploration for the sake of travel and exploration is a good thing.

That old canard about only using 10% of our brains isn’t true. But we definitely use less than 10% of our environment. Whole streets we never drive down, whole stores we never go into. Whole forests we never smell, whole lakes we never cross.

Go get lost. Flip coins to see which way to turn at an old country road. Disable your GPS and look around.

This isn’t just for the sublime beauty of it. It’s also because your environment is useful. There’s all sorts of cool stuff out there that can make your life better, and it’s worth it to take a look around and see where it is. It’s worth it to see what fits with what.

Go wander.

My oldest daughter is already one of these “holiday purists” who vehemently opposes the holiday creep of ever-earlier yule-tide decorations infringing on her Thanksgiving turkey or, heavens forbid, even her Halloween candy. The fact that homes and stores are already adorned with tinsel and holly offends her a great deal. I asked if she’d prefer that people wait until after Black Friday to decorate, and she was even more extreme: in her view, a week before any holiday is the earliest you should decorate for it.

I’m with her in spirit, but my reasons are different.

I’m a total humbug. The Grinch, Ebeneezer Scrooge, Johnny Roccia. Not just Christmas, mind you. I’m generally not a fan of any particular holiday.

I would very much like to make some sort of principled stand against commercialism or capitalism ruining the pure spirit of any given holiday, but truth be told, the total reverse is true. I adore commercialism and capitalism. As far as the “spirit of the holidays” goes, I’m all for it – I like Christmas music, I like pretty lights, I like peppermint, I like a general sense of both mercy and wonder that we can let into our souls during the cold long nights of winter. That’s all great.

What I don’t like is disruption. I’m a creature of habit. If you’re one of the few strange travelers who reads this blog with any regularity (or just knows me outside of it), you’ll know that I very frequently force myself out of my comfort zone. I constantly solicit new experiences from the world – I go on adventures, I consume new content, I strike up conversations in elevators.

There’s a reason for that. It’s because it’s absolutely not in my nature to do so. I am very capable of living a very grey and featureless life and never really noticing. Because I believe there’s virtue in not doing that, I’ve set up a series of mechanisms by which I fight back against it. But the fact remains that all of those things are weapons I employ against my innate self, and it takes a great deal more mental strain and spiritual effort on my part than you may appreciate for me to do it.

The one thing all of those choices have in common, though, is that they’re… well, choices. I choose to go to new places, eat new foods, listen to new music. I create specific spaces in which those things happen, and I build a framework to support them. When outside things push me, I don’t always do well with it.

As an illustrative example: my wife and I once visited the Vatican. As a tourist, it’s very, very crowded – crowded to the point where you don’t have any choice but to move with the glacial tide of that crowd. You couldn’t stand still or move faster if you wanted to. My wife commented as we got out the other side that it was the worst she’d ever seen me – I looked ready to fight, fists clenched, jaw set, eyes narrowed, practically snarling. It wasn’t that at any point I was doing something I wouldn’t have wanted to do, but I didn’t feel in control.

It has perhaps, on occasion, been gently suggested to me that I may have something of an issue with control. I think the word “freak” may have been used in a less than complimentary manner. I do not dispute the accuracy of this claim, but it’s oddly specific in my case – I have no problem yielding control over pretty much anything… as long as yielding control was a conscious choice on my part. I can be the most “go with the flow” guy you’ll meet, but it’s because I decided to be. I’ll go anywhere, but I don’t like being pushed.

Holiday celebrations of any kind represent a forced disruption to my routine; a structural weak point in my framework. Obligations and events and costs and interactions that I don’t choose to have, even if I otherwise would. Some, even many of these things are downright pleasant when I’m able to let myself believe that I would have chosen them, but it doesn’t change the fact that not choosing them makes my skin crawl.

This definitely means that left to my own devices I’d celebrate no holidays of any kind. I don’t begrudge anyone else their celebrations – Grinch and Scrooge may have been a bit of an exaggeration, as I’ll enjoy any sparkling house I happen to pass – but it’s just not in my nature to decorate.

