Let’s imagine someone has a problem that’s costing them a thousand bucks. You have a solution that will fix the problem, and you sell that solution for a hundred bucks. Shockingly, they don’t want to buy your solution. You’re frustrated because it seemed like a pretty clear win/win situation. Don’t be frustrated! Instead, let’s look at the reasons this happens:

1. Certainty. How certain are they that this solution will actually fix their problem? Even you aren’t 100% certain, so they’re significantly less so. If they think your solution only has a 5% chance of fixing their problem, then the solution is only worth 50 dollars to them – less than what you’re selling it for.
2. Problem Misidentification. They might not actually agree that their problem is costing them a thousand bucks. Maybe they think it’s less severe. Not every problem has an easy price tag. Someone with bad advertising for their business might not agree on what it’s costing them to not fix it.
3. Source Misidentification. Maybe they do agree on the cost of the problem, but they disagree about the root cause, and whatever they think the root cause is won’t be affected by your solution. Their water bill might be a thousand bucks a month, and you’re selling a plumbing service to fix the leaks for a hundred. That’s a great deal, but if they think that the high water bill is actually caused by their children showing for too long, then your solution doesn’t address that.
4. Alternatives. Even in the scenario where they agree on the source of the problem, the cost of the problem, and the likelihood of your solution fixing it, they still may not feel like your solution is the best one. Maybe someone else out there can fix it for 80 bucks.
5. Immediacy. Budgets are real. Spending a hundred bucks to save a thousand is a no-brainer, but if the spend is a hundred thousand to save a million? Even if you agree on the solution itself, you might just not have a hundred thousand bucks laying around. Even if you do, it might be going toward solving problems that are costing even more than a million bucks.
6. Trust. Of course, all of the above questions have to get filtered through the lens of belief. Your solution could directly address the root cause of the most important and expensive problem they have with a high likelihood of success and with no better alternatives, but do they believe that?

So you set out, essentially, to sell someone a thousand dollars for the low price of a hundred dollars. They turned you down. If every one of the above points was addressed, then a “no” would be insane. So, how do you address every point?

Solve certainty with statistics. If this solution worked for this problem in 95% of prior cases like yours, then that’s close to a 95% likelihood that it will solve yours, too. Solve for problem and source misidentification with data and discovery. Show them how to identify and label their problem and make sure they get to the same conclusion before you do anything else. Solve for alternatives by being easy and effective. Remember, finding an alternative doesn’t mean that alternative is better, even if it’s cheaper. And the cost of searching is non-negligible when you have a costly problem right now! Be easy to work with, offering low-stakes contracts or easy revisions if they find something else, and they’ll rarely look. Solve for immediacy by making sure they can see the return on investment quickly – if you can solve a thousand-dollar problem for a hundred bucks, can you solve 200 dollars of their problem for 20 to get started? That frees up operating capital and lowers risk, if there’s some version of that you can do.

And you solve for trust by doing all of those other things. You don’t ask for trust until you’ve shown that you deserve it.

So the next time you try to solve a problem, remember what they need to get there. The win/win isn’t always visible from both sides at first. And it’s your responsibility to get it there.

We have a hierarchy of needs that we require from our jobs or careers. These needs must be met in order; we can’t care about higher-order things until the basics are covered.

The very base of the pyramid is the job itself. We need to have some sort of source of income, our employment. Until that need is met, it’s hard to think about things like pursuing a passion or deeper purpose.

The next level up is Steadiness. We need to feel like the money is coming in predictably, that our employment is reasonably secure, and that we aren’t one errant sneeze away from losing our job. If we’re in that kind of fear state, we can’t think higher.

Once those two levels are covered, now we can start thinking about a team. We want good coworkers, pleasant managers, etc. To some extent this level affects the level below it, but until we’re generally not going to be picky about our colleagues until we’re sure we can be without threatening the basic employment. (But this is why you can’t win people over with a pizza party if they’re worried about steady employment – they’re too low on the pyramid for them to care about team-building yet!)

If we have steady employment with a good team, the next level is caring about advancement. Once we feel like the job is safe and has good people in it, we want to start growing and building. We want to put down roots and get promoted. We want to build that team, not just be on it.

The highest level of the pyramid is passion for the work. The other rewards have to be met before most people can really dedicate themselves here. It’s hard to be passionate about work, even work you love, if you can’t pay your rent and your boss is a jerk. Asking people to care about “the mission” under those circumstances rings hollow.

Understand where people are in the pyramid of job/career needs, and you’ll understand how to help them and motivate them.

The big block of ice will melt faster if you break it into smaller pieces. Increased surface area. So it is with big tasks – simply sub-dividing them is progress. Things start moving on their own.

The larger the task or more frequently you perform it, the greater the impact of finding ways to automate as much of it as you can.

If you do one load of laundry every two weeks, then the benefit of any improvements in efficiency is pretty small. You’re probably fine doing it the way you’re doing it. But if you do four loads of laundry per day because you have a particularly large and messy family, then it’s absolutely worth it to find ways to improve that system.

