The wall is the reason for the struggle. Yes, the wall is inconvenient – but do not despair. Its presence means you’re getting stronger, getting closer to the things that matter to you. Your efforts to scale it are the very thing that creates your rewards in life! There will always be walls, but you will grow ever stronger and more resilient for them, and you will teach yourself to love what’s on the other side all the more.

The more you build up your expectations, the more likely you are to be disappointed. Not only because your expectations may spiral out of the realistic, but because time spent daydreaming isn’t time spent experiencing the world!

One of the worst kinds of expectations is expecting anyone to be anything other than what they are. I’m not saying people can’t change – they certainly can, and often do. But they won’t change to fit your desires about them, and expecting them to is the path to madness.

But people are wonderful! Exactly as they are, they can enrich your life in so many ways. So stop trying to squeeze them into a mold. Instead, let the wind take people into your life as it will, and rejoice.

A year ago, my dearest friend showed up at my house with a cheesy greeting card. In that card, he wrote an incredibly heartfelt letter of friendship and support, knowing I was going through a rough time. He also wrote the date in it, which is how I know it was a year ago today.

Gestures like that don’t come every day, and I saved the card. I’m very glad I did. We hung out that day and had a great time, and it was exactly what I needed to feel better about the state of things I was dealing with at the time.

The whole day, we had no idea that he already had terminal lung cancer, and wouldn’t last the year.

In the letter, he said that there was no one more awesome than us.

There certainly wasn’t, my friend.

I like to leave places better than I left them. Unless I’m condemning a place to be destroyed, I have to imagine that someday someone else will use what I’ve left behind. They’ll need the emotional support of someone I’ve encouraged, or they’ll need the tools I’ve designed. Maybe they’ll just need to see a little more clearly. So I leave the lights on.

Information is hard to retain, even harder to get other people to retain. Whatever gimmicks you can employ to make the information stick, I’m all for it!

Tell stories. Crack jokes. Rhymes, jingles, and of course direct practice all help information lodge itself in the brain. The Animaniacs (an amazing cartoon from my childhood) had all sorts of amazing songs that turned lists of facts into goofy tunes and as a result I can still name all the countries (well, all the ones that existed then, anyway).

If you’re a teacher of any kind, be silly. Silliness is stickiness!

There is always someone who wants what you do. You surround yourself with people who might not, but the world is a billion times larger than your circle of friends. It costs so little to explore a bit – why not?

You aren’t trying to balance all the things in your life, as if they were working against each other and your job is to keep the peace. At least, you shouldn’t be.

Every aspect of your life is part of a planetary system, with you as the star they orbit around. Their gravity affects the other spheres in the same way that Earth’s gravity affects Mars’ orbit. Your career orbits you, and individual jobs orbit your career like moons to a planet.

Your family is a gas giant, with individual members becoming major moons. Your bad habits and vices collect like an asteroid belt, putting craters in the surface of the nearby planets. Some orbits are elliptical; they will at times be closer to or farther from you.

But ever, you are the center.

Their movement is part of an important system, and that system’s energy is all connected. The moon controls the tides on Earth, and so it is with the harmony (or lack thereof) between the aspects of your life.

Use the orbits, use the harmony. Do things in their season, and respect their gravity.

There is rarely harm in asking for information from honest people. If you’re worried about a negative reaction, that’s usually your gut telling you that the people you’re dealing with don’t have your best interests in mind.

As an example, imagine you’re buying a car and you ask to look under the hood. What kind of salesperson would react poorly to such a request? Only someone who didn’t want you to see what a mess the engine was! Anyone selling a reasonable vehicle would be happy to abide by an equally reasonable request.

Curiosity doesn’t just gain you information. It gains you insight. How people respond to curiosity in others tells you a lot about them!

As obvious as it might seem, it’s important to differentiate cause and effect. Aspects of a system emerge from the properties of the elements of that system, not the other way around.

If you have a chunk of ice, it’s because the temperature of the individual molecules of water within that chunk is low enough for the whole mass to become solid. But if you want the individual molecules of a bucket of water to get colder, you can’t accomplish that by trying to hold the water into a solid shape. In other words, you can’t generate the cause by trying to artificially generate the effect.

Shared incentives are vital. All people have different wants and needs, different desires and goals. The key to a well-functioning team isn’t complementary skills or superior organization. Those things are important, but not the most vital ingredient. The essential element is a shared incentive to succeed.

As a leader of any kind of group, that’s your number one priority. Find the thing that everyone wants. If you have to create it, so be it. But there must be a reason for the band to assemble, or you’re sunk before you’ve begun.