People who overcome a particular hardship become excellent guides for the inevitable hardships of the future. Having survived something terrible is a tremendous skill that’s – by definition – hard to get, and yet we often don’t recognize it. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” may or may not be true. But it certainly makes you a commodity.

The next time you’re doing a little self-inventory of your skills and the contributions you could make, don’t just think about the abilities you specifically tried to cultivate. Think about the trials and traumas you’ve endured. Think about what took a swing and you and couldn’t keep you down. Dig the bullet out of your arm and realize it might be made of gold.

Other people want to avoid those hardships, and your lessons can be invaluable to them. Still others have recently suffered similar fates and want a map of the road to recovery. There’s a big market for people who came out the other side. And it can be a great way to resolve some internal conflict, too – helping others is a great way to release a burden on your soul.

There is a simple trifecta of ingredients for all success. If someone has the skill for the task, the tools to complete it, and the effort to drive the endeavor, then they will – eventually – succeed.

So if someone doesn’t succeed, and it’s your job to figure out why and correct it, then your job isn’t actually all that hard.

You can usually figure out which one(s) of the three is missing via process of elimination. Start with what you know to be true: Have they done this successfully before? Then they have the skill, and likely the tools unless something has changed. So they’re lacking the effort – and addressing their motivation is different than trying to upskill them. Or, do you see them putting in consistent effort but not realizing the goal? Then you don’t have to motivate (or intimidate) them; you need to get them what they’re lacking.

Make that your checklist, reinforce it constantly. It will solve most of your problems!

My son, two weeks shy of his sixth birthday, broke his collarbone today.

For such a painful injury, he’s doing amazing. He’s tough, brave, and gracious. And even at his young age, he’s mature enough to take the lesson that previous injuries – things he once thought were so dire – really pale in comparison.

I don’t wish misfortune on anyone. But sometimes the aftermath of misfortune can really teach us some gratitude. This isn’t his first major injury (though it is his first broken bone), and he gets tougher – and wiser – each time.

May we all learn such grace from our trials!

Go back in time to a moment when someone truly had a positive impact on your life. Think about when a mentor, leader, or other inspiring figure went above and beyond to really affect your trajectory in that way. A moment that might have resulted in an entirely different present for you had it gone differently.

Now imagine that person decided that they weren’t ready to help you and stayed home instead. Or they didn’t speak up when you asked for help because they weren’t sure if they were the right person to be there. Maybe they didn’t think they deserved the chance, so they waited for a “better time.”

That’s you, right now. That’s you every time you don’t go out and be the leader and mentor the world is calling upon you to be. You have gifts to give the world, and you’re hoarding them instead – worse than hoarding them, squandering them. And it isn’t about your gain, it’s about theirs.

The future versions of you, all over the world. The people that need their moment of inspiration, their spark of purpose. They need it from you. It’s not about what you deserve, it’s about what they need.

To be selfless is to step out of the shadows. Stick out your chin, squint your eyes, and don’t let those moments pass.

I’ve never been much of a gadgeteer. New technology doesn’t excite me in that “new toy” way; I’ve never been an early adopter of new phone models or anything like that. In fact, I had to be forced into owning my first cell phone by parents who were tired of not being able to find me while I was living mostly on the road.

This persists to this day, and as a result I’m usually several years (if not more) behind in awareness of the current level of technological convenience. So instead of constantly keeping up with the latest incremental improvements in… well, anything, instead every once in a while I just take a huge leap forward.

Usually something breaks or finally becomes completely obsolete and I’m forced to replace it, so I figure I might as well grab a new whatever – television, laptop, phone, whatever it is that finally crapped out on me. Alternatively, sometimes it’s just time for an upgrade due to me engaging in some project that’s beyond the capabilities of whatever bronze-age technology I’m currently using.

And WOW when that happens! It’s a rush getting all this future all at once. It’s like I’m watching the Moon Landing.

The point is, sometimes you don’t want your improvements dripped down to you in the tiniest and rapidest increments. It can be really worthwhile to save up a little wonder so it can rush over you all at once. Lets you really enjoy it. Plus, it gives it time to settle; a lot of “new improvements” turn out to be trash, and the early adopters are canaries in the coal mine. My method means I almost always end up with something viable.

Viable and awesome.

I strongly dislike feeling rushed. I want to have time to do things right, and according to schedule. I’m careful about how I schedule things, and have learned after many years of trial and error how not to overload my calendar. I also have, by now, a solid sense of how long things will take me by default.

But if I have to be somewhere at 10 and it’s 40 minutes away, I’m definitely the kind of person who will leave by 8:30. I’d rather have the option to take different routes, stop for coffee, or even just arrive extra early if I want to.

The thing is, that kind of “setup time” requires guardianship. Doing things this way lowers my average stress level enormously, but it can be hard to maintain. People and tasks constantly want to encroach on that time, even unintentionally. Sometimes I have to justify my choices; more often I simply have to be firm on them.