“Automate” can mean a lot of things. It can mean finding ways to save labor via technology, but it can also mean delegation or outsourcing. For instance, if you actually were doing four loads of laundry per day, it would almost certainly be worthwhile to hire a laundry service and then do something more productive with the enormous amount of time you’d save.

Your own mental and physical effort can only stretch so far, and you can’t make more hours in the day. If you want to scale, automation is the key that unlocks your cage. Invest the time to look for solutions.

This Too Shall Pass, he said. Like Vonnegut; So It Goes. And it will. It will.

It will.

When you have a non-Newtonian fluid, like oobleck, the harder you hit it the more resistance it gives back. You can crack it with a hammer, but you can also slowly push your finger into it with almost no resistance. Go faster, and it sticks.

Sometimes life feels non-Newtonian. You can’t go faster, you can’t push harder. Tiny and slow.

There is no pain.

You are receding.

A distant ship.

Smoke on the horizon.

Thirty years ago, my father volunteered at my middle school to get the newly purchased computer lab up and running. That meant him spending most of each weekday over the summer in the otherwise empty school (his actual job was weekends only). Since most weekdays at that age were spent with my dad, that meant I was there, too. Far from an unpleasant isolation, we had a great time together messing around with new technology. I also didn’t really have anything else to do – I hadn’t yet made any real friends outside of my family.

Early that same summer, a woman moved to our town from somewhere else in the state. She didn’t know anyone and came for her full-time job. She was also a single mom working hard to make two ends meet, and so her dilemma was what to do with her son during the day while she worked. Since she was registering that son for the town’s middle school, she discovered that the school’s computer lab/media center was technically open all summer, even though the only two people there were my dad and me. Still, this was perfect for her, and she started dropping her son off every morning when she went to work.

And this was how I met my oldest and best friend.

We spent every day that summer together, and just about every day after that. Chalie (yes, “Chalie,” not “Charlie” with an “R,”) was the absolute best friend I could have ever asked for, at every age. I could dedicate this blog exclusively to stories about him and I’d still be writing years from now. He showed me what friendship was. He showed me how you could be loyal to someone while still pushing them to be better. How you could forgive someone over and over and over again without ever accepting that they couldn’t be more. How to show up for someone when they need it, and especially when they don’t think they do.

We had so many shared jokes and references other people said it was like the two of us spoke our own language that they couldn’t follow. We had our first job together, we practically lived at each other’s houses, we were more less in constant contact. There was never enough of him. He was funny, and smart, and adventurous, and generous, and cool as all hell, and he saw the absolute best in everyone, even if he knew you’d have to work hard to let it out.

He traveled the world. He lived on different continents, spoke multiple languages, smuggled things across borders, and found love. In all of that, he never “went away” from me. We’d live thirteen thousand miles apart and he’d talk to me every day. To outsiders our adult lives couldn’t have looked more different – he was exploring the world, I was raising a spectacular family – but we shared those trials and triumphs together. There was never a millimeter between our understanding of one another.

His nickname when we were young was “Superkid.” Even his mom called him that. I knew lots of people who knew him (he was that kind of famous, friends everywhere, you’d be so astonished who’d already know him when you walked into a place you were certain he’d never been before) that didn’t even know his real name, because “Superkid” was who he was. He was one of the most hyper-competent people I’d ever met, could solve anything, never worried. I was his sidekick, his shadow. In every way, he was cooler and smarter and better than I was.

He’d yell at me for saying that, though.

He had so many friends, friends he held onto for so long – a skill I’d simply never mastered. The fact of us being friends for three decades was surely because of his ability to keep friends, not mine. And yet somehow, with all those amazing people to choose from, he kept coming back to me. He never let me down once, and I know I’d let him down dozens of times. He’s rescued me more times than I could say, and I’ve never had to repay the favor. I will never know why he put up with me. It would certainly have been easier to write me off. But not only did he never give up on me, he kept me at the very top of his list. He called me his best friend. He would introduce me as his brother.

Last night I said goodbye to my best friend, my brother, my Superkid. After an intense but far too short battle with cancer, he left us peacefully. I was never able to bail him out of jail or save him from a burning building or carry him down a mountain or any of the other things he deserved a thousand times over for all the ways he’s done the same for me. For all the ways he’s made my life immeasurably better and made me so much better than I could have hoped to become without him. I was never able to do any of that, because he never needed it.

But last night, I was able to hold his hand. I was able to walk with him to the very end of his road. I was able to be at his bedside, my brother, my best friend, my Superkid. It isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. I have so much debt to him that I will never be able to repay.

And I know what he would say. He would tell me to pay it back to other people, instead. To forgive them, and be a better friend to them as he was to me. To give all that energy to people I don’t think deserve it, instead of hoarding it for the people who do.

I will try, Superkid. I will miss you every day, and I will hold you in my heart, and I will use your memory to wedge open that door inside me that too often shuts, and I will let people in, instead. I know you would want that, and I certainly owe it to you.

I love you, my brother. Farewell, Superkid.

Go then – there are other worlds than these.

You cannot ask people to act against themselves. People can sacrifice, yes. But they will not oppose their fundamental needs. If you build your plan assuming they will, your plan will fail.