I’ve never been good at not being good at things. I don’t mean I’m great at everything, I just mean that I’m not generally good with accepting that I’m not.

If I’m not good at something, I want to get better. I want to improve my skills, my tools, my knowledge. I want other people to do it, too. I’m a fixer, a compulsive advice-giver to the point where I have to create rules for myself to not do that.

But lots of people do stuff not as a means of getting better at that stuff. Some people do stuff – shockingly! – just to enjoy doing it.

They don’t even have to be good at it! In fact, they can be downright terrible and still have a blast. I’m not great at that.

(Interestingly, I’m not a hyper-competitive person. I’m fine with losing games and contests – just not against myself or against the universe.)

I’m going to try to get better at that. Ha! I can’t even avoid it here – my mind defaults to trying to improve. I’m going to try to get better at being okay with not constantly getting better at stuff! What a riot!

Here is a complaint you sometimes hear about entertainment media, like television shows or bands or what have you: “Their early stuff was great, but they changed. They moved away from the core elements that made us love them, and we don’t love this different stuff.”

Here is another complaint you sometimes hear about the same kinds of entertainment: “They were great when I first encountered them, but they just do the same stuff over and over. It’s getting tired at this point and I’m bored of them.”

Sort of a conflict, isn’t it? If you were someone who made media like that, I could understand getting a little frustrated. “What do you people even want?“

Well, I’ll tell you a secret. Let’s say you hear a really funny joke. Side-splitting, even! You say “That’s a solid joke,” and you slap the person who told it on the back, maybe even buy them a beer because of the great laugh you just got.

Now, what’s better – they tell you the exact same joke again, or they tell you a joke that has the same structure but maybe swaps around the names of the characters or the type of food they were eating?

That’s right – both are terrible!

The fact is, you just can’t repeat a joke. Anything that relies on emotional impact can’t have that same impact again. It’s just not the way our emotions work. The second joke is never as funny.

The right move – the one that’s hardest on the ego – is just to get your win and then move on. Take your victory and leave ’em cheering. When you want to do a totally new thing, unrelated to the old one, great! You’ll have an audience. Because you didn’t drive them away with the second joke.

If I’m doing generally constructive things with my time and mental energy, it usually makes me want to do more constructive things. Whereas if I’m being a slug, it’s not exactly inspirational.

There’s a feedback loop of mental energy that comes from using it productively. A sort of recycling effect. Part of that is purposely engineered – if you deliberately live a more transparent life then you’ll tend to be more motivated to do good and more rewarded for doing so.

As much as you can, do that engineering. Create systems in your life that reward you for doing virtuous things. We are creatures of our habits, but our habits can be hacked. If the end result is good, it doesn’t matter that you had to coax yourself a little to get there.

Sleep is such a funny thing. It’s constantly haunting you, but when it finally catches you – it heals.

I mean, think about hunger. If you don’t eat for a long time and you collapse from hunger, the next stage is hunger killing you. Same with thirst, or vitamin deficiency, or what have you. All these basic human needs kill you if you don’t get them.

But if you don’t get enough sleep and you collapse – the collapsing makes you better.

I mean, physically better. It might have done plenty of inconvenient damage to your life as you miss work or fall asleep at your cousin’s wedding or whatever, but your body is healing the very resource you didn’t give it.

Sleep is such a weird thing to think about. Food, I get. Machines require energy. Food is fuel. But what is it about the processes of regeneration and recuperation that require we be unconscious for them? Sure, you can’t run a marathon every day – but why the specific process of dropping into a wild hallucination combined with total obliviousness and vulnerability to predators?

Oh well. The body will take it when it wants it. Sleep always wins.

There are two kinds of money.

For every person on Earth, there is a specific threshold – and it’s different for everyone – where the majority of your problems are not variations of “not enough resources.” Below that threshold, money is one thing. Above that threshold, it’s a very different thing indeed.

People sometimes like to say “Money won’t solve all your problems.” And it won’t! Nothing will ever solve all your problems. Problems are relative. But below that magic line, almost all of your problems are basically “I don’t have enough money.” The line is different for everyone – a chronically ill single parent might have a higher line than a childless, healthy young adult. But the point isn’t where the line is, it’s acknowledging that it exists.

Because a lot of people’s philosophical mistakes about money involve being ignorant of the line. If you are below the line, you should care a lot about money! You should work your butt off to change your circumstances, either getting more wealth or lowering your needs, until you’re above that line. Life below that line is hard. And living there makes it really hard to solve other problems – heck, it’s hard to even think about them.

But once you’re above that threshold, you need to dial back your pursuit of money considerably. Right above the line where your day-to-day existence isn’t a constant neck-and-neck race with the resources you can obtain, additional wealth has a significantly lower marginal utility. If you look at the extremes, this becomes obvious: Who benefits more from finding a 20-dollar bill on the sidewalk, a chronically ill single parent or Elon Musk? But what’s obvious at the extremes is still true even right against the line.

So what happens for many people is that they successfully work and strive until they’re over the line, but then they keep pursuing money with the same level of tenacity and sacrifice. They get more and more, and they spend more and more, but their actual level of happiness plateaus. And then it even starts to decrease as the other aspects of their life wither and falter.

This is a hard, hard lesson to learn. Especially because the threshold is different for each person, it’s not like someone can tell you exactly the level of accumulated wealth and annual income that you should hit before coasting. But if you don’t figure it out for yourself, you will be so much more miserable in your life than if you never take your foot off that accelerator.

Money matters, don’t let anyone tell you differently. But how you think about it matters even more.

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.