Sometimes, after painfully slow progress toward a goal, you suddenly have a huge breakthrough. You gain a bunch of ground all at once. Great! But as anyone who’s ever ridden a bike over hilly terrain will tell you, that’s not the time to cheer.

It’s the time to pedal.

The sudden burst of speed that comes from going downhill is a gift. The way to maximize it is to build on that momentum, to pedal faster to build up speed, because just around the corner is the next hill to climb. Getting to the bottom of a new hill at a leisurely pace is a recipe for a very difficult ascent. But if you’ve got that burst of kinetic energy behind you because you capitalized on the last downslope, you can be halfway up the next hill before you even slow.

Cheer the breakthroughs, yes. Cherish them. But use them.

I dislike the word “review.”

The past is only useful in one regard, as information used to direct or predict the future. Suppose I review a contractor’s work on my house. In that case, I have one of two goals: I either want to change one or more aspects of future work from that contractor when I hire them again, or I want to inform my friends/family/community about that contractor in a way that affects their potential future with them. If I never intended to use that contractor again and I didn’t think my review would help anyone else make future decisions, I would never bother.

However, many people seem to focus their “reviews” in any context on the past. If I’m scolding my kids for some behavior, I’m not trying to change the past behavior. That’s absurd! I’m trying to affect the future – and that’s how I start that conversation with my kids, every time. “Let’s talk about how we can make sure this doesn’t happen again, okay?”

(Parenting side note: This helps reinforce that redirects from a parent are about changing behavior, not “being mad” at a person!)

So here’s my tip, the future I want to see: When you give feedback, review something, or comment at all on the past, start by thinking about the future you want to see.

Let’s say one of your employees makes a costly mistake that loses a client. You’re stressed, frustrated, disappointed, maybe even a little angry. Naturally, you want to talk to the employee about the mistake. But pause. Because what a lot of managers naturally do as “feedback” here is describe the mistake. They talk about how severe it was. They talk about the impact on the department, company, even themselves. They act, in other words, like the future they want to see is “My employee feels super bad, their confidence is shot, and they have a worse relationship with me.”

Look, the employee knows the severity of the mistake. Your goal isn’t to vent your frustrations, right? It’s to prevent similar mistakes in the future. And to attempt to reach that goal, you have two choices: You can get rid of the employee if you feel like they’re too much of a liability, or you can correct their behavior to minimize future risk. If you evaluate that employee as too much of a risk, then that’s fine – but that’s the only necessary action then. Venting your frustrations doesn’t help! And if you want them to correct their behavior in the future, then you have to think about whether each thing you say to them moves toward that goal or not.

Does telling them how mad you are give them better information about how to do that? Do you think that the reason they made the first mistake was because they didn’t know how mad you’d be? Because they didn’t realize that losing a client would have a negative impact on the business? No, of course not. People make professional mistakes because they lack information, expertise, or skill. Your goal is to give them that skill, if it’s possible to do so.

So picture that future: “My employee never makes this mistake again, because they have the tools that they were missing when they made it the first time.”

(Incidentally, this is why I think firing people because of big mistakes is so foolish. Experience is the best teacher – why get rid of someone who is probably so likely to never make this mistake again?)

Once you picture the future you’re trying to reach, you may come to a startling conclusion: You barely need to talk about the past mistake at all. You can mention it as the context for the discussion, maybe you can answer questions about it, but don’t dwell. Just get to the tasks at hand! Fuming, blaming, and venting aren’t feedback. They aren’t directional. And they don’t lead to the end you (hopefully) have in mind.

Boy, apologizing is cathartic. Imagine gripping a sharp piece of glass. Gripping it hard. No matter how strong you are, you won’t win. You might want to crush the glass, but that isn’t what happens. What happens is that your own strength is your very weakness. The stronger you are, the more harm you do to yourself. The glass will always win.

Holding a grudge is gripping the glass. Not dwelling on the past loosens the grip a little. But apologizing lets the glass fall from your hand. Your wounds begin to heal.

If someone has wronged you, hurt you – done something worthy of the grudge in the first place – you may find yourself balking at the idea that you should apologize to them. You may accept the premise that holding the anger isn’t healthy, but apologizing? For what?!

Let’s start with a shocking but helpful axiom: If you are angry at someone, there is absolutely something you could apologize for.

If you start with that as a given truth and begin to truly look, you’ll probably find something. Even if you can’t find a single thing you should own, maybe because you were truly the target of some random attack, then you still have one last resort – apologizing for being angry. Reacting in anger and hatred instead of understanding and patience.

I can hear the resistance. “Someone randomly attacks me and I owe them an apology for being angry about it?!”

