We give people too much credit sometimes.

Think about the five worst decisions you ever made – the ones that turned out to have the most disastrous consequences in your life. Chances are good that the majority of those decisions weren’t made with a clear head. You made poor decisions because you were exhausted, stressed, drunk, scared, angry, or any number of other things. Of those five decisions, you’d be lucky if one of them was something you could honestly say you’d do again with a clear head and twelve hours to reconsider.

Okay, now think about the last time someone else made a decision that negatively impacted you. The last time someone fired you, or didn’t buy that big sale you were pushing, or broke your heart, or whatever. My guess is that you think they made that decision with a perfectly firm heart and sober head. They calculated the best possible way to hurt you and did it with exactly that intent, right?

Look, people are just bad at… most things, most days. We’re all drunk toddlers waving around swords most of the time. Carrying grudges around because of that will just make you make even worse decisions.

Our whole lives, we have people in authority over us. We grow up with parents, teachers, bosses, all of whom we believe must – by default – be infallible. After all, they couldn’t be in charge of us if there were simply random stimulus-response machines, right? That would be insane! Who would allow that?!

The entire system of barely-functioning stimulus-response machines, that’s who.

At a certain point in your life, I think the point where you truly become an adult, you realize that your parents were just people, trying their best with no clue what they were doing. Your first boss at the ice cream store when you were 15 was probably younger than you are now – heck, they might have been all of 17. The first person who ever fired you might have just gotten divorced that day, but they couldn’t exactly call you up the week after and say that and offer you your job back in most cases. The world makes us double down on our own stupidity, lest we become the scapegoat everyone else is secretly hoping for.

The solution is simple, but not easy. You insulate yourself as best as you can against the failings of others. You rely on yourself for the important things, like wisdom and security. You don’t trust your entire family’s continued survival on whether or not your over-stressed boss holds it together for another day. You don’t place your entire self-image in the hands of a partner who doesn’t know how to change a tire. You don’t believe that your children’s education will be perfectly shepherded by a 22-year-old C student who yes, is absolutely trying their best, but that’s not really the issue.

The point isn’t to be an isolationist. Other people can be wonderful additions to your life. You will sometimes have bosses, hopefully have partners, maybe have children who will maybe have teachers, and all of these things can be amazing. Neighbors and friends and lovers and colleagues and fans and heroes are all part of the rich tapestry of life. But none of those people should hold more sway over your life’s outcomes than you. And that’s largely up to you – people gain that influence over our lives because we give it to them. Because we think there’s benefit to outsourcing that agency.

But on their best day, I doubt it.

Don’t police the little decisions. Police the big ones, and then let the sub-decisions run wild.

Let’s say your department has to stay within a $10,000 budget for the upcoming project. The wrong thing to do is try to approve every individual expenditure. The correct thing to do is give the team a $9,000 account and let them use their discretion. And if you don’t trust your team to use their discretion… well, that’s on you, pal. You either hired them, trained them, or both. Why didn’t you do a better job?

It’s the same with my kids. I don’t believe in policing their every intake of food. It sounds exhausting. Instead, I just only buy things that I’m comfortable with them eating without my supervision. That means that I only buy things that are healthy and not terribly messy. In practice it means a lot of fruits and raw veggies, pre-cooked chicken and other lunchmeats, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs. They can eat as much of that stuff as they want, and I don’t have to spend every five minutes attending to my children’s appetites like a waiter.

If you want less stress in your life, save your decisions for setting the parameters, and set them around the decision space such that any decisions made within that space are satisfactory.

My daughter asked if I could help her make her own miso soup. We had all the ingredients, so away we went.

I don’t actually know the proper way to make miso soup. But I know generally what goes in it and what it tastes like. And more importantly, I know the secret to all soup.

The secret to all soup is this: you boil a pot of water, and then you put whatever you want in there.

It’s all soup! Sometimes it’s not miso, or chicken noodle, or gazpacho, or whatever. But it’s always soup. You can’t set out to make soup and fail. If you boiled water, put something tasty in there, and ate it, then congratulations – soup!

The secret to all soup is also the secret to ninety-nine percent of life. Get the basics down, and then fill in the details however you want. You don’t have to live by other people’s recipes.

If you’re bopping around the kitchen having fun and whatever you made tastes great (and hey – it did!), then you’re winning. Keep it up!

I am terrible with problems that just have to be “managed,” not solved. When I’ve tasked myself with a problem, my mind tends to focus on it pretty obsessively. That’s an advantage when solving a problem, but it’s an awful curse when just maintaining.

Some problems aren’t the kind that have a once-and-for-all solution. Some problems simply have to be monitored. You might have a chronic health condition that can’t be fixed, only mitigated, for example. I don’t do well, there.

