You have to be careful in life to make sure that your scale of perception aligns to your scale of action.

We live in a world where it is very, very easy for those to fall dramatically out of alignment. In fact, a lot of entities try very hard to do that to you on purpose.

If you’re Superman, it makes sense to pay attention to the entire world and choose the worst, most horrific events to respond to. Since you can observe the whole world at once and be anywhere in a matter of seconds, you have the ability to impact the entire world with your actions. Since your scale of action is thus worldwide, it makes sense for your scale of perception to be global as well.

But if you’re not Superman, then guess what? It doesn’t make sense to do that. Let’s say you’re a local, small-town police chief and you truly care about peace and order. You would love a crime rate of 0, or as close to it as you can get. In that case, it not only isn’t helpful for you to read global or national crime statistics, it’s actively harmful. That information is noise, and it will cause you to perform your job more poorly. Imagine your small town has never had a murder. If you read about a “national crime wave” of murders related to the international drug trade, what good is that to you? At best, it’s just clouding your judgment. At worst, it causes you to enact policies to counter something that isn’t happening in your town – and such policies are not without cost in blood and treasure.

Life is actually very good in most places, for most people, most of the time. We need to look at larger and larger scales in order to find the same amount of tragedy we could find yesterday, and humans’ appetite for the tragedies of others is bottomless. But if you spend all day taking in information about things at a national or global scale (information that is probably not accurate, to boot), then you’ll forget just how good life actually is.

I promise you, there are few more certain ways to make your life worse than to believe it to already be bad. One of the very best things you can do for yourself and your family is cut out information that doesn’t directly relate to whatever scale of action you operate at.

People who never travel more than three blocks from their home read national news every day, and never read local news – they don’t attend community meetings, don’t read the local school’s newsletter, don’t do any of it. It’s an addiction to tragedy, and it kills you a bit every day.

Break that habit! There is wonderous life all around you, at a scale you can truly touch and experience. Your life will be better if you do.

Today is just about the definition of bittersweet. I am as lucky as any father could be – my children are the most amazing blessings I could have ever asked for. The other side of the coin is that I miss my father terribly. I miss him for myself, and I miss him in the lives of his grandchildren.

They tell stories about him. They sing the songs he taught them. They are like him in many ways. He is, in other words, remembered well. I try to remember him well in my own life; to live the lessons he taught me and to honor the man he wanted me to be. I don’t always know how well I’m doing.

I’m like him in many ways, though there are more than a few in which I’ll never hold a candle. I’m eternally grateful that he was my father for all the years I had him, and I’m as blessed as a father could be, myself. The rest will come as it will.

Imagine that you could take all the words of any kind that were written down in this year, in any medium – newspapers, blogs, emails, kids’ diaries, graffiti, books, everything. It would be a large volume of words, even in a single day! Okay, now imagine that a machine randomly selects 5% of those words and presents them to you.

Of that selection, what percentage would be factual, truthful information? It seems like only a small percentage would be! Most of the words wouldn’t be true accounts – by volume, most words written in a year are pure fiction, speculation, gossip, etc.

Especially if you took that small selection of words out of context – or didn’t have the context – you really wouldn’t know anything by just reading those words.

Now imagine trying to assemble an accurate picture of what 2024 was like if you were reading that contextless, random 5% sampling of our words from the year 3000. If you read that random sampling and then claimed “Here is what was happening in 2024,” you would be absurdly, laughably inaccurate.

I think about that a lot when I think about the study of ancient history.

I like getting rid of stuff. It makes me happy to clear out old junk or unnecessary clutter. If I can sell it or give it away, all the better.

I often see people hemming and hawing about whether to sell an item. They discover something in their house (that they don’t use) is worth something on the secondary market but they hesitate to pull the trigger because “What if I need it someday?”

That’s status quo bias chaining you to that item! Here’s the trick: imagine you didn’t already own that item. Would you buy it for X dollars, where X is the amount of money you could get by selling it? Probably not, right?

So sell it and be happy!

You can only grow so big in the pot you’re planted in. Our leaves reach as far as our roots, as it were.

But roots do more than just provide nutrients. They also grip. They make you stable, and they make you hard to move. The two go hand in hand.

So when you experience the discomfort of moving, of being “uprooted,” just remember that. It’s uncomfortable now. But you can’t grow without it.

No matter how far down you go, there is always a choice. A better and worse path. A way to face it.

In the very last moment of your life, you can grimace or smirk. When you can’t even do that anymore, your worries are over. Until that moment, take your best shot.

It doesn’t all even out; some people just have better luck than others. But even within that, some folks squander good luck and some folks still make the best of the bad.

Nothing else to be done about it. Just keep it moving.

Today my children and I played a board game called “Random World,” designed by my 7-year-old daughter.

It was exactly as incredible as you’d imagine.

When I was a kid – but older than her – I designed games. It was exhilarating and I never stopped. To this day, I still do game design. I even get paid for it! So watching my daughter leap into this with both feet makes my heart absolutely swell.

The kids have a shelf with 30+ board games on it, and we play as a family all the time. It’s a great joy. But now there’s one more, and she designed it.

So it’s the best one ever. And it will be, until she designs they next.

Many people fall into the trap of waiting to solve a problem until they have the right “setup” to do so. Here’s an illustrative example:

Many parents of young babies find that when it’s near to bedtime, the baby starts crying. And some of those parents try to soothe the baby before putting it down to bed, not wanting to put a crying baby down. So they rock the baby, sing to it, pat it, walk around the house – all the while, getting more and more stressed and anxious and frustrated, and all the while doing absolutely nothing for the baby.

They want to soothe the baby before they put it down to sleep. But putting it down to sleep is what will soothe it!

The setup is the solution. If you put that baby down as soon as it started to fuss, it would fall asleep.

This works on all sorts of problems. Whatever you think you need to do before you solve a problem is probably just one step that you’re splitting into two and making it far harder as a result. Figure out what you want to be true – what’s the “sleeping baby” of this situation – and go after it directly. Skip setup steps. If the first attempt doesn’t work, you can always reevaluate and go backward a bit, but chances are good that it’s less complicated than you think it is.

Creating your own space in the world is a good thing. The best lives are lived in small circles. But no matter how beautiful of a bubble you craft for yourself, occasionally you’ll have to leave it and interact with the outside world.

So don’t forget their customs! Remember how to say hello and what they expect. It’s polite, for one. But more importantly, it’s how to get what you want from that world and make it back to your own little one in one piece.

If you want to do something, the question isn’t usually whether or not you can. The question is usually: “How weird are you willing to get to make it work?”

Very few things can be accomplished in a straight line from Point A to Point B. But very few things can’t be accomplished if you’re willing to find that strange and twisting path. The limitation for most people is simply how strange of a path they can imagine.

The stranger the better, when it comes to making it work.

A few decades ago, my father put an addition – a second story – onto my childhood home to make room for my soon-to-arrive baby sister. His goal was to get 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there. Several architects told him it was impossible, that given the size of the footprint he had to work with, the building codes, and so on, there was simply no way to put 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there.

Go into that house now, and you’ll find 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there. They’re all of normal size, too. They’re just configured in just about the strangest way you’d imagine. The rooms themselves are all normal, but the hallway that leads between them is straight out of a carnival funhouse. My father could envision the strange path, so he designed it himself and made it work.

Make it weird to make it work!