You’re fine until you aren’t, and you only aren’t once.

No matter what you’re facing, that’s the measure. “Is this the problem that defeats me?” If it isn’t, you’ll be fine. And it isn’t, so you are.

One thing that has always annoyed me is when any authority figure tries to catch someone breaking a rule at the expense of actually preventing the transgression in the first place.

The most obvious example is the “speed trap.” You have a police cruiser parked somewhere that can’t be seen from the road, often in a spot where drivers might be prone to driving faster than the posted speed limit. Often it’s the case that a low speed limit makes sense during high-traffic times during the day, but a higher speed is perfectly safe in the evening or on the weekends, but speed limits don’t work like that.

So lo and behold, someone zips by that cruiser and then boom, on come the lights and sirens and the driver gets a nasty ticket. It always struck me as transparently exploitative. If the goal of speed limits is safety, then the aim of enforcement should be to keep people safe – and letting people break a law designed to keep them safe just so you can catch them doing it is deliberately putting lives at risk, right? You could have parked your cruiser in plain sight and everyone would have slowed down. The roads would be safer – but the town wouldn’t get its ticket money. When you see that, you can’t unsee it. Either the police are deliberately putting people’s lives at risk to make money, or they aren’t putting people’s lives at risk because the speed limit could easily be higher (or time-dependent) without making anyone less safe. Whichever it is, it clearly serves the agenda of the authority figures and not the people they have authority over.

That’s an obvious example, but the pattern is everywhere. You can see it in the behavior of almost anyone whose job is to enforce rules. Principals who wait until they know kids are smoking in the bathroom to barge in and catch them instead of just being more visible so they don’t try. Bosses who ambush their employees during slow times to try to catch them surfing the internet instead of just managing them more productively. Even parents do this kind of thing to their kids, all the time.

It’s all designed to intimidate. Authority through fear. They don’t want to overly punish, necessarily – that’s why these figures often “catch and release,” giving mild punishments along with the reminder that “they’re always watching.” It’s to get as many people on their “first offense” as possible, so that combined with the fact that they now think that hidden authority figures could be anywhere, they get paranoid and (in theory) stay on their best behavior all the time.

There are two problems with it: One, “authority through fear” is just bad in general. It doesn’t teach people to value a system proactively, it makes that system their enemy. Maybe you need people to have this sort of paranoia-based adherence in a prison, but in most systems, your goal isn’t just obedience to a rule set, it’s respect for the system and environment itself. Running a school like this doesn’t make kids want to be a part of the learning environment, it makes them treat school like a prison.

Which brings us to the second problem: When people view the system they’re in as an enemy, they start resisting. Fear-based authority breeds rebels. And it breeds smart rebels. People learn how to beat speed traps, sneaky principals, overbearing parents. In fact, they have the advantage – the authority figure is ruling through fear, and once you’re not afraid anymore, a little paranoia just makes you sharp. Once you start treating the system of rules as a game to be beaten and outsmarted instead of something you respect, it’s trivially easy to beat it most of the time.

Don’t enforce rules this way. If you have behaviors in any system you oversee that you don’t want people to engage in, then give them reasons not to engage in them. Some people still will! But some people still will no matter how you try to enforce rules. But when people respect their environment, it happens far less, because people won’t generally want to. And that’s always more powerful than them being afraid to.

Some people just thrive on handing you stress. They’re stressed about everything, in a constant state of neurotic panic, and they try to give it to you. They might do this by trying to pull you into their panic with emotional outbursts. They might try to let their own lack of project management skills overflow into work that they try to get you to do. Whatever the form of the contagion, you need to remember to innoculate yourself.

Just because someone else is in a high/negative emotional state doesn’t mean you have to be. Their urgency is not currency by which they buy your attention. If they can’t take a few deep breaths and circle back to you at a scheduled time, then don’t make exceptions. Don’t trade your own sanity to someone who’s just going to chew it up.

