The hardest part of winning a relay race isn’t running fast. It’s handing off the baton correctly. Any time there’s a transition, there’s room for error. Friction that can spark an explosion.

Too often people pay enormous amounts of attention to the part, and not nearly enough to the connection between parts.

One of humans’ greatest strengths – and most insidious curses – is our ability to adapt to nearly any change in our circumstances.

It’s not always, of course. Sometimes a great tragedy befalls someone and they never recover. But most of the time, they do! People get life-altering injuries or make career-ending mistakes, and life goes on. They not only adapt, they ultimately return to baseline happiness. They find new things to give them joy. The fact that most humans do this is why it’s such a tragedy when a few can’t.

Why did I say it was an insidious curse, though? Because it works the other way, too. When things go well for us, humans very quickly raise their new baseline expectations. I’ve seen it happen so many times. Someone is living quite happily on $50k/year, and suddenly they get a job that pays triple that. For whatever reason, it doesn’t last more than a year, and the person goes back to making $50k. You’d think that would be no problem, right? But no. The adaptation process has to happen all over again, and it’s often slow and painful.

My father used to tell me that the best position to be in was “playing with house money.” In a casino, you walk in with whatever money you have and you start gambling. If you’re under what you came in with, you’re betting your own money. You’re probably losing it, too. You might be responsibly having a good time with a budgeted amount, but you’re still losing that amount. On the other hand, if you can get an early win or two, my father said, you should immediately put away all the money you originally came in with. For the rest of the night, just gamble with your initial winnings. If you “lose everything,” then you’re – at worst – back where you started, but having had a pleasant evening. Gamble, in other words, with house money.

It has other advantages besides protecting your stake. When you play with house money, you can have more fun – you can take more risks, try wilder things. The important thing to remember is that it is house money. It’s not yours. Don’t start feeling entitled to it.

That lesson stuck with me. I remember when I was a young man, I lived with some roommates and (being too poor for a car at the time), I walked to work. One of my roommate’s friends left a car with us for a few weeks while they went out of town, and my roommate immediately started driving to work. I would be fine borrowing the car for a night out, but I didn’t change my daily routine. Sure enough, when the friend came back into town, my roommate had a hard time adjusting to walking to work again, even though it had only been a few weeks!

Good times and lean times both come and go. When the good times come, enjoy them – but remember that they’re house money. Don’t instantly adjust your expectations of life up to the maximum. If you’ve made $50k for a long time and you suddenly get a big raise, keep living like you make $50k. Put the rest away. Maybe you’ll never go backward – but many people do.

And sure, you can adapt. But why make it harder on yourself? Playing with house money rules. But don’t quit your day job.

There are different forms of rest, and getting the wrong kind can be as bad as getting none.

No one can go go go forever. You need to recharge, but “recharging” doesn’t just mean sleeping. If you don’t believe me, picture a life where you get nine hours of sleep every night, but you spend the other 15 hours each day working – every day. Do you imagine that you’ll feel rested? Will you be able to maintain it?

Satisfaction, engaging other parts of your brain, leisure and enjoyment, productivity on other priorities – these are all ways “resting” and getting back the energy you need to be able to give to the world in exchange for its bounties. Don’t neglect them.

I’m probably more obsessed with containers than most people. I like having my things organized and ready to use, but I also like the constraints. If there’s something I like (for instance: board games), then I might be tempted to get… let’s just call it “way too many.”

But if I start with a container – a shelf, a box, a backpack, whatever – and say “this is my container for X,” then I can easily lock that in within my brain as the hard limit on how much of X I can get.

This works for time as well as space, more often than you realize. We start committing to things as if time wasn’t a hard limit, as if we could shove more things into the back of that hour the way some of us try to shove more things into the back of the closet.

You can’t, in either case.

You have X tasks, problems, or obstacles, the combination of which is stressing you out and providing a barrier. You need to solve for the most efficient number of tasks and problems to tackle right now in order to progress through the list in the most effective way possible. What’s the formula?

It’s 1. X is 1. It’s always 1.

There’s a trap you can get yourself into. You take on a new type of task, probably professionally. You’re too concerned with being “productive” too quickly, but you’re new to the work. You lack expertise, so you make up for it by working harder and longer. The work begins to burn you out and you don’t seem to be making any headway. Years may pass without you improving your skill or efficiency, but now you’re also locked into your way of doing things. Your brain has mistaken time for expertise.

I’ve seen it happen often. Professionals with ten or more years on a task who don’t have certain fundamental skills in it. Why? Because they never gave themselves time to learn. Instead, they used all their available time right away trying to “produce,” never taking time to practice.

Practice isn’t the same as just doing. Yes, some skill gain happens over time without you concentrating on it. Some. Much, much more happens through deliberate learning. If you play basketball every day, you’ll get better at basketball. But you’ll get much better if you get coached, learn fundamentals that exist outside of the game actions, gather complimentary athletic skills, and so on. Without those things, even the modest skill gain you get from just playing will quickly plateau.

When I was in sales, I’d see this constantly. Someone would join the profession and just hit the pavement or the phones and start selling. They’d be desperate to hit quotas and make money so instead of dedicating any time to learning, they’d just dial or knock or what have you for hours extra every day. And they’d get a little better! Then they’d quickly level off in skill; now they can make an okay living by only working 60% harder than they should have, instead of twice as long. Meanwhile, they’ve still never read a book on selling, attended a workshop, sought mentorship, or anything else that might truly level them up.