Of course, I’ll die nowhere near this hill. I recognize that this puts me so far outside the norm for my culture that there’s virtually no chance of me even explaining it without sounding like a huge jerk, so instead I try to make the conscious choice at the beginning of every holiday season to “go with the flow” for a few months and be okay with all of the disruption. Maybe even that’s good for me. No one can be in control all the time, and maybe the biggest holiday lesson I can learn is that it’s good for me to lose my grip a little each year.

I once heard an absolutely amazing piece of wisdom; supposedly a Russian proverb, so who knows its origin. Doesn’t matter – truth is truth no matter who says it. The quote is:

“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”

The first time I heard that, let me tell you – it sank in. Hit me like a ton of bricks, really. I was chasing, conservatively, about three dozen rabbits at the time. I was scattered and wasn’t giving anything the attention it needed to thrive.

Few things will bring success like single-minded focus. Whatever thing you’re doing, that has to be the thing you do. Distractions are a killer.

I don’t think this means that your life has to be so narrowly focused that you have no room in it for more than one objective. Rather, I think it means that everything needs to have its place, and that place has to be respected. When you’re working, work. When you’re reading, read. When you’re running, run.

I think it also means to keep your reach within your grasp. Set attainable goals. Your goal can be “catch rabbits,” and you can be single-minded in your pursuit of that goal, and still fail if you try to do too much. I see so many people fail in their goals because they don’t start with something reasonable and attainable. They discourage themselves because they try to be a hero about their task.

Set a reasonable goal, and then pursue it with all you’ve got. If you catch the first rabbit, you can always catch another. But one rabbit – and one rabbit only – has to be your first target.

No one deserves anything.

I don’t find the concept of “desert” (in the “just deserts” sense) to be a meaningful or helpful concept. (I obviously find the concept of desert as an after-meal treat to be a highly meaningful concept.)

Appeals to desert fall on deaf ears. If the universe is in fact ruled by an intelligence beyond our own, they clearly don’t care about what we think we deserve in the earthly realm.

I don’t like to categorize ideas as “right” or “wrong.” Such a classification smacks of a hubris I’d rather not embrace. But I’m very comfortable categorizing ideas as either “helpful” or “unhelpful,” and desert is definitely an unhelpful idea.

You get what you work for, seasoned liberally with what random events dish out to you. Crying foul about your lot in life might be cosmically true, but no one is listening. No universal force will respond to your appeals. You just have to pick yourself up and try again.

And this isn’t some hopeful missive tainted with privileged naivete – I’m not saying “If you just keep at it you’ll eventually succeed!” No way. Many people try their whole lives and fail, unsuccessful and unfulfilled. I acknowledge it. I embrace it. Rather, this is simply helpful advice: what else can you do?

Every second spent grousing about injustice is a second you could have been building a boat. Sowing a garden. Learning a language. Hugging a friend. Telling a joke. Chase meaning or chase joy – chase both if you can catch them, but there’s never been a single instance of anyone getting what they deserved because the universe agreed with you.

Your existence begins anew every instant. Whatever your circumstances are right this very second, those are the starting conditions of your new life. If you see an injustice you can fix, fix it. If you can’t, fix something else. The noblest form of life is the person that says, “Everything about my life is terrible, and none of it is my fault – so I’m going to plant a tree.”

My daughter and I have a game that we play regularly, called “Let’s Make Stuff Up.”

It’s a pure imagination game. It has no object and you can’t win. The way it works is this: One of us (usually her) invents some fantastical concept, such as a tree in the center of the Earth that can grow all types of food or alien cars that can turn people into more alien cars, or (in today’s case) a ring that presents you with a choice between two super powers and then stipulates how you can use the one you pick.

Once the concept is created, the game is for me to ask her questions about that concept that she has to make up answers to, turning the concept ever more real. In the tree in the center of the Earth example, I asked her how people get to it, how much food it can produce, why that doesn’t destroy the economy of the world, what happens if bad people try to cut off access from it, etc.

The rules of the game are the rules of good storytelling – she’s not allowed to dodge questions or say “just because.” She has to develop her concept. The tree is a unique species that absorbs energy from the pressure at the center of the earth, and is both magical and sentient, so it can transform its energy and the minerals around it into whatever kind of edible material humans want. It is served by an army of “treemaids” (Like mermaids, but they swim in the lava and have leaves for hair) that keep anyone from restricting access to the tree; all are welcome. But if you’re bad, the tree only makes you bad food. You still get fed, but it tastes gross.