If you actively look for a hint about someone else’s desires, it’s shockingly easy to find. That’s because almost no one ever picks up on hints naturally. If you try to drop a hint about something you want, exactly zero people will get it. You have to just be direct.

Which means if you want to be a completely beloved superhero to someone, all you have to do is observe them intentionally for a little bit, pick out one thing they expressed that they want, and then deliver it to them along with the phrase, “I noticed you said you wished you had [X] the other day, so here you go.”

You see why it works? It’s not because of [X]. Whatever [X] is, it doesn’t matter at all. The only thing that matters is that for one tiny, brief moment, this person will understand what it’s like to be truly paid attention to. Someone actually cared about them enough to do something unbidden and listened to them enough to figure out a thing they’d want done.

It’s incredibly easy. No one ever does it, but it’s not because it’s hard. It’s just because people’s brains are tuned to their own needs, and they don’t bother to look. The only tricky part is that it actually requires you to “activate” that part of your brain intentionally, because it will virtually never pick up on those things automatically.

But if you ever want someone to like you, there you go.

Time for another episode of “Johnny dispels a folksy truism!” Today’s example: “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” (First, there’s no evidence that this was ever actually said/written by Albert Einstein, the person to whom it is commonly attributed.)

Okay, so this one isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s woefully incomplete and therefore unhelpful. Yes, if you judge someone by what they can’t do, they’ll seem incompetent. That’s so obvious it’s pretty much tautological, so I don’t know why that alone would be helpful to anyone. The intended meaning seems to be that you should judge people by what they’re good at when evaluating their overall competency or intelligence. To that extent, that’s true – but the analogy is terrible.

If you judge a fish by its ability to swim, it’s not a genius – it’s normal. All fish can swim. And in fact, that’s where people mostly lose the power of their own special talents.

See, in the life of humans, people specialize into all sorts of skills and abilities. But simply by nature of how things work, people with similar talents mostly hang out and work together. In other words, if you’re a really great engineer, you probably mostly hang out and work with other engineers. You’re a fish hanging out with other fish. You might be a fantastic engineer, but you’re normal.

This is how people end up radically devaluing their own skills. They’re hanging out with the exact tiny faction that is least impressed by whatever they can do, because the other members of that faction can all do it, too. Other fish aren’t impressed by your ability to swim. But to most other animals, it’s amazing!

So yeah, if you’re a fish – the monkeys won’t think you’re very smart if you try to climb a tree. But if you can show them how your ability to swim is valuable to them, then suddenly you’re the most incredible thing they’ve ever seen, because they can’t do that. But it was always the monkeys you needed to impress. Trading them something that can only be found on the riverbed for something that can only be found at the top of a tree enriches you both.

In other words, the fish that hangs around with monkeys is more likely to be thought of as a genius. Not because it can’t climb trees like everyone else, but because it can do something they can’t do at all. The missing piece is the ability to explain the value of that unique skill. And that’s the trap – the fish often hang around with other fish because at least the fish get it. The other engineers don’t think you’re special, but at least you don’t have to explain to them why engineering is a useful skill. But that’s called the “comfort zone” for a reason. You’re too comfortable there to be special, valuable, needed.

Try hanging out with the people that don’t get it. Help them to. Once they do – you’re a genius.

It’s dark in the tunnel. But it’s also the way through. When it’s dark, you can’t always see movement. “The light at the end” can be coming closer far before it’s visible. Keep moving, even when it’s dark.

Do you look busy?

I’m not asking if you are. I’m asking if you look busy. People’s perception of output is so heavily affected by what they perceive as input, it’s wild. If you tell someone you labored over a painting for five hundred hours before they see it, they will see it and be amazed. If you tell someone you slapped together something in twenty minutes and didn’t try very hard, they will think the painting is low-quality. Even if you show them the exact same painting.

