There’s a lot to be said for knowing how to ignore distractions and focus. Sometimes you have to dedicate not just a few hours, but a significant stretch of your life – weeks, maybe months – to a particular project. The timeline is intense, and being pulled away from your rhythm can mean not succeeding at all.

When you come up for air to keep your body and mind energizes, you should even do this with intention. Exercise breaks, healthy meal regimens, and genuine relaxation and social time are all part of the successful marathon. But getting caught up in things that don’t energize you are the opposite. Yes, take breaks to see friends and family. No, don’t take breaks to doomscroll and get blackout drunk.

Of course, even in the midst of the marathon, there is one thing I think is worth breaking from the routine a little for. And that’s opportunity.

Look, I’m a pragmatist. If I’m training for a real marathon and my training is important to me, I don’t want to stop in the middle of my practice run, ruining my time and my momentum, to check social media. But if I see a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk while I’m running? I’m not made of stone, man.

Likewise, there are metaphorical “hundred-dollar bills” along the way of your life, sometimes. They’re worth pausing for – if you have the sense to differentiate them from the pennies.

You have to pay for past mistakes. Don’t pay with interest.

That means fix the mistake.

Try to make the payment an investment in your intelligence.

One of the ways we discover, innovate, and create is by taking discrete tidbits of information we already have and attempting to combine them in novel ways. It’s amazing what you can do with what you already know!

I love seeing early development of this ability in children. My four-year-old niece was playing pretend restaurant with me today. She claimed they didn’t have what I ordered (pizza), but that instead I could have “flamingo juice.” After a few inquiries to make sure this wasn’t a concept from some book or show she’d seen, I worked out that she simply knew there were different words that could go in front of “juice,” and she hadn’t yet worked out what those words signified. So she put a word she liked in front and bam, a delicious (?) new beverage was invented.

So hey, maybe flamingo juice isn’t going to fly off the shelves. But the basic concept of just putting together two things you know is absolutely the way we form higher levels of knowledge and creativity. You should always try it.

And from now on, my term for a brilliant combination of two existing but previously separate things will be “flamingo juice.”

What joy! My niece is having her very first sleepover ever, and I get the honor of hosting it. She’s currently eating cookies and watching movies with her three favorite cousins, just being spoiled rotten, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

Such joy we take in doing perfectly normal things just a little differently. Is this house vastly different from her own? Of course not. But it’s different than what she’s used to, and that is a treasure all its own. We would do well to remember that as adults! A little change of pace can be a holiday, a celebration, an experience worth remembering.

May you walk home a different way tomorrow!

Sometimes the greatest gift isn’t some new thing, but room to move around.

Bless me with empty space! Grace me with cleared clutter! Purge and prosper!

My children, in honor of a special occasion, threw away a bunch of junk. There are few better gifts I could receive. I love them so!

I miss my father, and I miss my best friend. Too much loss for the memory, in one day. But I am connected to people here on this world, and even in our grief we’re linked. The hole in our individual hearts is extra glue for the collective, like the wood you carve out of two pieces so they’ll fit better together. I will take it.

When someone is overly curious about the exact rules of a situation, asking many questions before engaging, they tend to fall into one of two camps:

1. People who are very interested in following the rules because they don’t have a lot of confidence in their ability to infer the correct behavior in ambiguous situations, and
2. People who intend to do very weird things and want to know what they can get away with.

In other words, when someone asks a lot of questions about all the laws of a town before setting foot there, they’re typically either a socially-inept but obedient person, or they’re a lawyer.

Cleverness often requires structure. Left to pure imagination, some people can go absolutely wild. But the joy of a clever solution is in making a clever solution that works within the confines of the restrictions set by the opponent. Making a highly-unexpected but legal move in chess is a satisfying way to outsmart your opponent. Playing an Uno Reverse Card when they take your queen isn’t.

The responsibility of people who like to play smart is that they have to know the rules better than anyone else. You can’t just be a clever and persuasive person to be a good lawyer, you also have to know the law better than anyone else in the room. Remember that, clever kids, and study up.

Today I taught a class on being resilient in the face of adversity and unexpected challenges. And a bunch of stuff went wrong in the morning leading up to it! It was perfect!

You couldn’t ask for a better time for a bunch of random mini-disasters to happen. Tech issues, miscommunications, last-minute changes; we had the whole set. A half-dozen things went wrong in the two hours or so before the event.

And the event went perfectly fine.

Rule number one, straight out of the hitchhiker’s guide, is just “Don’t Panic.” Nothing is unfixable, nothing will kill me. Always remember that most people can’t even see those challenges, and won’t even notice their effects on the final product.

“Change” is neither good nor bad. It’s just different. You now exist in a new world; if you view that as a “challenge to overcome,” then you’re fighting the normal progress of life. Don’t. Just think of it as a new town, and now you’re looking for a new place to eat. Neither better nor worse, just different.

There are problems everywhere. No job, house, school, community, relationship, or anything else will be perfect. Perfection shouldn’t be the goal nor the standard.

But not all problems are equal! Here’s an extremely basic example: let’s say your preferred temperature is 70 degrees. You have two apartments you can pick from to live in: one is 65 degrees naturally, and the other is 75 degrees naturally.

Neither is 70, so neither is “perfect” for you on that metric. But even though they’re both off by the same amount, one of those is probably better for you! Being too hot makes me more uncomfortable than being too cold, so I’d choose the 65-degree place (plus, I own more clothing that lets me deal with cold than the reverse, not to mention that it’s generally cheaper to warm a place up than cool it down). But some people find being too cold much more uncomfortable and would choose the other apartment.

So it’s not always about finding something “perfect,” but you can make a lot of improvements by finding a better-fitting imperfection. Everything has trade-offs, and every person is unique. That means you can find the job, community, relationships, or whatever else that gets the things you care about most right. The rest, you just laugh away.

Today is my father’s birthday.

I spent the morning visiting him, in many ways. I went to his grave, adorned it with new trinkets with my mother and sister. He would have laughed, and so we laughed – it was as he wanted. The rest of the morning I spent on old pictures, videos, messages. The hundreds if not thousands of little signs and wonders he left behind for us. I listened to his music.

I laughed as often as I cried. I can only miss him because of how wonderful his presence was. You can’t miss something you didn’t love. I remember that when I’m sad; sadness is a small price to pay for joy.

There is always light coming. For all I miss him, he added so much more, and still does.

Happy birthday, old man. I love you.