Confusion is a very difficult mental state to work through. It’s an insulator against good experiences. It’s the opposite of confidence, and confidence is often what we need to enjoy ourselves.

In any circumstance, we can take in more of what we’re experiencing and experience it in the way we want if we’re navigating that circumstance with self-assurance. If we have no idea what’s going on, we’ll retreat to safety practices and shyness, and most of the enjoyable aspects of the experience will be lost to us.

In new situations, it’s easy to feel much more confused than confident. That makes us enjoy new experiences less, which can drive us to associate “new experiences” as a general category with unpleasant emotions. That’s a very dangerous spiral.

Try this: let the confusion wash over you. Remind yourself that you don’t care about the outcome, especially in a new environment. It’s your first time in the new office? So what? You may get lost a little, forget which conference room you’re using today, or need to ask where the bathroom is. You can’t do any of those things badly enough to get fired. So be confident in the confusion – it’s a natural state! And if we worry about it less, it goes away faster.

Minor tweaks in direction and size. Help a few more people or pull back a bit for your own energy. Change a slight aspect of what you’re doing. Don’t remain still. This is the real meaning of “going the distance,” because you can’t win a race if you never turn, never alter your speed. The real way to the end is to flow.

“How” is a much better word than “what” in front of “…do you want to be when you grow up?”

Identities aren’t as important as values. Vocations aren’t as vital as philosophies. The ethics of how we behave and the mentality that motivates our work are essential. That’s what we need to demonstrate, not the elevation of one job over another.

Not just for children, either. For all of us.

Happy New Month!

October is my favorite month. The weather gets perfect, spooky season is fun, October baseball is best baseball, and it just has the best overall vibes. This month, I vow to make the most of it, because it’s gone in a flash. I’m going back to the woods!

May you get treats instead of tricks, may your World Series dreams come true, and may you find your own best vibes, wherever you find them.

When I was an adolescent and teenager, I had a marble notebook that I carried with me everywhere. It was full of truly awful poetry, broody letters, cut-and-pasted items I thought were interesting (or at least made me interesting), and so on. It was, by the parlance of today’s youth, “cringe af.”

I don’t regret it at all. Part of me, in the classic Millenial cliche, is glad it was only a notebook and not eternalized social media posts or videos. But I don’t regret the time in my life when I was… whatever I was.

Cringe is part of growth. Cringe is good. We all try on scores of identities as we explore what makes the world interesting. As we figure out what we truly have to offer, we seek and struggle for something that both sets us apart and includes us. We want to be different, but we want people to notice that we’re different and admire it. Full admission: I would never, ever show anyone that notebook back then, but I always hoped people saw me writing in it and were intrigued by the mystery. I wanted more than anything for someone to want to read that notebook, to care enough about me to try to pry out my secrets.

That actually did happen. But it wasn’t until years and years after I didn’t write in it anymore. I still had it for a long time, a piece of nostalgia maybe. But someone who already knew me and cared about me discovered it in some corner of my closet and then was interested, because by then it was an artifact. Something about who I had been, rather than who I was now – and maybe some sense of the journey from one to the other.

We read it together, and of course it was cringe af. But I enjoyed the reading. I enjoyed seeing that young man’s exploration, trying to figure out what he thought was cool, what he thought other people might think was cool, and reconciling how he felt about both. That young man grew up into a guy that’s pretty sure-footed when it comes to dealing with the opinions of his peers. He became a pretty socially fearless guy, as a matter of fact.

I tossed the old notebook, after that. I don’t put a lot of stock in physical objects like that, and it had now served its full purpose. That part of the journey was over, and I was happy with it. No desire to go back, and no regrets about the time I was there.

Cringe is good. It’s just the sense you get when you try things on and they don’t quite fit yet. But trying things on is all of life, if you want it to be worth living.

There is always just a little more in you, for when you need it. Don’t ever forget that nothing has killed you yet, and much has tried. But that heart has a few more beats in it yet.

All animals are both social and competitive. Cooperative and hierarchical. Humans want to work together, but they also want to know who’s in charge. It’s in our blood. We enter a new environment, and we immediately look for weaknesses in others while hiding our own. We try to project strength, even if we’re trying not to threaten (and maybe we are trying to threaten a little, even when we don’t know it).

The point is that a lot of our behaviors are explained in this model. You don’t want to speak up in the meeting with the new team because some part of your brain is worried that they’ll kill you and eat you if you mess up. They probably won’t. Let them peck if they want to. You’ll be fine.

You could eliminate half the words you say without any effect on your life. Scratch that – it would almost certainly have a positive effect on your life.

Talking (or writing, as it were) feels good. We have someone’s attention, and a big part of our brain just wants that and nothing more. So we talk more and more. Talking is like junk food; it feels great in the moment, but the long-term consequences are terrible for us.

I’m a very outcomes-focused person. That not only means that I care about the results of my actions, but it means I tend to be pretty good at recognizing what will actually affect those outcomes – as opposed to what couldn’t possibly.

Big outcomes are made of small details, but very often a wide range of variance within those details will produce exactly the same result. Let’s say I could take one of five different routes to an event, and as a result I could arrive at said event at five different times, all within the same 15-minute window. Does it matter which route I take?

Not even a little. I mean sure, if I get in a car accident along one route I could end up dwelling on whether I should have taken another, but given that I couldn’t have known that to begin with, there’s no reason to stress about this decision. There might be a sixth route that crosses three state lines and takes the long way around Lake Michigan, and I probably shouldn’t take that one – but I probably wasn’t going to.

The point is that some details are certainly important. But very rarely are they worth any stress. My favorite painting is Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Assuming you find it as beautiful and moving as I do – can you point to one solitary brushstroke that, if altered by fifteen degrees in angle or by a slight shade in color, would ruin the experience of gazing upon it?

Not even a little.

Obsess over the technique. Obsess over getting good at the things you do, to the point where the details take care of themselves. And then you can live in the outcomes, not in the process.

When people’s only job is to do one thing, and them continuing to have gainful employment depends on them doing that thing, then they will – guess what? – do that thing.

Some people’s job is to find fault with things. So they always will. Don’t sweat it.