“I can’t believe he gave it all up to go live on a farm!”

Really? You can’t?

I can’t wrap my head around people who don’t. I recently read a story about a high-level, long-tenured (more than two decades), and well-compensated executive at a major tech company who quit and became a goose farmer. There were all these shocked statements from industry colleagues who couldn’t believe he’d walk away from a high-paying, high-status job to do that.

But… really? You can’t?

Look, whatever your version of “goose farmer” is, that’s the goal. Not the thing you’d do if you were rich, but the thing you’d do if you didn’t have to care about money. Because those are very different thresholds! Long before you’re rich, you’ll reach a point where if you’re careful and wise, you can stop worrying about money anymore. At that point, whatever you do for work becomes a conscious choice in a way that’s fundamentally different from when your survival depended on your income potential.

Getting to that point might take a long time. And if we’re being truthful, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get to it. It requires some luck, a lot of determination, a good strategy, and time. Enough time, in fact, that some people lose the thread. They forget why they were grinding in the first place, and they blow right past the finish line and never see it. They keep making more money and gaining more status until they die.

If that makes you happy, then do it. But I don’t think it does. I strongly suspect that people who could have long ago become goose farmers and have instead stayed in their command centers have something fundamentally wrong with them. I’ve seen the seed of that wrongness take root in me, sometimes.

Video games – old school video games, like from the 80s – had two ways they could end. You could die, or you could “beat the game.” Either way, the game was over. You weren’t supposed to play it forever. That’s what modern life is like. The goal of this life is to stop. And there are only two ways out: you can die, or you can beat the game. Either way, it ends eventually.

One way is better. On that farm or boat or mountain or non-profit or stage is who you really are. They’re waiting for you, with some geese. Don’t let them wait too long.

There’s a critical lesson in decision-making: patterns and rules are almost always better than human judgment.

(For an example, think about the book/movie Moneyball.)

Basically, if you create a list of criteria that determines what kinds of decisions get made, following that rule will almost always be better than trying to judge individual cases. People don’t like that, but it’s true. We don’t like being “impersonal.” Everyone thinks they’re the exception, or that they can spot exceptions, or whatever. But the measures work better.

But then again, here’s the caveat to that – the measures are written by people. And those people might be just as bad at writing the initial rule as they are at following it.

Let’s say I’m trying to predict which horses are going to win the Kentucky Derby. I know it would be a bad idea for me to just look at the horses and try to “get a feel” for which ones look lucky or fast. So instead I create a rule: I’ll sort all the horse names alphabetically, assigning a value of 1 for A-names, 2 for B-names, etc. Then I’ll do the same for the jockey’s last name. I’ll total the values and bet on the highest one.

That rule will definitely keep me from trying to make snap judgments if I follow it. But the rule is dumb!

So there’s the rub – you have to be sure that the measure isn’t, you know, terrible. And you can only get there by testing. So sure, use rules – they help cool your emotional bias, if nothing else. And they help you get actionable data that has some element of consistency to it.

But measures aren’t magic, and don’t forget it.

Remember the Serenity Prayer? “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.“

That “wisdom to know the difference” part is pretty important, but I mostly see it applied in one direction – as advice to people who are constantly railing against the immutable aspects of the universe. Sometimes it rains, and you can’t do a thing about it – so quit complaining.

But lately I’ve noticed that more often than we’d like to admit, we humans make our mistakes in the opposite direction. We turn things that are very much under our control into immutable facts of the universe in our heads. We often do it in order to escape the shame we feel about the choices we’ve made.

But as long as we keep doing that, we’re going to keep making those same choices. We don’t leave ourselves any alternative as long as don’t even accept that we’re making a choice to begin with.

It’s painful to admit, of course. But it’s absolutely necessary. Don’t hang your head and say “I have to go to work today.” You don’t have to! You choose to, because you’re choosing one set of consequences (being miserable but making money) over another (not being miserable but not making any money). But you’ll never be able to explore alternatives as long as you hide from yourself the fact that you’re making an active decision about your life. As long as you use tricks of language and willful ignorance to disguise the fact that you own the agency over these outcomes, they’ll never change.

That’s the first step. No matter how miserable the action is, accept that you’re choosing it. When your friend asks if you want to go on a road trip or your partner asks if you want to spend a romantic evening at home, don’t say “I can’t – I have to go to work.”

Instead, say: “I do want to, but I’m choosing to go to work instead. I value time with you, but I value my continued employment more.”

You will not like saying that. But it will be true – until it isn’t, and you change.

When your brain doesn’t want to do something, it will look for any possible escape route. Prisoners want to escape prison, too – but they can’t just walk out the front door. If they want to escape, they have to disguise the fact that they’re doing so. They can’t just dig a tunnel in the yard; they have to hide it behind a Rita Hayworth poster.

Your brain will do that, too. Your subconscious brain won’t say “I really don’t want to work out today because I’m lazy and unmotivated.” Instead, it will try to distract you. It will hide the escape tunnel inside things like “better organize these pillows” and “you know, you aren’t feeling so well today, you should lie down.”

