How we talk about ourselves is so much more important than we realize. Our willingness to attempt things is so driven by our belief in our ability to navigate that attempt – how likely we are to succeed, at what cost, and at what risk. And all of life’s joys and successes are borne from the attempt.

This is probably not a universal experience, but it’s certainly common enough for many: You’re playing a team sport and someone on your team has the ball. You have a clear path to score if you get it, so you shout “I’m open!” Sometimes you get passed to, and sometimes you get passed over. The deciding factor is how convincing you were to your teammate about your ability to score – and that is driven, at least in part, by how confident you were in that fact.

In life, we’re constantly shouting “I’m open!” to people all around us. We ask for people’s faith in us all the time – to employ us, to date us, to buy from us, to vote for us. Very few dreams can be realized in a vacuum.

Communication skill matters. But that’s the steering – the engine is your belief in what you’re communicating. Motive power without steering will at least get you somewhere; you should learn to steer, but at least you’re moving. Steering without movement is pointless. The self-belief must come first.

You must always believe that you’re open – that given the chance, you’ll score. You must have the conviction to even take the shot and inspire confidence in others to pass to you. None of that works if you tell yourself that you’re closed.

Some creative endeavors favor mastery. Others favor adaptability. It’s rare to be able to have both, so it’s a good idea to know which category you’re in. I call this the “cooking/baking axis.”

Cooking is an art. You play. You mix and match, taste and adjust. You modify as you go, you put a little pizzazz in it. You can throw an extra dash of something in and leave out something else and the whole thing can come together like magic if you’re good at it. Getting a sense of all that can take practice, but you’re always weaving.

Baking is a science. If you don’t put the right amount of everything in, at the right temperature, for the right time, heck at the right altitude, you don’t get cake – you get sludge or charcoal. You can’t just decide to throw an extra stick of butter in there without consequences. You can’t decide to make your pineapple upside-down cake al dente. Mastery is important. You practice until it’s perfect.

This is the difference between a gymnastics routine and improv comedy. In the former, you need perfect mastery to get it right (and not get hurt). In the latter, practicing too much can make you rigid, and rigidity actually makes you worse.

People tend to gravitate toward one or the other, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But then sometimes they choose endeavors that don’t always line up with their natural style, and that can be frustrating. It’s worth it to look inward. Next time you’re going to a potluck, observe what you’d rather make. You’ll enjoy your enjoyment more if your creativity matches your methods.

It can be hard to face facts when it comes to our own shortcomings. Always remember: even if you ignore them, the world doesn’t. And the farther you let your version of reality drift from the version the world sees, the less the world will consider you worthy of interaction.

If you’re a teacher and one person fails your class, you can say that it’s on that student or it’s a fluke, etc. But if you’re a teach and everyone fails your class, then you’re a bad teacher. And no matter what else you point to as evidence that you’re a “good” teacher, you have to face the facts. There’s ultimately one measure of how good a teacher you are, and that’s how well your students learn.

No teacher wants to admit that they’re bad – no one ever wants to admit that they’re bad at one of the primary things they identify as. I’m okay with admitting that I’m a bad golfer because I don’t care about being a good one. But if presented with evidence that I was a bad father, a bad friend, a bad coach – these would be harder for me to accept. But I have to face those facts if they’re presented to me.

If I loudly and belligerently proclaim “I’m a good father” while my children violently attack everyone around them, steal things, destroy stuff, do drugs, go to jail, and so on, then the world will (correctly) realize that I have no interest in changing my behavior as a parent. The world will then lose any interest in helping me. I’ll be written off, and likely so will my children. If instead I say, “I don’t know where I went wrong, but clearly I’m doing something incorrectly,” then the people in the world who might be able to help me do better are far more motivated to do so.

How much you want to be good at something isn’t a measure of how good you are. It can be a great input; wanting to be good at something is the first step. But it isn’t, itself, a measure. The results are the measure. And if you don’t face that, you’ll never actually be good.

I want to live a long time. But that doesn’t mean I’ll pay any cost to add any amount of time to my life. Like all things, the marginal benefit must exceed the marginal cost.

Consider that not all years of your life will be equal. How much worse are you willing to make your 30s and 40s to add one year to your 90s? One month? One week?

There are many variables – too many. Some people like salt more than they’d like a few extra weeks as an octogenarian. That’s a reasonable trade-off.

Everything has a cost, and the time between paying that cost and getting the benefit can be decades, if you get it at all. Buyer beware.

Imagine you attempt to make a gingerbread house for the first time. You mix the frosting that holds it together with a little too much water so it’s not as strong, and your walls don’t stick together as well. An experienced mentor points this out to you, correcting your error so you can build more effectively. You probably feel good about this – you’ve saved yourself a lot of time and headache and you appreciate the input from the knowledgable mentor.

Now imagine instead you mixed the frosting wrong the same way, but no one told you. For the next ten years you made your gingerbread houses that way – they don’t hold together very well and you have to spend a bunch of extra time holding walls together until they dry, using extra frosting, etc. Even still, the houses fall apart more frequently and look worse from the drippy frosting. Now that same person tells you that you’re putting too much water in the frosting. They use the exact same tone of voice and say the exact same words.

You’d be furious, wouldn’t you?

“I know what I’m doing! I’ve been making gingerbread houses for ten years, don’t come over here and tell me how to mix frosting! How dare you!”