So much of life’s output is subjective. There aren’t hard metrics for a lot of things – or there are, but they’re only measurable in the very long-term, and we need to evaluate whether our work is effective far before that time horizon has arrived.

As a result, humans do this odd dance. This “productivity theater.” We look busy not only to avoid having more work heaped upon us, but also because it so often improves how other people evaluate our own work.

It’s totally false, of course. We proved Marx wrong a long time ago; how much effort you put into something might be correlated with the output value, but it in no way determines it. If I work ten times harder on something and as a result produce something better, great. But if I can work 10% as hard and the output is the same, then it doesn’t decrease in value.

But hey, realizing that humans have flawed reasoning processes doesn’t change them. What it does change is how you can act, and how frustrated you can get. Recognize that you won’t get anywhere by trying to explain to people that you don’t need to work hard to produce something incredible. Like it or not, people absolutely take how hard you appeared to work into account when evaluating your work. Even back in school, don’t you remember turning in an absolutely garbage paper and the teacher being lenient on your grade because “I can tell you worked really hard on it?” Or maybe a less lenient teacher telling you or one of your peers that your paper got a low grade – do you remember the first line of objection most people utter in response? “But I worked so hard on it!” We say that because we instinctively know most humans respect that line of reasoning, however absurd it actually is.

So the point is – look busy. If humans were robots, you wouldn’t have to. But they aren’t. So communicate how hard you worked. One small trick that does seem to work – if you don’t want to lie about having worked hard on a thing directly (and I don’t), then you can comment on how hard you worked in general to get here and that tends to do the same thing. When someone says “Oh, this project proposal is fantastic!” you don’t have to say “Thanks, it took twenty hours and I haven’t slept,” when it actually only took thirty minutes. You can say “Thanks, I’ve put a huge amount of effort in over the years to get good at this, I appreciate you noticing.”

People respect the work, and you should give the people what they want.

Sometimes we have these extremely important, formative moments in our lives. They say “you can’t go back again,” but that isn’t always true. The arrow of time only points in one direction, but you can do a lot of looping around if you care to.

One particular way of circling back that I find very meaningful is to re-read the most influential books of my past. I have always been deeply affected by books. For a while I thought that might have only been an artifact of my youth, but even as an adult I’ve found certain books can just utterly change my core.

When I re-read those books, an interesting thing happens. I time travel. I find an earlier version of myself walking around the same labyrinth I’m lost in, and we can talk for a time. I am not him and he is not me. I am shaped by things he has not yet experienced, and he still has things that I have lost, for good or ill. I am not an upgrade over him, but nor am I him, deteriorated. We are just different. The one advantage I do have is that I can learn from him, even though he can’t learn from me.

Doubling back through the maze, using those books as the string and breadcrumbs to retrace my steps, I can find him. We can talk for a while. We can experience the same thing, overlapping for a moment or two or however long it takes for me to read those same words again. I can both feel the the emotions they caused in him and the ones they cause in me. I can catch glimpses of how those words might have changed in meaning if they’d found me for the first time at another first time altogether.

After this meeting, we’ll both go back to wandering about in the labyrinth. I know he’s going back to looking for a way out. He wants to defeat the maze, he’d knock down the walls in passion and fury if he could, he’d cheat and rage and find his exit, straight & fast, just to prove that nothing could hold him if he didn’t want it to.

I choose the labyrinth. I’ll find new hallways and I’ll find old ones anew. I’ll find other people who are lost and other people who don’t mind. Crooked & slow, I’ll meander.

There’s lots of really good advice out there, on just about any topic. If you want to do something – anything – well, the instructions are there. It won’t be perfect, of course. Learning to take advice is a skill all on its own, but the information is out there in one form or another. Given that all this wisdom exists, I’ve often wondered: What’s the reason so few people take it?

In my experience, people rarely take the time or put in the effort to become exceptional at anything. I used to think it was primarily because humans are lazy, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Humans are lazy, sure. But they’re also greedy – and greed usually overcomes laziness. So why don’t more people take what seem like obvious steps to better themselves?

