Being comfortable with discomfort is a keen and convenient superpower.

Have you ever been really cold, maybe outside in a winter storm? You do all sorts of weird little things: your teeth chatter, you shiver and shake, maybe you even dance around a little.

You know what? None of that stuff makes you any warmer. In fact, some of it makes you colder!

(The best thing you can do if you’re stuck outside and it’s cold is to find a place that isn’t windy, and then just hold still. Your body will warm the air around you and it will become an insulator, but if you disrupt the warm air by bopping around, it’s less effective.)

A long time ago, I was stuck in that situation. I tried something new; I told myself to just “be cold.” As in, don’t try to fight it. I relaxed my body, purposefully letting my shoulder and neck muscles go slack. I let my jaw go loose so my teeth wouldn’t chatter. And you know what? I was cold. But that’s it. I was as cold as I was before, but I was significantly less disturbed by it. I wasn’t in pain or uncomfortable. I was just cold.

Our reactions to negative stimuli aren’t always counters to those stimuli. We think they are, because we never really stop to question their effectiveness. But frequently we just do stuff when we’re tired, angry, lonely, hungry, upset, etc., and that stuff isn’t doing anything except making us more uncomfortable.

Sometimes the thing to do is just be cold until it passes. At worst, you don’t waste effort and add to your own discomfort. At best, you think more clearly and find an actual solution to your problem – which is always better than being left in the cold.

You’ll do many things to benefit yourself. Some of those things truly are “for yourself” – purely to enrich your own existence. If you watch a beautiful sunset or enjoy a stunning piece of music, you are enriched. If you eat a little healthier and feel better as a result, that’s an improvement. Such things can truly be for you and you alone.

Other things don’t actually improve you much if other people don’t know about them. If you want to learn a new skill for the purpose of achieving more success in your career, then just learning the skill isn’t enough. Other people need to know about it, too. If become one of a handful of people in the whole world who knows a particular programming language, that doesn’t help me much if I keep it a secret!

Humans mess this up a lot – in both directions.

Many humans (not all, obviously) tend to over-signal the stuff that should be for the self, and under-signal the stuff that should be a part of their public brand. They seek validation because of the music they listen to or the food they eat, but then don’t appropriately broadcast their skills and abilities that they’ve learned specifically to help others!

I get it. Things like our aesthetic habits can be a way to find community – and if you’re doing that, great. But if you’re just sharing pictures of a salad to share them… well, take some time and try to be comfortable in your own presence for a while. And take that same impulse to share and direct it towards the things you feel less confident about. You don’t want to share that you’re learning something because that’s a level of vulnerability that isn’t carried by a picture from your jog. But that’s why you should do it.

Align the right patterns of self and signal. Those being out of whack is a cause of a great deal of ennui.

The little secret treats are better than the bigger, obvious ones. It’s the seeking that makes it good, not the having.

Some problems aren’t the kind you can solve yourself – they’re the kind created by, and therefore only solvable through bureaucracy.

These are the worst kinds of problems. But there are some secrets to solving them efficiently.

First, the most important skill you can master is how to identify people who cannot help you at all. This is most of them. 100% of the time, the first person you talk to will not be able to help you, even if they wanted to, which they do not. What you must do is quickly identify these people and then be incredibly nice to them. You have to hide your contempt for their position and remember that ultimately they are people who aren’t out to get you, specifically. They’re just part of a horrible system.

Remember though, while they absolutely cannot help you, they certainly can hinder you. And they will definitely do everything they can to do so if you’re not nice. Powerless people trapped in a soulless system often take any opportunity they can to become petty tyrants, so don’t give them a reason. Be an absolute sweetheart, every second. Your goal is just to get past them as quickly as possible, and being nice is the best way to do that. Believe me, you may feel the urge to let your frustration out, but that’s just pouring concrete around your own feet. You can’t bully these people. You can’t “customer is always right” them. Consequences be damned, it’s just too satisfying for people in their position to squash a miserable complainer, so don’t be one.

Be nice. As nice as you’ve ever been. And quickly move inward until you meet someone who actually has the combination of authority and/or intelligence to help you.

And then be nice to them, too! It’s good to be nice to everyone, but I’m telling you this because in this situation you will not want to be nice. You’re only here because you’re frustrated and irritated and you’ve wasted your afternoon trying to solve this stupid problem that wouldn’t even BE a problem except for these very people. It’s natural to want to scowl.

Do not scowl.

Be as kind as you’ve ever been in your life. You have absolutely no way to destroy this bureaucracy. You can’t “teach these people a lesson.” You can’t even make them care, even for a second. Their system won’t let them care, even if they’re the kind of people who naturally would. So don’t try to win any moral victories through self-righteous posturing.

Just be nice, nice, nice until you get what you want.

Then get out, and try to make it a long time before you have to do it again.