This is a fun game.

Today’s example – she invented a ring that grants a single super power. When you put the ring on, you’re presented with two choices via pop-up screens that each show a future image of you heroically using one of the two powers. You touch one of the screens, get that power, and that choice is forever removed from the ring. Then you have that power, but it vanishes if you try to use it for evil.

The next person that gets the ring gets a different choice – whichever power you didn’t choose, plus a new one to fill the other screen. In this way, no two people get the same power from the ring, so theoretically anyone can get any power, but only of two possible choices. You can’t trick the ring by taking it off and putting it back on again; it remembers you. If you don’t like your options and so you give the ring to someone else to pick first, you miss your chance and the ring won’t let you get any powers.

Running through it, she first chose Ice Powers (like Elsa from Frozen) out of a choice between that and Flight. I chose next, and picked Flight over Plant Control. Then my daughter mentioned teleportation as a choice, which raised the age-old question: which would you rather be able to do, fly or instantaneously teleport?

She immediately chose teleportation. Her reasoning: “That way, if you have to do homework but there’s a crime, you can just teleport right to the crime and stop it, and then go right back to doing your homework.”

I replied: “Yeah, but wouldn’t flying be so much more fun?”

She clapped back: “We’re not here to have fun. We’re here to fight crime.”

These karate lessons are paying off, people. My daughter is a vigilante-in-training, and I love it.

I love the super powers she invents, and I especially love the super powers she already has. Her unflagging moral compass (note how unprompted she always puts some sort of “you have to be a good guy” clause in her magic), her absolutely incredible imagination, and her riotous sense of humor. She’s a cool, noble kid – and that’s definitely the best power of all.

Except Ice Powers, of course.

Yesterday I had my first live appearance on a live radio broadcast, which was really fun! The segment is over in my “Scrapbook” page if you’re interested.

The show has a six-figure+ listener base, so it was pretty awesome to think that some of the advice I doled out might have really helped some people. That’s eternally my mission, and I sincerely hope that at least one person out there found a little bit of help on tap for that particular issue.

The segment was very last-minute – their publicist reached out to my company that same day. I know a tiny bit about how those things can go; last-minute cancellations or something like that, most likely. But it definitely meant I had no time to plan, nor really any advanced awareness of the topic of discussion. I wasn’t already familiar with the show, though the hosts were spectacular and I was treated respectfully by everyone at all stages.

Personally, I love that kind of adventure. There’s virtually no size of audience that will make me nervous to speak, and I’ve never really needed advanced planning to speak publicly. So this was exactly the kind of thing I’d jump on anyway.

But even if it wasn’t, it’s good to jump on things. Say yes to stuff! The more stuff you say yes to, the more stuff is likely to cross your path.

Thanks to everyone that ever listened to me talk. I hope I said a few words, at least, that helped you.

How do you inspire others to challenge you?

My general demeanor is pretty confident. I don’t see much reason not to be – I might have plenty of self-doubt or hesitations, but those don’t provide me with any value if I express them, so I don’t. Even if you’re only 51% certain that a given course of action will be successful, once you’ve decided to act on it, you’d better act as if you were 100% certain.

One of my father’s great stories is about how he snuck into a concert without paying not by being stealthy or hopping a fence or anything like that. Rather, he found the employee entrance to the venue’s burger joint and burst in, loudly. He started shouting orders for people to flip those burgers faster, we’ve got hungry people waiting, those fries look done mister, go fill up the condiments! And then while everyone scrambled to obey his commands, he walked confidently out the front door into the crowd. Not only did he enter the concert, he probably raised production of the snack area by 10%.

The lesson that this story and so, so many others taught me is that with a truly insane level of outward confidence you can accomplish pretty much anything. You can will your desired place in the world into existence. The method works because the confidence becomes like armor – it keeps anyone from challenging you.

But sometimes you want to be challenged. Sometimes you need it.

