When someone “gets lucky,” we often forget that there’s skill even in that. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “He wouldn’t know what to do with good luck if he got it,” just remember that we have that phrase for a reason. Just because someone throws something at you doesn’t mean you can catch it.

When you’re down on your luck, it can be hard to remember. But it’s crucial – you can never stop being ready to catch a lucky break when it’s thrown to you. Opportunities ebb and flow, but when you’re in a slump it’s easy to stop looking for them. And then you miss them even when they practically drop into your lap.

You are much less complex than you think you are. Everything else is much more.

We view things we don’t know about as monoliths, simple entities with simple rules. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. At the same time, we think of ourselves as these deep beings with rich tapestries of motivations, but we’re mostly just status-seeking machines who eat sometimes.

Anyway, it’s a good thing to keep in mind. Don’t make too many assumptions about the world until you go and look, and remember to be a bit more humble about yourself.

There is an art to speaking as one person, but listening as another. It’s hard to do; not everyone gets it. But it’s the true secret to effective communication and engaging your audience. Whether it’s a one-on-one conversation, a sales pitch, or a keynote address, it’s an opportunity.

First, let’s assume for a moment that you realize that every time you speak, it should be with purpose. (And I’m using “speak” as shorthand for all communication, not just verbal speech.) If you’re just doing it to hear yourself talk, well… mission accomplished, I suppose. Plenty of people want to just be visible. They speak for their own status. This isn’t advice for that. If that’s your goal, I’m probably not much help.

Often, people don’t explicitly begin communicating with the singular goal of hearing their own echo, but they sure act like it. They start with the question, “What do I want to talk about,” and go from there. Once they’ve picked a topic, it’s on to, “What do I have to say about this topic,” and now you’re giving a great speech or writing an amazing newsletter for an audience of exactly yourself.

Understand these truths:

1. No one else necessarily cares about what you care about.
2. No one else has the same background or foundational knowledge as you.
3. No one else “lives in your context;” the information they get affects them differently than it affects you.
4. No one else shares your assumptions about language, style, or the value of your time spent speaking versus their time spent listening.
5. All of these things are your responsibility if you want to communicate.

The first question you need to ask is: “What do I want to happen as a result of this communication?”

If you’re a professor, for example, you should have several goals when you communicate. You have a goal of students absorbing information in a useful and applicable way. You have a goal of those students being able to communicate that information back in the form of whatever assignments and tests will certify that knowledge. And you want them to engage with an active learning process that advances the field as a whole over time.

Those are reasonable goals, so now we have to run those goals through the “Truths” from above. If my goal is for students to learn about economics in a way that enables them to retain knowledge, pass tests, and ultimately do economic work, I need to first understand that they don’t automatically care about that. Even if they’ve signed up for my class, that doesn’t guarantee it! That just means they needed the credits from Econ 101, or it was the only class available, or they mistakenly thought it would be easy, or a hundred other potential reasons. Their starting motivation is probably closer to “I just need to get through this class with at least a C so I can move on.”

And here’s the first major fail point for most communicators: they dismiss that whole point. They scoff and say something like “Well if they’re not showing up eager to learn in the first place, then why should I bother?” Look, no one’s telling you that you have to take responsibility for communicating well. But if you don’t, you own the results. Sometimes those results won’t matter to you directly – maybe this professor has tenure and they truly don’t care if people learn or not. But again, if you don’t care about communicating better, I’m not helping you. If you do, keep reading.

So you have a goal, and your audience’s initial motivation doesn’t align with that goal. You want the students to truly learn, retain, and practice. They want to get through to the other side of the class with a passing grade. If you want those two goals to align, it is on you to align them.

Speak to their goal. Start with an understanding of the realities, and communicate your understanding of them without being condescending or dismissive. “Welcome everyone to Econ 101. I know many of you are already trying to figure out if it’s not too late to switch classes, and a few of you are excited about the world of economics. No matter your level of excitement when you came in, I’m going to let you know that the same standards apply to everyone. If you want the surest way to leave this class with a passing grade and no more grey hairs than when you came in, I’m going to speak to that today. One thing I will promise you: I will not give lectures that you can largely snooze through, and then selectively draw nuggets from to pass multiple-choice tests. If you want to pass, you will do real work in this room, and the quality of that work will determine your success.”