I’m adjusting, of course. It helps to break timelines down. To say “Okay, the problem to be solved this week is to get XYZ results before the week is out.” That’s something discrete and tangible that I can address. That can give my mind some relief.

I’ll find more solutions that work. I always do. After all, that’s a problem I can solve, too.

Work is hard enough without someone trying to stop you. And you’d think that wouldn’t be a frequent occurrence, but sometimes the people doing the most to hinder you are the people who ostensibly want the work to get completed as much as you do!

Sometimes people want to get to the same place as you, but they want the journey to be very different. They could just have a big ego. Maybe they want more credit than they’ll get if they just stay out of your way. Or perhaps their intentions are noble but they’re just not very good at the task in question. Whatever the case, it’s always a challenge when you have to do the extra layer of work that is managing someone who doesn’t want to be managed.

Pick your battles. Leave when you can. This sort of fight is rarely worth it, because you don’t even get a vanquished foe when you’re done – you just get an annoyed ally. Take a deep breath and kill ’em with kindness. Offer to follow their lead, and then do your own thing if they lead poorly – they’ll back off more readily than if you argue up front.

And seek out more allies in new places, whenever you can. The more you have to choose from, the less likely you’ll be stuck with the worst one.

None of us are perfect – not in mind, not in body, not in spirit. Weakness and sickness are relative.

If you say something is “wrong” with you, you’re not stating an objective, platonic fact about the universe. You’re making a comparison. For some, that comparison is to the norm for your peers – maybe your condition makes your vision worse or your resistance to disease lower. Or maybe you’re making a comparison to your former self; before this developed, you were faster or stronger or felt less pain.

This isn’t me saying that those comparisons aren’t valid. I’m just trying to gather some context for my own understanding.

So the concept of “better” is just that – you don’t become free of weakness, but maybe you can become “better.” Better than yesterday. Better than the baseline. A little less pain, a little more speed, a few deeper breaths.

Someday, something gets all of us. Some days we’ll get worse. But when we can, we get a little better.

Whenever you want to win against someone, leave them a way out. If you corner someone, they have no choice but to go all-in against you. If you give them a graceful exit, most will take it.

So today, I went to a small local cafe for a business meetup. The waiter asked me what I’d like to drink, and I asked for an iced tea. One of my colleagues was then asking about flavors of tea, and the waiter mentioned that they had peppermint tea, which I like.

“Ooh,” I said. “Could I change my order to a peppermint iced tea, please?”

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “We don’t have peppermint iced tea.”

…

I looked at him for a moment, just in case he was joking. He wasn’t. He seemed genuinely ignorant of the relationship between tea and iced tea. I didn’t want to burden him, so instead I asked if I could just have a hot peppermint tea and a glass of ice, then.

He asked: “So, you want that AND the iced tea?”

…

I clarified that I just wanted the hot peppermint tea and a glass of ice, thank you.

A few moments later, he returned. What he brought with him to serve to me was the following, and ONLY the following:

– A glass of (normal, non-peppermint) iced tea, with a lemon slice, and
– A sealed peppermint tea bag.

And when he set these two items down in front of me, he said:

“I hope this is what you wanted.”

People describe me as very optimistic. I don’t really like that term, because I don’t really like the whole “optimism/pessimism” axis of thought. Both of those mindsets yield a lot of agency to the universe, and that’s not the way I like to operate. I seem optimistic because I think things will work out well, but I don’t think that because I’m trusting in good fortune. I think things will work out generally well because that’s the way I’ve engineered them to work out.

Sure, some things are out of my control. Lots of things, in fact! But I don’t waste any time even thinking about whether those things will work out well or poorly. Instead, I think about ranges of outcomes, and my potential reactions.

An optimist thinks a coin flip will end up in his favor. A pessimist thinks it won’t. I don’t think either of those things – instead, I think about the bets I can make, what I stand to gain or lose, and whether I can choose to bet or not. I make my bets accordingly and then I’m satisfied that no matter how the coin lands, I’ll be fine. I’m not sure what kind of ‘ist’ that is, but that’s the kind I am.

You are not a passive observer of your own life. Roll your sleeves up and start working – minimize your need for hope or your vulnerability to fear. Be an empowerist.

Count backward from ten. Breathe. Keep your mouth shut. Listen, but listen to the patterns of information more than the information itself – most of which is nonsense.

The fire will burn out, the dust will settle, and there will be time to sift through the ashes. You’ll find truth in a book a decade or a century later, not in a screaming crowd while the flames still rage.

Just a reminder that humanity is most tested when it’s most needed.