Organizations can create this in their people. If the focus is constantly on production in the short term and not on knowledge and skill growth, employees can be funneled into this trap by the company they work for. This is as frequent as people doing it to themselves.

You learn pretty much everything you’ll learn “by osmosis” in the first year of a task. After that, you’re not going to be making any appreciable skill gains unless you’re actually seeking knowledge outside of your daily tasks. If it’s been a while since you’ve done that – now’s the time.

The shiny parts of the house don’t stand up on their own.

People often want – or even demand – the shiny results. They unrealistically demand this of themselves, of others, of the world. They don’t always want all the results immediately, but people get very upset if they don’t see progress toward results almost instantly.

But often you just have to pre-heat the oven, you know? A foundation has to be laid first, and while that’s real work, it’s often invisible. If you pay someone to ghost-write your book for you, they’re doing tangible research work for weeks before the first word goes on the page. If you’re the kind of person who yells “It’s been three weeks and you haven’t written one word?! What am I paying you for,” then you’re not going to get many quality results in life.

For any project of real substance, ask that question first: “What foundation is needed here?” Being aware of the need will help keep you patient and realistic. And that’s a solid foundation all on its own.

How we talk about ourselves is so much more important than we realize. Our willingness to attempt things is so driven by our belief in our ability to navigate that attempt – how likely we are to succeed, at what cost, and at what risk. And all of life’s joys and successes are borne from the attempt.

This is probably not a universal experience, but it’s certainly common enough for many: You’re playing a team sport and someone on your team has the ball. You have a clear path to score if you get it, so you shout “I’m open!” Sometimes you get passed to, and sometimes you get passed over. The deciding factor is how convincing you were to your teammate about your ability to score – and that is driven, at least in part, by how confident you were in that fact.

In life, we’re constantly shouting “I’m open!” to people all around us. We ask for people’s faith in us all the time – to employ us, to date us, to buy from us, to vote for us. Very few dreams can be realized in a vacuum.

Communication skill matters. But that’s the steering – the engine is your belief in what you’re communicating. Motive power without steering will at least get you somewhere; you should learn to steer, but at least you’re moving. Steering without movement is pointless. The self-belief must come first.

You must always believe that you’re open – that given the chance, you’ll score. You must have the conviction to even take the shot and inspire confidence in others to pass to you. None of that works if you tell yourself that you’re closed.

Some creative endeavors favor mastery. Others favor adaptability. It’s rare to be able to have both, so it’s a good idea to know which category you’re in. I call this the “cooking/baking axis.”

Cooking is an art. You play. You mix and match, taste and adjust. You modify as you go, you put a little pizzazz in it. You can throw an extra dash of something in and leave out something else and the whole thing can come together like magic if you’re good at it. Getting a sense of all that can take practice, but you’re always weaving.

Baking is a science. If you don’t put the right amount of everything in, at the right temperature, for the right time, heck at the right altitude, you don’t get cake – you get sludge or charcoal. You can’t just decide to throw an extra stick of butter in there without consequences. You can’t decide to make your pineapple upside-down cake al dente. Mastery is important. You practice until it’s perfect.

This is the difference between a gymnastics routine and improv comedy. In the former, you need perfect mastery to get it right (and not get hurt). In the latter, practicing too much can make you rigid, and rigidity actually makes you worse.

People tend to gravitate toward one or the other, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But then sometimes they choose endeavors that don’t always line up with their natural style, and that can be frustrating. It’s worth it to look inward. Next time you’re going to a potluck, observe what you’d rather make. You’ll enjoy your enjoyment more if your creativity matches your methods.

It can be hard to face facts when it comes to our own shortcomings. Always remember: even if you ignore them, the world doesn’t. And the farther you let your version of reality drift from the version the world sees, the less the world will consider you worthy of interaction.

If you’re a teacher and one person fails your class, you can say that it’s on that student or it’s a fluke, etc. But if you’re a teach and everyone fails your class, then you’re a bad teacher. And no matter what else you point to as evidence that you’re a “good” teacher, you have to face the facts. There’s ultimately one measure of how good a teacher you are, and that’s how well your students learn.

No teacher wants to admit that they’re bad – no one ever wants to admit that they’re bad at one of the primary things they identify as. I’m okay with admitting that I’m a bad golfer because I don’t care about being a good one. But if presented with evidence that I was a bad father, a bad friend, a bad coach – these would be harder for me to accept. But I have to face those facts if they’re presented to me.

If I loudly and belligerently proclaim “I’m a good father” while my children violently attack everyone around them, steal things, destroy stuff, do drugs, go to jail, and so on, then the world will (correctly) realize that I have no interest in changing my behavior as a parent. The world will then lose any interest in helping me. I’ll be written off, and likely so will my children. If instead I say, “I don’t know where I went wrong, but clearly I’m doing something incorrectly,” then the people in the world who might be able to help me do better are far more motivated to do so.

How much you want to be good at something isn’t a measure of how good you are. It can be a great input; wanting to be good at something is the first step. But it isn’t, itself, a measure. The results are the measure. And if you don’t face that, you’ll never actually be good.