We are not a unified being. We have many voices, often at war. The crafty ones try to slip past the more vigilant ones.

Recognize the escape tunnel for what it is, and get to work.

I am generally a proponent of “marginal steps to a better world.” Make small, incremental changes. Improve little things, as long as you’re improving.

Sometimes though, you’re careening toward a cliff. Slowing down gradually isn’t going to save you. You need the drastic brake, the cold turkey, the hard reset.

You shouldn’t do it often. It often has unintended consequences; disruptions to things other than what you’re aiming for. But you also shouldn’t do it often because it rarely works. It’s an emergency option for when less drastic measures have been exhausted.

But when you do it, do it right. Burn the boats. Don’t leave yourself any escape routes. Commit; put money on it if you have to. Whatever it takes to grab that last lifeline before you go over.

The last thing you want to do is have to do it again.

When you learn about other people, you get better at predicting their actions. That’s helpful and generally makes your life better.

The same is true of learning about yourself. Except it’s harder.

Imagine that you learn that your boss is really cranky every day from noon until 1. Then they eat lunch, and they come back pleasant as a peach. If you’re reasonably intelligent, you’ll recognize the pattern – they obviously get cranky from hunger and are in a good mood after their blood sugar goes back up. You can use this knowledge to make your own life easier; you would make sure to schedule meetings with your boss only after lunch. If you had to meet earlier, you’d make sure to bring a snack and casually offer some to the boss. It would be easy exactly because you have no reason to doubt your own observations.

Now imagine that you get really cranky every day from noon until 1. Then you eat lunch and you come back in a great mood. In theory, it should be even easier to take advantage of this information! Don’t schedule meetings during your low times, and put emergency snacks in your desk drawer for the meetings that have to happen anyway. Because you can control your own behavior, this information about yourself should be even easier to take advantage of than the same information about your manager.

Except it isn’t, is it? Because unlike the info about your manager, you don’t like this information. You don’t want to believe you could be a jerk just because you needed a bite to eat, and you certainly don’t believe you’re ever an unwarranted jerk. Since your behavior is always justified, it doesn’t need to change – or even be acknowledged! The incredibly simple act of having a snack – perfectly fine for your boss – is demeaning to even suggest as a reaction to your mood.

People will go to years of therapy before they’ll eat a snack and go outside, you know?

From about the ages of 25-30, your brain and body are settling into more or less the configuration they’ll have for the next 50 years. So that’s a really great time to read the operating manual, so to speak. Observe your own behavior like you’d observe others’. Figure out the basic controls. Peruse the FAQ.

“When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” Doubly true when both parties are you.

What can you put in a barrel to make a barrel lighter?

(Answer at the end. It’s not helium.)

When you want something and then you get it, it can have a tendency to be bigger in your life than you anticipated. “When it rains, it pours” and all that. It’s not uncommon to get more than you bargained for, because we don’t often fully realize the conceptual space something is going to take up in our lives.

We need to poke some breathing holes, so to speak. If you get a dog and you’ve never owned one before, you can be in for a rude awakening. The pup takes up more physical space than you anticipated, costs more to take care of and replace what gets damaged, requires more of your time and energy than you thought, etc. It’s just bigger. If you don’t give yourself a little space it can overwhelm you – you need to poke some breathing holes in that box, so to speak. Maybe that’s a dog-walking service you hire. Maybe it’s splitting bulk food orders with fellow dog-owners. But somehow, you need to carve out space for the life you want to keep.

That’s what you can put in a barrel to make the barrel lighter – a hole.

Nothing is obvious. If you think the solution to some widespread problem is “obvious” and everyone else is simply foolish for missing it, then there’s only one fool in the room, I’m afraid.

People know things because they learn things, and they learn things through effort and challenge. Other than how to walk and eat, virtually no knowledge comes “naturally” to humans. But the brain is a funny thing, and loves to be confident where it shouldn’t be. So your brain will jump with great certainty to “obvious” answers, especially when the risk of being wrong is virtually zero.

(The above paragraph explains why almost all opinions are terrible.)

Experts can lie, and non-experts don’t know anything. So your only reasonable path is to become an expert yourself on things that actually matter, and ignore everything else. It’s hard, but it’s happier.

When you’re teaching someone how to do something, what’s important is that they learn how to do it, not that they understood how you taught them. If you’re teaching someone how to ride a bike, it doesn’t matter that they gain a deep appreciation of your pedagogy. What matters is that they can ride a bike at the end of the lesson.

Unless, of course, you’re teaching someone how to teach.

If you’re teaching anything in the vein of leadership skills, training methods, public speaking, etc. – in other words, if you’re teaching people how to do the very thing you’re currently doing – then be transparent with your methods! Anything that’s working for you could work for them, and it may give your audience a deeper connection with your content as well as your methods.

What’s important isn’t just that they learn; it’s that they teach. It’s a unique case, but often an easy one. If you’re good at it, all you have to do is explain why.