You could eliminate half the words you say without any effect on your life. Scratch that – it would almost certainly have a positive effect on your life.

Talking (or writing, as it were) feels good. We have someone’s attention, and a big part of our brain just wants that and nothing more. So we talk more and more. Talking is like junk food; it feels great in the moment, but the long-term consequences are terrible for us.

I’m a very outcomes-focused person. That not only means that I care about the results of my actions, but it means I tend to be pretty good at recognizing what will actually affect those outcomes – as opposed to what couldn’t possibly.

Big outcomes are made of small details, but very often a wide range of variance within those details will produce exactly the same result. Let’s say I could take one of five different routes to an event, and as a result I could arrive at said event at five different times, all within the same 15-minute window. Does it matter which route I take?

Not even a little. I mean sure, if I get in a car accident along one route I could end up dwelling on whether I should have taken another, but given that I couldn’t have known that to begin with, there’s no reason to stress about this decision. There might be a sixth route that crosses three state lines and takes the long way around Lake Michigan, and I probably shouldn’t take that one – but I probably wasn’t going to.

The point is that some details are certainly important. But very rarely are they worth any stress. My favorite painting is Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Assuming you find it as beautiful and moving as I do – can you point to one solitary brushstroke that, if altered by fifteen degrees in angle or by a slight shade in color, would ruin the experience of gazing upon it?

Not even a little.

Obsess over the technique. Obsess over getting good at the things you do, to the point where the details take care of themselves. And then you can live in the outcomes, not in the process.

When people’s only job is to do one thing, and them continuing to have gainful employment depends on them doing that thing, then they will – guess what? – do that thing.

Some people’s job is to find fault with things. So they always will. Don’t sweat it.

The hardest part of winning a relay race isn’t running fast. It’s handing off the baton correctly. Any time there’s a transition, there’s room for error. Friction that can spark an explosion.

Too often people pay enormous amounts of attention to the part, and not nearly enough to the connection between parts.

One of humans’ greatest strengths – and most insidious curses – is our ability to adapt to nearly any change in our circumstances.

It’s not always, of course. Sometimes a great tragedy befalls someone and they never recover. But most of the time, they do! People get life-altering injuries or make career-ending mistakes, and life goes on. They not only adapt, they ultimately return to baseline happiness. They find new things to give them joy. The fact that most humans do this is why it’s such a tragedy when a few can’t.

Why did I say it was an insidious curse, though? Because it works the other way, too. When things go well for us, humans very quickly raise their new baseline expectations. I’ve seen it happen so many times. Someone is living quite happily on $50k/year, and suddenly they get a job that pays triple that. For whatever reason, it doesn’t last more than a year, and the person goes back to making $50k. You’d think that would be no problem, right? But no. The adaptation process has to happen all over again, and it’s often slow and painful.

My father used to tell me that the best position to be in was “playing with house money.” In a casino, you walk in with whatever money you have and you start gambling. If you’re under what you came in with, you’re betting your own money. You’re probably losing it, too. You might be responsibly having a good time with a budgeted amount, but you’re still losing that amount. On the other hand, if you can get an early win or two, my father said, you should immediately put away all the money you originally came in with. For the rest of the night, just gamble with your initial winnings. If you “lose everything,” then you’re – at worst – back where you started, but having had a pleasant evening. Gamble, in other words, with house money.

It has other advantages besides protecting your stake. When you play with house money, you can have more fun – you can take more risks, try wilder things. The important thing to remember is that it is house money. It’s not yours. Don’t start feeling entitled to it.

That lesson stuck with me. I remember when I was a young man, I lived with some roommates and (being too poor for a car at the time), I walked to work. One of my roommate’s friends left a car with us for a few weeks while they went out of town, and my roommate immediately started driving to work. I would be fine borrowing the car for a night out, but I didn’t change my daily routine. Sure enough, when the friend came back into town, my roommate had a hard time adjusting to walking to work again, even though it had only been a few weeks!

Good times and lean times both come and go. When the good times come, enjoy them – but remember that they’re house money. Don’t instantly adjust your expectations of life up to the maximum. If you’ve made $50k for a long time and you suddenly get a big raise, keep living like you make $50k. Put the rest away. Maybe you’ll never go backward – but many people do.