This is why feedback needs to be frequent, everyone. Because if you don’t learn that you’re making a mistake early, you have a tendency to integrate that mistake into your identity. It’s the sunk cost fallacy – it’s easy to admit you made a mistake once, especially when you don’t think you’re very skilled at the task yet because you’re just starting out. It’s much, much harder to admit that we’ve been doing something the wrong way for a long time – wasting effort, losing opportunities, etc. Let someone make a mistake long enough, and you’ll never correct it.

I once had a very good manager who absolutely destroyed me when he told me: “Your willingness to work extra hours to make sure the job gets done is not a virtue.”

He explained that because I came into each day with no boundaries about how long I’d work, I worked inefficiently. I didn’t challenge myself to work smarter because I was willing to work harder. I didn’t search for improved practices because I was willing to crack another energy drink. The end result was that I worked harder, but I didn’t actually get more work done.

The sculptor is a fascinating artist. You start with a chunk of marble and your glorious statue of the most beautiful human form is already done, it’s just covered in other bits of marble that you don’t need. The exact molecules of marble that are in Michaelangelo’s David were already there, in that exact configuration, before Michaelangelo even started. Michaelangelo just cleaned it. A sculptor is like a paleontologist who can’t use any tools to find the fossils except their own mind’s eye.

That’s the kind of artist you need to be with your time. Don’t be a painter, always adding more to make the painting more robust, more detailed. Be the sculptor – clear away everything except the most perfect minutes, and use only those. It will take some time to learn what those minutes are, just as it took Michaelangelo time to learn which marble to clear away.

But he never added marble. That was his virtue.

Often you have to contribute positively to the world, even if you didn’t receive the benefit you’re contributing.

You have to be a good parent even if you had bad ones. You have to treat your employees well even if your boss treats you poorly. You must teach even if you weren’t taught.

Your own bad experience can’t become your excuse for abandoning your duties to others. You must hold yourself to a higher standard than the world has presented, or you’ll always sink to the lowest level the world has to offer.

Cycle up, heroes. You are founders of great and mighty works. The seeds you plant will shade generations of the grateful.

People who have been punched in the face are more self aware. Not only do you know how you’ll react – which you truly have no way of knowing until it happens – but you also know more about what you do that might be punch-worthy.

The point is that people who have never truly crashed don’t truly know how to fly. So when you crash – rejoice!

I notice something odd. Sometimes people believe something that makes them upset, but the thing they believe is not only false, it’s almost the direct opposite of the truth. So you’d think that learning the truth would make them happy! But it sure doesn’t.

To understand why, you have to go back to some really basic elements of human communication. Namely: “Talk is cheap.” To go a little deeper: The vast majority of communication done by humans isn’t done to actually engage in the transfer of information. It’s done to signal tribal affiliation and get points with your tribe, whoever they are. If you understand that, a lot of life makes a lot more sense.

Very recently (as of this writing) some children were killed in a horrific incident at their school. This is tragic and sad and bad. Whenever something tragic and sad and bad happens, people will often talk about how common that thing is “these days,” and so on. People lament especially that their children are less safe today than we were ourselves when we were children however many years ago.

So, here’s what they’re literally saying: “I’m sad because our children aren’t as safe as children were in the last generation.” If that was also what they literally meant, then the perfect solution would present itself! Because of course, the exact opposite is true. Children today are much safer, by every measure and in every category, than they have ever been. They aren’t perfectly safe, as occasional tragedies demonstrate. But any inference of declining safety is completely wrong.

But of course, what they literally say isn’t what they literally mean. What they mean is: “I would like to take this opportunity to signal my affiliation to my tribe by saying the things my tribe wants to say and hear. I hope many members of my tribe hear this and raise my status.” That sounds callous, but remember that they probably don’t actually realize that’s what they mean. Tribalism is so deeply ingrained in our psyche that it guides our actions without us realizing that’s what’s happening most of the time. People sincerely believe that they sincerely believe that children are less safe today.

Which is why they are very upset if you tell them otherwise, even though you’d think they’d rejoice.

If someone believes that they’re poisoned and about to die, you’d think they’d be relieved to learn that it was only water and they’re going to be fine. But if they believed they’d been poisoned because their tribe told them so, then they would at least be a little mad at you for dispelling that belief.

Now, let’s go just a tiny bit further down this rabbit hole before we’re through today, shall we? Remember that one of the surest ways to get people to do what you want is to make them angry or scared. Angry, scared people will do a lot of really terrible things, especially if they’re angry and scared as a group – angry and scared of the same things. It is very, very difficult to control people by telling them good news.

So when people tell you bad news, be suspicious. Don’t be committed to sadness. Don’t decide to be angry and scared. Decide not to be, by default. Sometimes there will be valid reasons to feel fear and anger, but it will almost never be because someone else told you to be. Trust your own senses and experiences and use a commitment to happiness as an inoculation against control. You’ll never be free of tribalism – it’s too deep within us. But recognize it. And be happy.

I worry often about settling into mistakes. Getting something wrong that won’t come around to bite me until much later, but then it’s far too late. Habits relating to personal health are like this – you can do a lot of damage to your body for years before you start to actually feel the effects, but by then the habits are very hard to change.

I don’t like to consider things settled. I like to keep change as an acceptable cost of living, a recognized element. It’s difficult, but worthwhile. Everything changes.