See, the confident demeanor separates you from friend and foe alike. It keeps naysayers from dragging you down, but it naturally creates a sort of barrier between you and others. Even if your confidence is 100% friendly, and you never put anyone else down or give the impression that you’d use your powers for evil, it can dissuade people from approaching you.

“He’s so confident in his position, surely he won’t react well to someone disagreeing,” they might think. “Even if he isn’t argumentative or mean about it, he won’t budge. My opinions will fall on deaf ears. He might be great to lead people who don’t know what they’re doing, but I do know what I’m doing. In fact, I have information that would improve this process significantly, but there’s no way he’ll listen.”

That might be true or it might not be. But it’s 100% the signal you give if you act… well, if you act the way I do, let’s be honest.

I have thick skin, in a professional context. You could throw a pen at the back of my head, tell me to shut up, and erase my notes and start over, and as long as that was the level of discourse you’re comfortable receiving as well as dishing out, I’ll take no offense and in fact be thrilled at the bluntness. I mean, let’s solve problems, people! But other people have no way of knowing that. Egos can be fragile, and sometimes you challenge a confident person’s shtick and they lash out from wounded pride, resentful and vengeful. You’re probably right to be cautious.

But I don’t want that caution around me. My very presence can be silencing other voices, without a single conscious act on my part. I can welcome every single comment that comes my way, but still be discouraging them with the way I take over.

In the movie Pulp Fiction, there’s a scene where two of the main characters are in a real bind (to undersell the scene considerably), and they call in a specialist – Winston Wolf, who “solves problems.” He immediately takes over, giving curt orders and expecting immediate deference. When called on his bluntness, he explains that he’s there to handle a specific task and that time is a factor, so effectiveness in executing his expertise is more important than consideration of others’ feelings.

It’s a cool scene. And in a lot of high-pressure situations, I’m that guy. Calm under pressure, can act quickly and decisively, generally competent. What I’m absolutely terrible at is realizing that not every situation is like that. I’m not navigating an endless series of time-sensitive crises all the time, but I very much often act as if I am.

It’s not deliberate, and I’m definitely working on it.

But it’s not my strong suit.

What makes someone approachable? What signs about someone tell you: “this person won’t dismiss my thoughts and ideas, won’t be upset if they get challenged, won’t resent me for not following along?”

Another drawback of the Armor of Confidence is that I’ve never much had to consider how “approachable” someone is, because I’ll approach anyone. So I don’t really know what subtle signs one gives to assure other people that they are, in fact, not going to bite them.

Here’s what I’m trying to say: This goes on my Big List O’ Flaws. But that list isn’t carved on a stone tablet (I hope). It’s something to work on, and that work starts with reaching out. Like almost any problem in the world, you can’t solve it in your own head. If you had all the information required, it would already be solved. So this is my starting point for that research. I like my confidence, I like my, for lack of a better word, presence. It’s a trait that’s served me well. It’s armor against the world. But like armor, it needs to come off sometimes, and I’m trying to figure out when that is, and how to take it off.

In most actual businesses, “open until 4:30” means “we stop taking new business at 4:30, but we’ll serve everyone who was here before then, regardless of how long that takes.” Restaurants don’t always like it, but if they “close” at 11 they’ll seat you at 10:45.

There’s a good reason for this – those businesses have to care what you think. No matter what’s actually “fair,” the customer generally wins because the customer can – and will! – take their money elsewhere if they feel mistreated.

At the DMV, “open until 4:30” means “at 4:30 on the dot we go home, no matter when you got here, how long you’ve been in line, etc.”

At the organizational level, they have no reason to act differently. You have to use that service, and there are no competitors. No level of crappy service affects them in any way, so why change?

But even on a “trenches” level, I observe something interesting. When you come into a business at 5 minutes to close, the employees might stealthily roll their eyes, but they hustle. They want you out of there, so they can get out of there. 10 minutes to close at the DMV, they just stop working. They have no reason not to. They don’t have to clear out any queue before they can go home. They have no incentive, personal or organizational, to work hard.

Incentives matter, at every level. If you want a great life hack, figure out who’s incentivized to help you and seek them out. And figure out who has NO incentives to help you, and avoid them like the plague. Unless you’re forced, of course.