The point is this: if you have a method of doing things that causes you to live a happier life but that sometimes isn’t what others want, make the low-stress choice. Know your bandwidth and capacity, and know how much of it can go to others. Stay strong on that line, and your life will be immeasurably better.

To me, at least, there is a huge difference between “not taking something seriously” and “doing something half-assed.”

I am very much a “Yes” kind of person. I will go try just about any activity you ask me to do. I will generally not take it seriously (I take very few things seriously), but I will give it 110%. A lot of people have a hard time reconciling those two positions.

A friend once asked me if I’d like to go on a fishing trip with her. I hadn’t fished in about 30 years (not since going with my father as a young lad), but I had no reason to say no, so I agreed. And I did everything I could to be a great companion for it! Early morning drives to the shore with a smile on my face and coffee in my hand, all the rented gear I needed, and a cheerful curiosity about technique. I even caught the first fish of the day! Then I just sort of played around on the boat, trying all sorts of weird, different stuff – stuff that probably would have made a professional fishing enthusiast cringe, but that’s what “not taking this seriously” looks like. Jokes and experiments and laughter.

As we were driving home, the friend commented that she assumed I had a terrible time. I was shocked. I told her I had a wonderful time, and I meant it. It had been a fantastic day. And I commented that I had been laughing, smiling, having fun, etc. all day, so what gave her the impression that I hadn’t enjoyed myself?

She said that it didn’t seem like I cared if I caught any fish.

I had to laugh. Of course I didn’t care if I caught any fish! I couldn’t even imagine caring about whether or not I caught fish. The point wasn’t to catch fish – it was to go fishing. I gave 110% to the act of going fishing. I gave zero percent of my emotional state to the result.

That’s the difference. Probably lots of people aren’t wired like that – if they don’t care about catching fish, they can’t bring themselves to enthusiastically go fishing. Maybe it’s a special power of mine, but I certainly enjoy being this way. I like being able to enjoy doing things without caring about the result of those things. Caring about the result of every little meaningless thing in your life sounds exhausting.

So go fishing. Sing karaoke. Try that weird restaurant. Do whatever! Just try not to take it – or yourself – so seriously.

Want a great way to give impactful feedback? Pick something that someone did that’s a “Keeper:” a high-impact, positive thing. Something really good. Then, match it with something else you think could be improved, and use their own “Keeper” as the example.

“Joe, I think you crushed the intro to that presentation for the client. They were really captivated right away. In fact, I think if you look at your mid-presentation slides, they could even be improved by using some of those same methods. What you did in the intro would be great all the way through!”

It’s a high-trust feedback method. You’re using their own successes as the model for improvement, rather than imposing your own views. And it forces you to dig down for a compliment before you can criticize, which is always a worthwhile effort.

The best forms of leadership don’t always look good to other leaders.

Being a good listener, a provider of resources, or a highly trusting person can seem like they aren’t “active leadership” when your peers are looking. But that’s a status game you shouldn’t play. The best forms of leadership, like the best forms of decision-making in general, often involve less being more.

It’s interesting how things feel rude based on vestigial concerns.

Why is it rude to wear a hat indoors? A long time ago, knights removed their helmets to identify themselves and demonstrate that they weren’t impostors. I don’t know about you, but even on the rare occasion where I do wear a hat, it’s not a full-face metal helmet that obscures my identity. So why is it rude to keep it on? People say things like “Oh, it shows that you might be in a hurry to leave,” but that fails on two fronts. One, I might be in a hurry to leave, but that isn’t necessarily rude depending on the context. But more importantly, that feels like hollow justification. It seems like wearing hats inside was rude, and when the reason for it to be rude disappeared, people came up with new reasons for the same thing to be rude just so they could keep the same rules of etiquette.

Smoking, once ubiquitous, has fallen out of fashion. If you light up a cigarette in someone’s company in pretty much any context, it might be considered rude. If you’re in a shared public space such as an office, restaurant, bus, etc. then lighting a cigarette subjects other people to foul smells that can linger for days. That’s certainly rude in my book!

But now consider the age of virtual meetings. 99% of my business is conducted from my own home over a series of video conferences with people all across the globe. I don’t smoke, but if I chose to while I was working, it would affect no one but me. My colleagues could see it, but they couldn’t smell it. It wouldn’t affect them in any way. But some casual conversation with folks elicited exactly the responses I suspected: People can’t put their finger on why, but they still instinctively think of it as rude.

The rules of etiquette become subconscious. They burrow into our culture and stay there, even when they no longer connect to any meaning within that culture. Of course, some of the rules still make a lot of sense – cover your mouth when you cough, people. But that makes it all the harder to separate the ones that don’t.

It’s worth examining because outdated notions of rudeness build up as cultural barriers. A culture that never had knights might not care if you wear hats indoors, and therefore they might think nothing of keeping their headwear on at your dinner party. You might think they’re rude, but they don’t have an unkind intention in their heart – just a fancy hat on their head.