When we only have an idea of something, we fill in the rest in our imagination. We take the core concept and apply our own optimism or pessimism to it, and that can end up creating an enormous fiction.

Ideas are meant to be tested. You might think it’s going to be awesome to work at the ice cream place because you love ice cream – but when you actually start you find it’s not exactly a whimsical Wonka-esque experience. Or you might think that going on vacation with your in-laws is going to be a drag, but you soon discover that they’re actually party animals and you have a fantastic time.

Don’t fall in love – or hate – with ideas. Find ways to test them and then take the best parts for the next idea. Save love for real life.

Complaints are a gift.

I’m not much of a complainer. I don’t see much point in it – most of the time, the better option is to simply fix the problem. If it’s too hot in a room, I have many options that get me to a comfortable temperature more effectively than complaining about the heat. I can find and change the thermostat myself, I can leave the room, or I can take off my coat – or I can even just decide not to care about slight discomfort. I’ll choose those options over complaining almost every time because I think they’re all much more likely to get me what I want.

But let’s say the room I’m in – the one that’s too hot – is a business of some kind. And while waiting for my turn, I notice other people also showing signs of temperature-related discomfort. I see these people, exasperated by the heat, deciding to leave rather than staying as customers. The owners of the business seem oblivious; perhaps they’re so busy that they simply don’t notice, or maybe they think they’re hot because they’re working hard and don’t realize it’s actually the whole place.

In this instance, alerting the owners of the problem – complaining about it – is a huge gift. They might be losing a lot of business because of this simple and easy-to-fix problem and they don’t know it. That simple complaint and its equally simple solution could be worth thousands of dollars to them, or more.

So when someone complains to you, it’s often a tremendous gift. Of course, sometimes it’s poorly given. If I complain about the heat in that building to my neighbor when I get home, that doesn’t accomplish much. Likewise, if I complain about the price of a product to a cashier with zero input on that price, I’ve missed the mark again.

Before I complain, I take a moment to think – is this complaint a gift? Or am I wasting someone’s time and ruining their mood for no reason?

That’s why I complain rarely. But when someone complains to you, give a thought to unwrapping it before you throw it away.

One of my favorite books of all time (and hands down my favorite non-fiction book) is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman was a Nobel Prize winner for his work in behavioral economics. His life was as fascinating as his work and sadly, that life ended today.

His work has had a genuinely profound effect on me. Someone once asked me what book had the most actual impact on my life. It’s a hard thing to measure, but I can’t think of a better case for a book than for Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Raise a glass fast to an interesting man with an interesting life, 90 years long and still over too soon, and then set it down slow.

Like it or not, your emotions are a rough draft of your opinions.

What eventually becomes a deeply-seated opinion on a particular topic starts out as an impulsive, emotional reaction to that topic. And it’s very, very easy to just take that rough draft and edit it only for presentation rather than content before we turn it in.

That means we often have a gut reaction to something, and all we really do is “clean it up.” We add post-hoc reasoning that sounds high-minded but is really just the rider justifying the movement of the elephant. In other words, we rationalize.

But we don’t have to! The first step is accepting that a rough draft is just that. It isn’t something to be ashamed of, and nor is it a sunk cost we now have to justify. It’s just an initial impression. We can use it for data, edit it for content, or even throw it out entirely if that’s where the rational editorial process leads us. We should let it cool for a while before we publish.

I don’t want my strong opinions to be rough drafts with a coat of paint on them, and neither should you.

I have no idea what the actual number is, but some number of people have these things called “intrusive thoughts.” (Personally, my guess is very near all people have them; we just react to them differently.) This is a fancy term for random thoughts that pop into your head that represent unpleasant things you wouldn’t actually do, don’t actually believe, and wouldn’t even consciously choose to think about. They’re little unpleasant impulses or dark images or anything else you might rather not occupy your brain.

We have them because the brain is basically just a huge stimulus-response machine with a teeny tiny little bit of intentional consciousness on top. So a lot of your thoughts are just reactions to things and it’s totally normal to have a bad thought pop into your head.

That doesn’t mean it’s fun.

I like to find constructive ways to use mine. One of the recurring kinds of “intrusive thoughts” that I have is I will find myself writing eulogies for people I care about quite frequently. If I let this thought “win,” I will get very sad, because it will make me dwell on losing people I hold dear.

So I don’t let it win. Instead, I let that eulogy play out a little bit, get the kind words flowing… and then I’ll just say those things to the person. (Minus the context, of course.) See, a eulogy is usually very complimentary! Those same thoughts can make a living person’s day and strengthen our relationship. My mind wanted to take it to a dark place, but the sentiment is anything but.

We often have to ignore or fight against our worst natural impulses to live noble lives. But sometimes we can do one better – we can harvest those very impulses for noble ends.