There. You’ve started to align the goals. You’ve taken their incentive and attached it firmly to the thing you want to happen. You’ve spoken to their motivations, not yours. You didn’t assume they wanted to hear (and could retain!) all your advanced knowledge of economics starting from day one.

It’s the same all over. A CEO and ground-level employees don’t care about the same things, don’t have the same background context, don’t value their time the same way. No matter the context, the rule is simple: If you want people to listen, you have to speak for them, not to them.

I think it’s easy to use “At least I tried” as an excuse to not really attempt to succeed. It seems counterintuitive, but sometimes people aren’t afraid of effort, but they’re afraid of sacrifice. So they do the former without the latter, enabling a sort of social validation of their inevitable – and predictable – failure.

If you’re going to try, make sure it’s because you really do want to succeed. If the cost is too high, that’s fine – not all juice is worth the squeeze. But then walk away.

My Best Boy, my Number One Son, my Handsome Mr. Man – he turns six today. As you might imagine, we celebrated in quite the epic manner – games and snacks and toys and treats aplenty, music and dance parties, and joyous family fellowship.

Even though the day was all about him, he thought almost exclusively of others. He bought gifts for his sisters with his birthday money. He gave everyone else a bite of his ice cream before having a single bite himself. He offered to play any game I wanted.

He makes me proud. Happy Birthday, my son.

Sometimes, when you’re forced to improvise you actually create something better than the primary option. Improvisation is innovation, and that’s the process that yields progress.

So it’s not the worst thing in the world when Plan A fails. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

There are certain kinds of goals where the target number is zero. You’re awarded if things don’t happen. If you’re trying to avoid the flu, then the correct number of “times you get the flu” is zero. The same for “number of times this store gets robbed” or “number of times I crash this car.”

Those are good goals, of course! But they can’t – they can not – be your only goal. They can’t even be your primary goal. Ever. Or you’re screwed.

Consider: If my only goal is “crash this car zero times,” then that’s super easy. All I have to do is never drive it. In fact, that’s the best strategy – every course of action that involves even going near that car is a bad move.

Let’s consider that you’re a guard at a bank. Your goal is to have the bank robbed zero times. But if that’s your only goal, then your best move is to lock the doors 24/7 and never open them. Guess what, you’re the best guard in the bank’s history! Of course, the bank won’t do any business, but that’s not how you’re evaluated. As the bank closes up in bankruptcy, you can apply for your next job as the “Best Bank Guard Ever” with a perfect rating.

Defensive Goals have to be tempered by ambitious ones. In an organization, the bank guard can’t ever be in charge. The person in charge has to be someone with a revenue target or some other affirmative goal – because otherwise zero of anything is easy to reach. And within a single person, you always have to temper defensive goals against, you know, life. It’s easy to catch zero colds and crash a car zero times. Just never leave your house.

I find that a good practice is to assume that your opinions are minority opinions by default. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming that everyone already agrees with you. It forces you to examine your views more critically, to come up with actual arguments in their favor. It denies you the easy option of simply claiming that you’re already in the right just because a lot of people agree with you.

Plus, your opinions actually are minority opinions far more than you realize. You are in far more echo chambers than you think. If you go around always thinking that the world is already on your side, you’re going to be very dismayed when that turns out to be false. And you won’t be prepared to defend the position you think is right – if you even do think it’s right. After all, it’s easy to agree with opinions you think everyone else has.

Oh, and don’t fall into the trap of just being counter-culture for its own sake, either. Some people take this advice the wrong way, and try to make all their opinions unpopular just to be edgy. I’m not talking about that – I’m talking about assuming your opinions are minority opinions even among people you want to like you. If you imagine even the other punks disagree with you, you’ll be smarter about what you believe.

You sometimes hear motivational phrases like “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” They’re referring to things like a diet, or parenthood, or your career, or some other large aspect of your life. The well-meaning advice is that you can’t try to do it all at once; you need to pace yourself.

Sure. But sometimes, it’s a sprint!

Some things you really do need to do in short bursts, and some things you need to do in longer campaigns, and sometimes you’ll need to do the same thing in different modes at different times. So it’s important to know how to do both!

Take work, for example. There will be times when you need to approach a project as a marathon – pacing yourself to avoid burnout, keeping yourself focused and productive over long periods, and maintaining integrity over the scope and focus of the project. And there will also be times when you need to get a lot of stuff done in a short window, and those are different skills and mindsets.

