It costs nothing to be polite, but it’s not impolite to point out when someone is harming you and ask them to stop. They may take offense, but taking offense doesn’t mean it was given. Sometimes you simply have to walk away.

Yesterday I got to read “Green Eggs & Ham” to a group of preschoolers that contained my adorable niece. They were enraptured; what a wonderful audience! Chiming in with me on key words, laughing at my silly voices, talking about their own experiences trying new foods. Wonderful children!

My father used to read that book, doing impersonations of John Wayne and James Cagney for the voices. I can’t do those; I was doing an impression of him doing those voices, as best as I could.

My father love the joy of children, and I’m happy to say he gave me that blessing as well.

Some actions are good precisely because they make us do things we don’t want to do.

“Don’t go to bed mad” is good advice because it forces you to talk about your feelings instead of ignoring them and letting problems fester. You don’t want to do that. You want to hold a grudge. But it’s better if you don’t, so we make little rituals. Breaking bread with your enemies. Smiling in the mirror.

Hatred, bitterness, even just grumpiness – they feel good. The things that caused them don’t, but the feelings themselves are alluring. But the truly good feelings are better, so we make our rituals.

Normal reflections are a tiny bit dimmer than the thing they’re reflecting, no matter how shiny the surface. They can’t reflect light 100% perfectly, so even if a little tiny bit is lost each time, the reflections will eventually end. That’s why fun-house mirror halls don’t truly go on forever and seem to darken in the distance.

Love need not be like this. You can reflect it a little brighter than what shines on you.

Step 1: Have children.

Step 2: Take a true, deep, honest, soul-searching accounting of your flaws. The things you wish were different. You can “woe is me” here all you like – blame the world, blame your upbringing. Don’t look for solutions. Just make sure you have an honest list of your worst traits.

Step 3: Raise your children to not have those traits. Whatever you said “If only I’d been raised differently…” do that. Blame your parents, go nuts. Just, if you do, make sure you parent your own kids the opposite way.

Step 4: Don’t be a hypocrite. If you tell your children not to do X while you do X, they’ll ignore your words and copy your actions. So as part of raising your kids not to have negative trait X, you have to do everything in your power to suppress that trait in yourself, or you fail at Step 3.

Step 5: Realize that you’ve made tremendous progress in fixing that thing in yourself while simultaneously doing your best to prevent it from ever even developing in your children.

Siblings are a tremendous blessing. As a child, they provide so much benefit – companionship and understanding, but even the tough moments are so good for you. Learning to resolve conflict and compromise, learning to share space with someone who isn’t exactly like you, these are essential elements of a happy and productive adult life.

If you can give siblings, do! And if you don’t have siblings yourself – become one. Nothing stops you from being that close and that loyal, and seeking the same. I’ve had more siblings than my blood sister, and I’ve been glad of all of them.

Happy birthday to my wonderful blood sister, though!

There’s a game kids play (made up by exhausted adults, I’m sure), called “The Quiet Game.” The rules are simple – the last person to make any noise is the winner.

Kids who can’t be quiet for thirty seconds otherwise will last hours at this game. I’ve seen it.

Games sharpen our skills, skills of all kinds. Games where you can lie or bluff make us better at reading people, and races make us both quicker and aware of our endurance. Games of skill sharpen our strategic insights, and games of chance help our risk assessment.

Play is good. Do more of it.

If you make a loud noise when you sneeze, you can change what noise you make. You can should “hadouken!” Try it, it’s super fun.

But the point is, we have a lot of reflexive actions. Sometimes the reflex is just to take an action, any action. You might have as easy of a time fighting the reflex as you would just changing the default action.

Imagine that someone did something unkind, unjust, or harmful to you. They never apologize directly, but you notice that after the incident they do change their behavior such that this act never gets repeated. How would you feel?

It’s an odd one, right? One on the one hand, there are few things I dislike more than empty apologies. Give me changed behavior any day! But we often seem to think that changed behavior needs acknowledgement from the changer, don’t we? If they never acknowledge the harm they caused, how can we be sure they’re actually changing their behavior in accordance, and not just behaving differently by coincidence, only to change back next week?

But I don’t want someone being too embarrassed to apologize to be the reason they don’t correct the mistake, either!

Still, all things considered – if someone apologized to me after a demonstrated week of changed behavior, I’d certainly take it more seriously than if they apologized and promised to change in the future. Wouldn’t you?

You need to regularly hang out with people who disagree with you. They can have beliefs or views that are opposed to yours, or they can simply have more moderate versions of your beliefs, but ideally a mix is best. It’s really, really important.

One of the reasons it’s so important is that people who agree with you in a given area will generally not tell you when you’re being absolutely batshit insane in that area.

Partially it’s because tribalism makes us support people of our own tribe regardless of what they actually say. As long as the person is from your ingroup, you’re predisposed to view them sympathetically and, even if you disagree with them, keep quiet about any dissent.

But equally it’s because in-groups tend toward ever more extreme versions of their core views over time. Know your Maslow – once you’re in a group, you want status. And if the group’s “thing” is Belief X, then you gain status by claiming the most extreme version of X that you can stomach. The most extreme are thus the highest status and the Overton window moves over time.

But as your in-group’s views become more extreme, they deviate from society’s norms further and further. If you’re isolated in that echo chamber, eventually you’re saying or even believing things that are absolutely bonkers but gain you a lot of status with a hyper-narrow group. But your life will collide into “normal society” frequently, and if your most extreme bonkers views leak out – especially if you don’t realize that they’re looney tunes – you can have a real problem.

The solution is cosmopolitanism. You don’t have to dilute your deeply-held beliefs, but you should know where they fit. You should know which things are considered the absolute craziest, even if only out of self-preservation. You should challenge your wildest ideas and be able to defend them against the challenges from the middle of the Bell curve, or you shouldn’t have them.

Talk with many people. Sharpen your wits, stabilize your emotions, and control your beliefs (rather than the reverse). Otherwise, you won’t even know what your problem is.