There is a very basic rule of the universe that most people seem to forget. If you remember it, your life will be much better – largely because you’ll avoid wasting a lot of effort. Here’s the rule: The easier something is, the more people will do it.

Why is that rule important? Because people often lament that something is too hard, onerous, or bothersome – and then also complain that too many people are doing it. But one of those things is balanced against the other!

The example that shows up for me most frequently is career-related: people want job applications to be easier. And sure, some of the requirements these days are ridiculous. People don’t want to fill out eight forms, record five videos, design an app, interview sixteen times, and take a blood test just to try to get a job. They want to push one button called “Apply” and be done with it!

But if you pay attention, you discover that the other side of the problem is that ten thousand people apply to every job in the first five minutes that it’s posted. And look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but… you cannot solve both of those problems at once.

Anything that makes it easier to apply to jobs will increase the number of people who do so. And the only way to decrease that number is to make the application process more involved. Those are two sides of one scale.

This has nothing to do with whether the process is even good. Forget about whether whatever hoops companies are creating actually find good candidates or filter out bad ones. We aren’t even at that problem yet. We’re just talking about the math. And the math at this stage is – unfortunately – simple.

The economics language around this is “there are no twenty-dollar bills on the sidewalk.” Think like this: if a twenty-dollar bill was on top of Mount Everest, it would stay there for a long time, because very few people could get it and it wouldn’t be worth it for anyone to try. On the other side of the spectrum, a twenty-dollar bill just laying on the sidewalk would be picked up instantly – by someone else. The easier the bill is to reach, the more people are reaching for it.

If you want getting the bill to be easy, someone else got it. If you want no one else to be competing with you for the bill, then it has to be so hard to get that it’s not worth it – even for you.

Now, I’m not a doom-and-gloom guy. I offer solutions and opportunities.

The world is complex, and in that complexity there are opportunities for improvements – maybe not to an entire system, but definitely to your own life. Don’t lament that the mountain is too hard to climb or the sidewalk is too crowded – find a third way. There may be two ten-dollar bills just down the street, you just have to play a different game.

In practical terms, remember: There is almost always someone on the other side of the problem. To go back to the job example, this is also a problem for companies. It’s a different problem, but it’s a problem. Believe it or not, companies aren’t making this hard as a punishment for you specifically. When they make their application processes difficult and weird, they’re doing it because they’re trying (and I grant you, often trying very ham-fistedly) to reduce the number of candidates to a manageable level while still retaining the best ones. Most of them fail miserably (that’s a whole other post on why), but they’re definitely looking for solutions. That’s your angle.

Don’t play rigged games. If a process is crazy difficult and five hundred people are still engaging in it, then that means the process simply can’t sustain the weight of the math. So skip the process. Email the CEO directly. Do something weird and a little difficult, but that you want to do. Cut the line, in other words. It might not work! But the main process definitely won’t.

But understand this problem when you see it. This math dilemma is a brick wall, but it’s not universal. Go around it whenever you can.

People can deploy falsehoods so easily that they have no choice but to fall back on emotional tactics if challenged. If someone says something in support of their overall position, but you think that thing is untrue, you need to be prepared sometimes to be attacked.

This is true even if you agree with the position! I agree, for instance, that we jail non-violent offenders too readily. But if someone says “Police in this country jail non-violent offenders over a million times per week for an average of fifteen years,” I would point out that this probably isn’t true. I would challenge it, ask for sources, etc. And the speaker might say something like, “What are you, in favor of the police state?! Why are you making such a big deal about this?!”

That’s an old trick. My desire to be accurate and know the truth isn’t the same as support for one position or another. How can I even know what positions to take if I don’t know the truth? That has to be upstream.

If you’re getting upset because someone wants more information, then that’s a sign that you need to reevaluate. And if someone gets mad at you for wanting it, then that’s a sign that they’re not a source of truth.

“I love talking to you. It’s like watching a TED talk.” – my daughter, age 12.

I can’t remember a better compliment from a more important source. Some days you just feel like you’re doing it right.

Happy New Month!

My goal this month is to build new independencies in my children. Their own walking patterns to school, library cards, new bikes, anything that gives them more keys to the world. It’s a great month for it. And they’re great kids.

May you be independent too!

If you really want to get to know someone, you have to do something with them that forces them to rely on who they really are. Build something frustrating together, or compete with one another. Playing poker against someone is a better exercise for getting to know them than a thousand hours of them telling you what they want you to know.