Most people’s struggle comes from determining which is which, and in switching between “modes” when they need to. If you pace yourself for a marathon you’ll lose a sprint, and vice versa.

Sprints are goal-oriented. You’re starting with the end in mind and doing what it takes to get there. Process improvements can be made later; right now, you get across the finish line however you have to. Marathons are process-oriented. Small improvements can have big impacts, so you should make those adjustments as you go and care deeply about how you’re working.

My biggest piece of advice is simply don’t mix and match. If you have a sprint task in front of you, then don’t work on your marathon tasks until the sprint is over. Whatever modes work for you will rarely work together.

A wise mentor once told me that attitude isn’t a static quality. You don’t just “have a good attitude.” Your attitude is a resource that can be shepherded, attacked, depleted, and replenished.

On top of this astute observation, he offered me actionable advice. In order to show up as your best self whenever it’s important, you need to protect your attitude. You’re going to need that resource to be a great partner to your family, or to nail the big presentation at work, or to finish the grueling race, or to make it through chemotherapy. Big things need that resource.

Little things don’t, but it’s very, very easy to “nickel and dime” away our attitude.

His advice centered around recognizing which actions and situations would deplete your attitude for no benefit, and refusing to engage despite whatever other allure they offered. Arguing with people unnecessarily, whether online or in person, was one of his favorite examples. Banging your head against a brick wall was another.

That can be a tough one for a lot of people. There’s such a thing as quitting too early, but there’s definitely such a thing as quitting too late. People rarely have a good sense of where the sweet spot in the middle is. Which makes sense, because it’s different from task to task and person to person, but here are some guidelines:

1. Two is generally the bare minimum number of attempts if you’re serious about trying to do something difficult. If you try once and fail, you’ve just wasted time – you’ve gathered no data, given yourself no opportunity to learn and adjust, etc. At least with two attempts you can make a comparison between two outcomes. If I try to throw a ball at a target and I overshoot it, my second throw – made with a little less oomph – will give me at least some idea of how my adjustments affected the results.
2. If you’re approaching a task with the mentality of “it’s okay to fail X number of times because I’m gathering data,” that’s healthy and good. At a certain point though, X+1 isn’t gathering you any more actionable data. This isn’t necessarily an easy thing to determine – in fact, a huge field of mathematics is dedicated to studying exactly how many examples of something you need before you can reasonably infer something about future incidences. And unless you intend to become a mathematician, you might just have to do some rough guesses. But a good way to approach it is this: after a number of attempts that you still feel good about (i.e. you’re not frustrated, you feel like you’re learning, etc.), pause and write down your theories, plans, and thoughts so far. Then, do another set of attempts, maybe half again of the original set. Then pause for reflection again – has anything changed about your thoughts? Have you revised your theories? If not, then that’s probably a large enough data set to make an educated guess about what to do next, and it shouldn’t be “keep trying the same thing that isn’t working.”
3. The cost and risk of each attempt matter a lot. The cost and risk of trying to crochet a hat when you don’t know how to do it are pretty low. The cost and risk of attempting to climb a mountain when you don’t know how are very high. When the cost is high, you need to adjust your strategy accordingly – and I’m talking about the entire cost.

And that last point brings us back to protecting your attitude. Banging your head against the wall costs you your attitude. When you send out the same resume to a job board for the 801st time, you are banging your head against the wall. It feels low-cost because it’s a click of a button, but the real cost is your attitude. It’s draining your self-esteem, it’s frustrating you, and it’s depleting the very resource you’ll need to actually succeed at the next steps in that process – or do you want to have your job interview when you’re at your most frustrated, depressed, and exhausted?

If something isn’t working, you need to stop. When you don’t know what to do as an alternative, it’s hard to, I know. Plus, the sunk cost fallacy is real, and we end up feeling attached to the thing we’ve already tried just because we put so much effort into the attempts that we don’t want to feel like it was all wasted. But it wasn’t wasted – if you learned something. Including (often especially!) that you shouldn’t do that thing anymore.

It’s time to figure out a new thing to do. That’s hard and scary, I get it. But it’s necessary. Go out and talk to people, start doing some research, consult experts. Compare what you’ve already tried to other options. Be realistic with yourself about what you can change. And above all: Protect Your Attitude.