Imagine a scientist invents a miraculous new drug. It cures most diseases and extends human life by about ten years, with a dramatic increase in the quality of those years as well. It has a side effect, though; about once a month or so, those who have taken the treatment will randomly slap someone near them, probably delivering a stinging or even painful blow.

Is this a “good” drug? Right away, that’s a nuanced question. Undeniably the total good outweighs the total harm done by the treatment, but the effects aren’t evenly distributed. You get your disease cured; I get slapped in the face. Would I take a slap in the face once a month to have ten more years with my father? Absolutely. But I can’t assume everyone would make that choice, and I can’t make that choice for everyone.

But now here’s the real nuance – what should be done about the treatment, as the scientist, or the scientific community, or anyone able to influence them?

I think there are multiple wrong approaches. I think one wrong approach is to get rid of the drug entirely. The medicine is good; society-wide, it’s better than the alternative. But, importantly, I don’t think that justifies the opposite approach. The opposite approach is to say “Look, this is the greatest medicine humanity has ever seen, and if that means some people have to get slapped in the face, then suck it up because it could be a lot worse.”

The right approach is the hardest, most nuanced path. The right approach is to be glad of the wonderful boon that the medicine grants, while still working hard on eliminating or mitigating that side effect, and making sure that your work to do so doesn’t get rid of whatever element makes the medicine work in the first place.

This is the analogy for… pretty much everything. Lots of things, from countries to companies to relationships to jobs to homes to everything fall into the category of “overall good, but with some problems.” And very often, depending on which side of that you’re experiencing now or just your overall values, we err too far to one side or the other.

We say “This job makes me work 15 minutes of unpaid overtime on Tuesdays, so I’m going to quit,” despite the fact that it’s overall a good job overall that serves your life well. Or we say the opposite: “I would never even think about trying to object to that unpaid overtime, because the job is the best job I’ve ever had otherwise and being unemployed is way worse.” The nuanced view is much harder. The nuanced approach requires us to advocate against unpaid overtime, while still keeping the job, and making sure that the way we’re advocating against the bad policy is consistent with building the rapport that keeps the job.

Sometimes good things have “load-bearing problems.” That’s a term I’ll give to unpleasant aspects of a good thing that somehow are essential to that good thing’s existence. You love your dog but hate cleaning up its poop – but guess what, the dog pooping is essential to the dog continuing to exist. So the nuanced view requires you to find better and better ways to mitigate the bad thing, like training the dog not to poop on the floor and investing in a scooper gadget, etc. It involves neither getting rid of the dog entirely nor saying “It can poop wherever it wants, because having a dog is awesome and no one should say otherwise!”

The nuanced view also requires a level of serenity in our interactions with others. If someone complains that there’s always dog poop on your floor when they visit, you can’t treat them like they hate dogs and have suggested you not own one. And if someone says they love dogs, you can’t treat them like what they just said was “I love poop.”

(I get that one a fair amount as a dad; when I say how much I love kids, especially babies, there’s usually one childless person who will sarcastically comment “Oh, so you love crying and screaming and changing diapers?!” Same principle.)

We should always seek to improve the things we love, be realistic about their flaws, and be graceful to others who may experience more of the flaws than the benefits. If a thing is good, then it’s worth it.

Some fights you lose. Just a fact of life. Lots of people – myself included – insist on sometimes losing the same fight more than once.

I don’t even mean fighting the same kind of fight multiple times, or going back to the mat for rematches, etc. Getting back on the horse and trying again is admirable, to a point. I mean that some people will take a single instance of a single fight, lose it, and then insist on suffering that loss more than they have to.

Here’s the first tip: When you’ve lost, admit it. See it and say it. A whole lot of the pain or consequences that come from losing will cease the second you admit defeat, because then you can start learning, preparing for next time, and removing yourself from the conflict. When someone still sees you as an adversary, they’ll keep hammering you. When you tap out, they often stop.

Plus, the stress level drops considerably. A bad finish is still a finish, and you can start turning off the parts of your brain that are giving you constant agony and frustration.

Let go of the anchor. No one likes to lose, least of all me. But stop beating yourself up about it! Adversaries will do that enough, you certainly don’t have to.

My eldest child and several of her friends from school have started a sick punk cover band called Antispiral. This is the greatest thing ever and I cannot wait for everything that comes of it. They’ve produced no music but several Instagram reels so far. They look rad.

Learning to shape your universe through your actions, instead of simply reacting to and navigating the shape it already has, is such an essential part of life. Some people never do it. Some people do it for a while, and then hit a certain age and stop – as if they were only able to do this when they were teenagers, but then had to “accept reality” as an adult.

