My house is currently full of guests, people who have traveled a great distance to gather together for a weekend of fun. What a joy this is! What a point of pride to have a comfortable home with many pillows and blankets, no shortage of space and food and wine for those that travel. I am blessed to have such wonder under my roof!

Be frugal with yourself, and generous with others. Very few objects pay you back more happiness than the effort you spent earning the money to buy them, but friends pay you back tenfold more happiness than you spent.

Have you ever heard of “The Ultimatum Game?” It goes like this: You get a thousand bucks, but it comes with a condition. The condition is that you have to offer some amount of the money to a stranger. The stranger knows you started with a thousand bucks, and also knows the rest of the rules (as do you) – once you make an offer, there is zero negotiation or haggling. The stranger just gets to say yes or no. If they say yes, the split happens. If they say no, then neither of you gets any money. Zero dollars for both of you. In either case, you part ways and never see each other again.

How much would you offer that stranger? Think of a number.

Now, imagine being the stranger. Would you say yes to the amount you just proposed, or would you burn the whole deal?

There is a really funny trick about human psychology here, and if you can figure it out and then purge it from your own mind, you will make your life incredibly better from this point forward. Here it is: If you offer the stranger 1 dollar (so you keep $999), then the stranger, if they were perfectly rational, would say yes.

But you can’t imagine them doing that, can you? You certainly wouldn’t. You’d be so insulted you’d trash the whole deal. After all, that greedy jerk tried to lowball you!

But here’s the reality: If you ignore all the emotional elements, you have a simple choice. Do you want a dollar, or do you want nothing? A dollar is clearly preferable – yet virtually everyone would rather punish the greedy person, even if it came at their own expense.

Even now you hate this. You’re trying to come up with all sorts of rationalizations for why you shouldn’t take an unfair offer. But that’s because you’re projecting other circumstances onto the choice – you’re using your sense of unfairness as if you were being offered low wages for honest work, or an unfair split of money you earned together. But none of that is true! You’re being offered a tiny windfall, or nothing – and you paid nothing for the choice. So the tiny windfall is better!

We do exactly that all the time. We burn offers that benefit us simply because we think someone else is screwing us over. But how is being offered a free dollar a screw-job? You can’t compare your potential gains to hypothetical amounts that were never on the table. Because if you do, you’ll constantly cost yourself money.

Don’t concern yourself with what anyone else is getting. Just take the best option for yourself each time you can. Otherwise, you’re getting screwed – by you.

Sometimes, traditions or institutions endure because they’re working. They must be doing something right, or they’d have perished long ago, right?

Haha. Most of the time, traditions or institutions persist because they’ve learned to protect themselves. Very few things more than a hundred years old would look like they do if we designed them now, from the ground up. K-12 education comes to mind, but there are countless other examples.

You probably can’t change most of them. But opt out and find alternatives that actually fit you, when you can.

The real golden rule isn’t “treat people as you’d like to be treated.” It’s a combination of two things. First, treat people as they’d like to be treated. And second, make sure you let people know how you’d like to be treated.

Those two things aren’t the same! If you treat people how you’d like to be treated, sometimes you run up against preferences that are very different from your own. You may be being less kind than you think. And in turn, you’re setting unrealistic expectations for yourself. “I treated all these people like this; why won’t they do the same for me?”

Maybe because they’re treating you how they’d like to be treated – which isn’t how you’d like to be treated at all. But they have no idea, because you’ve never told them.

The biggest barrier between most people and kindness isn’t selfishness – it’s ignorance. They want to do good, but they often simply don’t know what’s best in any given scenario. Clarity is kindness, so if you want kindness from others, be clear about what that looks like for you. People will step up more often than you’d expect.

Isn’t it interesting that “fine” can mean “just okay, maybe not even really okay” or it can mean “exceptional, a peak example of whatever I’m referring to?”