One person can care for one tree. One person can care for a hundred trees. But one hundred people can’t care for a hundred trees.

It’s just not in our nature to be emotionally invested properly in things that we can’t conceptualize as “ours.” That doesn’t have to be in a selfish, greedy ownership way. It can be in terms of responsibility.

When someone is given a partial stake in a large domain, they tend to want to carve out subdomains for themselves. If you tell a hundred people to collectively care for a hundred trees, the natural and immediate response is for them to start picking individual trees to care for. Expecting them to each care 1% for each tree is absurd. It’s not how people act.

Remember that when faced with large collectives. If you meet a company leader who expects every employee to care equally about all aspects of the company, that’s a foolish leader. People need to have domains, or they’ll make them themselves. And if they do, it will often be at the larger collective’s expense.

If you tell all one hundred people that they each need to care for one tree, and give them access to the resources to do so and organize them, you’ll have a bunch of healthy trees. If you just tell all hundred people to care for all hundred trees, they’ll still split them up, but now they’ll become competitive and zero-sum.

Design the domains and you’ll achieve the goal.

People hoard information for too long. They want a big dramatic curtain flourish and thunderous applause, but that’s not what they get. They get confusion and fear.

Do you want the meeting to run well? Then tell people what it’s about a week in advance. When you ambush them they can’t be prepared and their attention and responses are scattered. You don’t need to outflank people. They aren’t your battlefield opponents.

This is a reminder mostly to myself.

If you get one question about something you’ve explained, it’s for clarification or context. If you get two or more, you’ve explained it badly.

Not always true, of course – but true often enough to be a helpful reminder. When someone asks a question, it’s for a reason. (And never forget one of the primary rules of teaching: for each person who asks a question, ten more had the question but didn’t ask it out loud.)

When someone asks a clarifying question, that’s your cue to pivot into examples and practice. Make sure everyone actually gets it. Don’t just answer the question and move on.

A question is a gift and an olive branch. Don’t ignore it.

There’s this pithy quote from Carl Sagan: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” I like that quote. It’s a good reminder that nothing is really “square one.” Everything builds on something else, is made from something else, was learned somewhere else. All starting points are more or less arbitrary.

Because of that, people sometimes pick bad ones.

Here’s a rule: if you’re doing something to learn, start as small as you can. If you’re doing something to get it done, start big.

If you want to learn woodworking, start with just a knife and a small stick and carve it up a little. Get a feel for how wood moves. Small, small.

If you want to have a house, start with understanding how a house fits in your life and consider location, style, scope. Big, big.

In other words, go from the inside out if you want to learn in an open-ended way so you can build on your skills and never box yourself in. Start with the outside in if you want to accomplish a specific goal so you can understand the proper context and then zero in without scope creep.

Pick the right starting point. And enjoy your pie.

Sometimes we don’t realize how bad something is until we experience a much better version. “Good” and “Bad” are relative terms, right? We look back on the way people did certain things a hundred years ago and we laugh at how horrible it was to, for example, take a long journey on a steamship or get Polio or whatever. But certain things are normalized for their context; intellectually you may be aware that travel and medicine will certainly improve over the next hundred years too, but you don’t really feel it.

In fact, the only way you think of something as good or bad is if it’s better or worse than the norms you’ve already experienced. You don’t think of air travel as inherently good or bad, it just is. But if you take an especially bumpy or late flight or have a very good hospital experience you’re aware of it – and you become aware of the standard you’re measuring that experience against, all of a sudden. A great doctor’s visit makes you say “Why can’t they all be like this?” A crappy flight makes you say “Most flights are enjoyable, why did this one fall short?”

But if you never take that horrible flight or get that great doctor’s attention, you may never know. A hundred times a day you probably experience something that could be much better or worse and you have no idea.

An upshot of this: often whatever you deliver could be much better, and you have no idea.

I mean, let’s say you make sandwiches in a cafeteria. Maybe they’re fine. They could be way better though – but you have no idea unless someone else comes in and, with the exact same ingredients, puts together a way better gourmet meal. And it’s very easy to accidentally engineer our lives so that never happens.

In many ways, I think it would be great if more people had to be like barbers. A barber can’t cut their own hair, so they have to pretty regularly interact with someone else who does what they do professionally. That’s not a bad thing, and most of us don’t do it. Most of us deliver something professionally for years or even decades without necessarily experiencing someone else delivering the same thing, but much better.

It’s worth looking out for. The bubble can be an average-making machine, and how would you know better unless you saw it?