You don’t owe them anything. This isn’t about them.

It’s about you.

Apologizing is a way to build empathy. To release anger and hatred from your heart. Where, let me be clear, it is killing you. You don’t want to grip that shard of glass in your hand, right? Well, you certainly don’t want it in your heart.

When someone wrongs you, you can be hurt once or twice, and it’s your choice. The first hurt is what the other person inflicts on you. The second and far worse injury is what you inflict on yourself if you shove that glass deep down inside your heart.

Don’t. No one ever died from an apology.

Being able to limit hope without becoming hopeless is a tricky but essential balancing act.

Imagine you’re locked in a cage. You have to escape. You start brainstorming, but all your ideas involve objects or people you can only find outside the cage. “If only I could get my power tools, I’d be out of here in no time!” Pal, if you could get your power tools, you’d be outside the cage.

So you have to write that stuff off. But that doesn’t mean that you have to give up hope. It just means you have to confine it. You have to create positive thought, but not let it go where you can’t. It’s a nice dream, having those power tools. But it’s an unhelpful dream.

Sometimes your situation is bad. And dreaming about all the ways you could make your situation better if only your situation wasn’t bad to begin with is… well, it’s not very productive.

If you never escape that cage for the rest of your life, there will still be a side of the cage that’s less drafty. A more comfortable corner. An angle from which you can see the sunrise. Whatever it is, find it. Hope for it, even. Dream of a better here and now – and not a pleasant there and then that doesn’t help you get there.

Happy New Month!

My resolution this month is as simple as it is important. I will spend as much time as I possibly can with people. Life is too short, and people are too important. I will be as good to them as I can be.

May you do the same, my friends.

Not being asked to help isn’t an insult. You can offer to help, and someone can decline without it meaning that they don’t think you’re helpful in general. Sometimes people just need their own way, for a while.

It’s amazing what people leave behind. Even accidentally, nothing ever really disappears. It all just moves around, collecting in little corners and hidden places, waiting to be discovered. Junk becomes riches on a long enough timeline. Dig around a little. Find wonder.

I had a humbling moment the other day. I did something, expecting to get thanked. I wasn’t. I was cross for about ten seconds before I realized that I had been on the receiving end of that same thing multiple times myself, and had never even thought to thank the person that did it.

The small lesson, of course, is “Don’t do things because you want to be thanked. Do things because they’re the right things to do.” But the larger lesson is to look beyond the obvious. People are doing you favors all the time, every day. If ever there was a day to remember to say thank you for the non-obvious, this is it.

Many people feel daunted by the idea of stating a goal. Two things drive this anxiety: fear of failure, and uncertainty about methods.

Fear of failure is commonplace, though all the best advice applies: If you don’t try you’ve failed already; don’t look at the odds, look at the cost, etc. But the uncertainty about methods is a poor reason to avoid setting a goal, simply because a goal requires no methods.

If my goal is “build a house,” then knowing how to build a house is absolutely not a prerequisite to setting that goal. It’s a requirement to achieve that goal, and it will be part of the project plan that gets made. But the goal is absolutely the first step, and requires nothing else. Nothing but desire and ambition.

So if you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t want to set a goal of becoming a famous musician because I don’t even know how to play an instrument,” then you’re already cutting yourself short. You’ll never even learn if you don’t have some motivation behind the act. Whether your goal is to be a famous musician, a cool dude at parties, or someone with a more relaxing private hobby, desire cannot follow action. You won’t ever learn to play guitar at all.

So set the goal! Tactics come later, success or failure comes later, planning and action and iteration all come later. The goal, my friend. The goal must be set to be accomplished.

There is a moment after the fire. You look at the ruins, the rubble. All that was once built, gone. The moment of greatest despair is here. When the fire raged and all was burning, even amid the fear and anger there was some shred of hope and purpose. Some idea that you might act swiftly enough to save something, anything. To stem the destruction somehow.

And then you don’t. You look out at the ruins and you see failure. You see not only loss, but loss connected to you and your actions, or perhaps your inactions.

And more, even more than that. A house may be built upon an empty field and the work is hard and heavy, but from the very first breaking of ground you’re building. Moving up and forward. But the rubble, the ruin. It’s weight. An enormous burden of weight that creates an impossible distance between you and simple neutrality. Even an empty field is a distant dream.

It is easy to leave ruin in your wake, to walk away with nothing but your despair. So much of you is buried under that rubble. The weight smothers it. The work is impossibly hard, but if you leave it behind you will never recover. You have lost so much. It feels like you’ve lost everything. The horror is this: you haven’t. There is still more of you to lose.

It’s under there. Under the ruins. Despite the impossibility of the task, you must begin to dig.