Modern society tells people a lot of lies. I don’t necessarily think it’s malicious in nature, because I know there isn’t some secret cabal of supervillains deciding what “society” tells people. It’s just the natural emergent property of the way civilizations with hundreds of millions of people evolve and all the competing self-interests that go into them. Society lies to you about what foods are healthy and lies to you about who you should be attracted to and all that. But those aren’t the biggest, worst lies.

The biggest, worst lie society tells you is this: “If you follow the standard playbook for life, your life will be exceptionally good.”

Pretty much by definition that can’t be true, now can it?

From a shockingly early age, you get fed a sort of “play by these rules” standard operating procedure for life. And this isn’t presented to you maliciously, but the message you get is: “Don’t think too hard about life strategy. It’s all right here. Just do these things and you’ll get the nice house and corner office and attractive mate and respect of your peers and society and everything else you want.”

So people don’t put the effort into critically cultivating skill and wisdom because they’ve largely been told they don’t have to. It’s a waste of effort! Just get good grades and color inside the lines and all the best stuff in life will just come to you on a conveyor belt.

My father instilled in me two deep, core beliefs about the world that in combination provided a blueprint for my life strategy that I think has served me very well.

The First Belief: “Absolutely anything is possible, the sky’s the limit. You can do or have or achieve anything, there is opportunity everywhere, and the world is full of treasures.”

The Second Belief: “Absolutely nothing will be handed to you, nothing is guaranteed, nothing is automatic, everything is vulnerable, and the second you take anything for granted you’ll lose it.”

I see a lot of people, I would even say most people, who have one of those beliefs but not the other. It forms the core of their worldview. People who hold the first belief but not the second are the ones who end up following the “standard playbook” and expecting all the things in their life to just fall into place. The majority that don’t get lucky enough for that to happen end up disappointed, confused, and frustrated. Then there are those who hold the second belief but not the first; they become jaded cynics who put no effort into anything because they don’t believe anything can happen even if they do. They say “the system is rigged” and take that to mean that they can’t ever succeed at anything, no matter what.

But if you hold them both? Truly internalize both? Now that’s motivation. I’ve achieved things I’m tremendously proud of, but my head’s on a swivel. I don’t think it’s a house of cards ready to fall at any moment, but I know it can be threatened, and I know how easy it is for the winds to change. I know that I may have to rebuild absolutely any or all parts of my life tomorrow, so I keep my tools in working order. If my industry went away tomorrow or someone in my family got sick or my house burned down or any of these potential disasters, I wouldn’t say “Woe is me, I followed all the rules!” I would bear down and keep going, because I know – I always knew – that this was on the table. It was one of the possibilities, always. And it doesn’t mean I’m ruined forever, because I still have The First Belief. Even after succeeding there can be disaster, but even after disaster you can still succeed.

You’re the one driving it all. No society will replace that for you effectively. Only you can make your life extraordinary.

Whenever you’re building something complex, it’s helpful – nay, essential – to have a guiding principle. An underlying mission statement that keeps you pointed in the right direction when things get confusing. Without that, it’s easy to fall into the trap of doing things for the sake of doing them, instead of because they’re essential to that main mission.

You need clarity of vision, and often you have to be relentless about it. Ruthless, even, if you want to get something done. But ruthlessness in pursuit of a single mission can be dangerous. If I ruthlessly pursue “enrich my children” as my central value, then eventually I’ll start robbing my neighbors.

I think the best way to do things is to create a sort of “Dual North Star” made of one positive value and one negative value. I.e. “Enrich my children as much as possible” (the positive value) “while never violating the rights of others” (the negative value).

If you make it more complex than that, then chances are you can go a layer deeper for your true mission. Less complex, and you can lose your moral compass. But that framing can help tremendously to get yourself on exactly the right course.