Hogwash. The more you learn and the more resources you command, the better you can do exactly that. As long as you never stop believing you can, never get to scarred over from the pain of being wrong sometimes that you stop pushing for the universe you want. Some people stop trying new things entirely, and then enter a downward spiral the rest of their lives – a spiral of complacency and regret.

Don’t. Do the opposite. Live the Antispiral.

You get a couple of laps around the sun and then you’re dust. When you move, move with intention. There’s benefit in stillness, and movement should buy you joy.

If you recognize that watching someone 24/7 is neither a good way to build trust nor a good way to efficiently manage someone, then make sure that you understand the same principle applies to directing all 168 hours of their week.

“Zero Mistakes” is not a realistic target.

Let’s imagine that you’re a heart surgeon. You have a literal life-or-death job. While obviously you should endeavor to never lose a patient, it’s not only unrealistic to expect that outcome, it’s bad practice to make it an institutional goal.

Sounds crazy, irresponsible, or even offensive? Let’s look closer. The hospital director tells you, the heart surgeon, that even one lost patient is unacceptable. They think that if they say “it’s okay to lose 5-8 patients per year,” then they might as well be signing a death warrant, like they’re giving you permission to screw up – and you’ll definitely do it! So they say that if you lose even one, you’re fired. That way, you’ll absolutely be motivated to make zero mistakes!

What happens in practice? In practice, you only ever agree to perform the safest, lowest-risk surgeries. The more routine ones with no comorbidities. You lose zero patients, but dozens die because they never get surgery at all. Of those dozens, some might have died even if you operated on them, but many of them could have been saved. Since your goal was zero deaths, however, you didn’t take the risk. More people died, but none of them were on you.

The reality is that some risk is necessary in order to do good. Yes, you should be careful with how you assess risk, especially if you’re a heart surgeon. But the answer isn’t to minimize your risk, it’s to seek the optimal level of risk versus progress. And you simply can’t do that with a personal or institutional goal of zero mistakes.

Another problem: If the heart surgeon gets fired after one mistake, imagine a totally random fluke early in the year. A patient having a safe, routine surgery has a random event unrelated to that surgery and dies. Now the heart surgeon gets fired, and even the routine surgeries don’t get performed! As soon as one mistake gets made, in other words, the whole project is scrapped.

On an institutional level, “zero mistake” policies leave no room to correct course. They never have a plan for what to do about mistakes, because mistakes are “illegal” in the first place. So instead of training their surgeon on what to do if a minor mistake happens, they just say “don’t make any.”

Especially in an environment that’s not life-or-death (like 99% of all situations), you should actively be targeting a few mistakes. That lets you know that you’re taking appropriate risks, growing out of your comfort zone, and stretching your effort to its furthest reaches.

The only thing you should have zero of is zero mistake policies.

If you set a goal, lay out a plan, and then accomplish the goal, you’ve done something else, too. Something probably more significant than the goal itself.

You’ve created a method. Evidence for your expertise. You can call your shot.

Don’t underestimate that kind of power.

A difficult fact of life is that experiencing something doesn’t make you an expert on it. Even experiencing it a lot – even experiencing it more than someone who is, in fact, an expert.

Getting shot doesn’t make you a ballistics expert.

When we suffer, we look for all sorts of ways to justify that suffering. Nobody likes feeling victimized. Nobody likes feeling like they’ve wasted their time, either. So if you get mugged, it’s perfectly natural for your mind to want to create some positive as a result, and often that positive looks something like your brain saying “Well hey, at least I’m now an expert on crime, street smart and savvy. Won’t happen again, and I can tell others how to avoid it, too.” And if you spend ten years doing something that you didn’t like doing, like a job you hated, you at least want to be able to say that you’re good at it!

Experience isn’t nothing, of course. You learn something from everything you do. But it’s only one way to learn, and it’s not always the best way, and not everything you learn from experience is even correct. But again, that’s a hard pill to swallow. If you get mugged, and in response you form certain very strong views on crime, and then someone tries to tell you that not only did you get mugged, but as a result you became more wrong about how, why, and where crime happens than you were before? You feel victimized all over again. Most brains will do a lot to not feel that way, including being very stubborn about what they think they know.

When something bad happens to you, there’s definitely opportunity for growth. I truly do view every experience as such an opportunity! But you have to be very deliberate about what you learn. Don’t let it become a door for new biases to enter through. Instead, let it be fertile soil for your emotional growth.

And whenever someone voices an opinion to you that is clearly based on their own traumatic event, be graceful – and don’t expect any good results from trying to change their mind.

I try not to interfere with anything I can’t truly take responsibility for. In other words, I keep my nose out of other people’s business. If someone asks for my help, I’m more than happy to give it! But otherwise, that’s a good general rule: don’t touch things you can hold securely.

Three years today since my father died.

It hurts like it was yesterday. And I’m glad of it – I would rather hurt every day than ever forget a second.