My children asked me tonight what “fine” meant, after I referred to my middle child as a “fine young lady.” She had heard people say “fine” in the first context before, and was worried that I was calling her a “just okay young lady!” I explained the difference, and we briefly discussed how to tell which version someone meant.

What started as a simple word choice turned into an important conversation about context and intent. It can be very hard to communicate what we truly mean, even when we’re doing our best. Giving grace and making charitable assumptions about others is a good pattern of behavior; lord knows we’ll all need it from others now and then.

It’s a fine lesson, indeed.

A very helpful tip to guide your interactions with others:

If you find yourself about to criticize anything, instead ask, “How can I help?”

And if you find yourself thinking, “But I don’t want to help…”

Then why are you criticizing?

One year ago today, my dearest and oldest friend left this world. Not a day has passed in the last 365 that I didn’t think about him. I have shed many, many tears for him; probably more than he would have told me to. He wanted us to be happy. The last time he was able to speak, all of his words to me were about how to make sure all of his friends and family found happiness and joy in their futures.

He had dedicated so much of his own life to that same goal. On top of being a shining light for those that knew him, he had just completed his Master’s in mental health counseling – a vocation he was tragically robbed of the opportunity to pursue by his illness. He would have been great at it; he already was, for all of us.

On his last day on Earth, he couldn’t speak. He communicated to us with hand gestures, kind eyes, hugs and held hands. He couldn’t write much, but he scrawled out a few notes that night. At one point, he saw me losing my composure very badly. Despite my attempts to be strong and stoic for him and for the others, I was failing. The sadness of it was overcoming me, and I started to choke with sobs. He took my pen and notebook from me, and he wrote the last word Charles Carrado III would ever write:

“Breathe.”

I will, Chalie. I will.

When there are too many people surrounding a problem, each individual person becomes less likely to act. There’s a social pressure, for one – “no one else is acting, so maybe I shouldn’t either” – plus the fact that people will naturally assume that surely someone else will, in fact, intervene.

It’s human psychology, but it’s a heavy curse. The more connected-but-not-really-connected we become, the more I think this just plays out in society at large. We see problems, sure – but there are so many people who can also see them, surely someone else will solve them, right? And so I’ll just do what everyone else is doing, which is join in the echo chamber of complaining about the problem online.

Fight this. Fight it with every shred of you. Go outside, look at a problem you can touch, and solve it like you’re the only person in the world who can. Especially when the problem is your problem.

Tough to find a job in your industry or demographic? No one is solving that for you; change your strategy. Cost of living is high for you? No one is solving that for you; change your strategy. People are just so mean nowadays? No one is solving that for you; go outside and be nice to someone.

This advice isn’t for anyone else. This is advice for me, and advice for you, and that’s it. We’re the whole team. Let’s go.

If you quit your day job to become a DJ, spent five years doing it, and then came back to more traditional full-time employment, did you fail at being a DJ?

Heck no! Things aren’t successful or not based on how long they last. I had a successful career in sales; I can say that despite the fact that I no longer work in sales. It was successful in that it served my life during the stage of my life where I needed exactly what it provided, and in that it taught me many skills that made the transition to the next stage of my career just as successful.

Once upon a time, I also had a successful career as a stable hand. I can tell you that zero horses died under my care! I also have a ton of great stories from that time and learned many valuable lessons. I’m not a “failed stable hand.”

Your life is going to look very different across its whole span. Its wild to think that shifting your career to suit those changes counts as “failing” at something. I consider it way more of a failure to dogmatically stick to something that’s no longer serving you just for the sake of doing so. Maybe being a DJ ruled when you were single in your 20s and then you swapped back to full-time employment (with benefits) once you got married and had kids. That’s about the story of my sales career, so it makes sense to me. It also makes perfect sense to me to swap to being a DJ in your 40s (or 50s, or 60s…) because you’ve done enough full-time employment work to get what you needed out of it and now you want something that energizes different parts of your brain. The point is, there’s no wrong answer here.

If your life is being served, that’s success.