And sure, you can adapt. But why make it harder on yourself? Playing with house money rules. But don’t quit your day job.

There are different forms of rest, and getting the wrong kind can be as bad as getting none.

No one can go go go forever. You need to recharge, but “recharging” doesn’t just mean sleeping. If you don’t believe me, picture a life where you get nine hours of sleep every night, but you spend the other 15 hours each day working – every day. Do you imagine that you’ll feel rested? Will you be able to maintain it?

Satisfaction, engaging other parts of your brain, leisure and enjoyment, productivity on other priorities – these are all ways “resting” and getting back the energy you need to be able to give to the world in exchange for its bounties. Don’t neglect them.

I’m probably more obsessed with containers than most people. I like having my things organized and ready to use, but I also like the constraints. If there’s something I like (for instance: board games), then I might be tempted to get… let’s just call it “way too many.”

But if I start with a container – a shelf, a box, a backpack, whatever – and say “this is my container for X,” then I can easily lock that in within my brain as the hard limit on how much of X I can get.

This works for time as well as space, more often than you realize. We start committing to things as if time wasn’t a hard limit, as if we could shove more things into the back of that hour the way some of us try to shove more things into the back of the closet.

You can’t, in either case.

You have X tasks, problems, or obstacles, the combination of which is stressing you out and providing a barrier. You need to solve for the most efficient number of tasks and problems to tackle right now in order to progress through the list in the most effective way possible. What’s the formula?

It’s 1. X is 1. It’s always 1.

There’s a trap you can get yourself into. You take on a new type of task, probably professionally. You’re too concerned with being “productive” too quickly, but you’re new to the work. You lack expertise, so you make up for it by working harder and longer. The work begins to burn you out and you don’t seem to be making any headway. Years may pass without you improving your skill or efficiency, but now you’re also locked into your way of doing things. Your brain has mistaken time for expertise.

I’ve seen it happen often. Professionals with ten or more years on a task who don’t have certain fundamental skills in it. Why? Because they never gave themselves time to learn. Instead, they used all their available time right away trying to “produce,” never taking time to practice.

Practice isn’t the same as just doing. Yes, some skill gain happens over time without you concentrating on it. Some. Much, much more happens through deliberate learning. If you play basketball every day, you’ll get better at basketball. But you’ll get much better if you get coached, learn fundamentals that exist outside of the game actions, gather complimentary athletic skills, and so on. Without those things, even the modest skill gain you get from just playing will quickly plateau.

When I was in sales, I’d see this constantly. Someone would join the profession and just hit the pavement or the phones and start selling. They’d be desperate to hit quotas and make money so instead of dedicating any time to learning, they’d just dial or knock or what have you for hours extra every day. And they’d get a little better! Then they’d quickly level off in skill; now they can make an okay living by only working 60% harder than they should have, instead of twice as long. Meanwhile, they’ve still never read a book on selling, attended a workshop, sought mentorship, or anything else that might truly level them up.

Organizations can create this in their people. If the focus is constantly on production in the short term and not on knowledge and skill growth, employees can be funneled into this trap by the company they work for. This is as frequent as people doing it to themselves.

You learn pretty much everything you’ll learn “by osmosis” in the first year of a task. After that, you’re not going to be making any appreciable skill gains unless you’re actually seeking knowledge outside of your daily tasks. If it’s been a while since you’ve done that – now’s the time.

The shiny parts of the house don’t stand up on their own.

People often want – or even demand – the shiny results. They unrealistically demand this of themselves, of others, of the world. They don’t always want all the results immediately, but people get very upset if they don’t see progress toward results almost instantly.

But often you just have to pre-heat the oven, you know? A foundation has to be laid first, and while that’s real work, it’s often invisible. If you pay someone to ghost-write your book for you, they’re doing tangible research work for weeks before the first word goes on the page. If you’re the kind of person who yells “It’s been three weeks and you haven’t written one word?! What am I paying you for,” then you’re not going to get many quality results in life.

For any project of real substance, ask that question first: “What foundation is needed here?” Being aware of the need will help keep you patient and realistic. And that’s a solid foundation all on its own.