If you set out to walk as far as you can go, then you cannot fail. Everyone lives all the way until the end of their life. No exceptions.

When you let the chips fall where they may, they can’t land wrong. That – wherever it is – is where they may. You play what you’re dealt, and you play it any way you like.

In these things, you cannot be a failure. It’s impossible; there’s nothing to fail at. You will not be early nor late to your fate, and you can’t get there the wrong way. You can’t get lost, and you can’t lose.

Wake up tomorrow and know it.

Convincing yourself that something you tried and failed to get was actually bad and you never wanted it anyway is a recipe for bitterness and anger. But convincing yourself that what you ended up with was what you wanted all along is the height of happiness!

Most of your life is going to average out, in the end. You’ll find an extra nugget in your 6-piece about as often as you’ll be missing one. Being able to cherish each moment as if it was exactly the reward you were aiming for isn’t self-delusion; it’s self-awareness. Most of those rewards aren’t much different from one another when you take the long view. So cherish what you get, even as you strive again next time.

What will improve is what is tested.

Organizations get better at their core function in two distinct ways. The first way is by improving the skills of its members. The second way is by filtering its members for skill.

For instance, imagine a baseball team that is first formed by a group of people more or less at random. The team probably isn’t very good at baseball, overall. The organization can train the individuals in skills like running and catching, but it can also replace the worst-performing members over time. Even if each eliminated player is replaced by another random person, the team will gradually improve if only the worst-performing people are eliminated each time, as they’re naturally below average.

So, a process of both training in the core skills of baseball and filtering the organization’s membership for baseball-related skills will gradually improve the team at baseball. It won’t improve the team at performing classical music together.

That seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s worth thinking about. Often, the core thing your organization does is hard to measure and hard to train. But organizations know that training and filtering are the improvement machines, so they just sort of substitute in something else without realizing it. So while an organization might really wish it was training & filtering for teaching ability, what it’s really doing is training & filtering for compliance and obedience, for example.

Be careful how you calibrate.

Happy New Month!

So, a small confession – I haven’t been to a doctor in years. But now that I’m a thousand years old, it’s probably time I took the ol’ body in for a tune-up. So that’s my resolution this month: get to the sawbones. If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.

May your month be healthy, my friends!

Cultivating an ability to control your desires is a worthwhile pursuit. I don’t just mean controlling the level of desire – I mean actually self-programming what you do and don’t want.

Solved problems aren’t necessarily solutions. Our brains are wired to want solved problems. We want to not be hungry, but that’s not the same as a solution to the problem of hunger. In other words, we seek out short-term results by nature.

Control that nature. Train yourself not just to not have bad things, but not to want them. And with good-but-difficult things, don’t just force yourself to do them, grumbling all the while. Condition yourself to want to do them.

Reward yourself if you need to. Trick your brain any way you can. Practice it until it sticks. Ultimately, your brain will do what it wants. Program it accordingly.

People often feel like they’re punished for success.

If you’ve been a working adult for more than 5 minutes, I can almost guarantee that you’ve experienced this. You start doing some work and you do well. Suddenly, you get more work. You get put in charge of something. You get given harder work. All of those things can feel like punishments if you didn’t ask for them!

They aren’t necessarily intended to be, of course. When people see potential, they often want to tap it. And someone may genuinely want to invest in you – so they challenge you. But again, if you didn’t ask for it, you might have been more comfortable being the big fish in your small pond.

Apart from half-assing things or self-sabotaging, how can you get around this? How can you be successful while still directing the outcome of that success?

Call your shot early. Have an understanding of what you do want, and use that to redirect other “suggestions.” For instance, maybe you don’t want to work with more challenging clients just because you’re good with communication. So make it clear that your ultimate goal is to learn enough about the business to move onto the operation side, and that’s where you’re focusing your energy.

You’re not lazy just because you don’t want every opportunity ever presented to you. But perception management is a real thing, and if you want to keep people investing in you, often it’s as simple as telling them exactly how to invest.

Falling a hundred feet onto a hard surface can likely kill you. But falling five feet twenty times, even in short succession, isn’t likely to do more than give you a few bruises.

You can’t truly prevent falls in your life. But you can usually shorten them.

Everything you care about, diversify. Did you know that some large companies have a rule that no more than a handful of their senior executives are allowed to be on the same flight? Even though flying is extremely safe, the rule exists so that no disaster can take out the whole company.

If you have a collection of antique books, it’s a good idea not to store them all in the same place. It’s a great idea not to get all your money from one source. It’s a good idea to have more than one friend you can confide in.

The ceiling can leak and get water on one bookshelf. You can lose one job. One friend can move away. These are sad things, but they don’t have to be hundred-foot disasters.

A short fall won’t hurt you. And it’s easier to get back up.

In Douglas Adams’ incredible Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, there’s an amusing scene (one among thousands) where a character is discovered to be living in a very strange house. The outside walls of the house are decorated with hung paintings, end tables, potted plants, etc. – in other words, all the typical things you’d expect to be on the inside of a house. Meanwhile, the inside of the house has grass instead of carpet, siding on the interior walls, and all the furniture is lawn/patio furniture, etc. So the house is exactly backwards.

The character that lives in the house claims to be living outside, with everyone else in the world living inside the house. The house is called “The Outside of the Asylum,” because the inhabitant has committed everyone else in the world to the looney bin.

(Incidentally, if you find this – as I do – absolutely hysterical as a concept, you should definitely read the series. The whole thing is amazing absurdist stuff like this.)

So when you build a barrier, are you keeping something out or something in?

Often it’s both, to some degree. The walls of my house keep the heat inside and the rain outside. But when it comes to intangible things rather than physical ones, it’s usually one or the other. You have “quiet time” because you don’t want noise invading that hour. You limit your kids’ “screen time” because you want to keep it contained to that block.

But try reversing it!

Many parents put a hard cap on “screen time,” telling their kids they can’t watch TV or use electronic devices for more than an hour a day or something like that. I agree with the concept – kids shouldn’t spend ages in front of screens. But I don’t like the implementation. I don’t want screen time to be the thing that’s so amazing that it has to be a sacred prize. I also don’t want to inadvertently focus my kids’ attention on it constantly by telling them “Don’t.”

So instead, I create really fun other times during which screens aren’t allowed. Screens aren’t allowed during Science Experiment Time. They aren’t allowed during Dance Party Time. They aren’t allowed during Silly Dinner Time. And they aren’t missed.

I don’t try to keep screens “in” one time. I just keep them “out” of other times, and then the actual amount of screen time takes care of itself.

So maybe don’t block off as much work time for yourself. Maybe just block off time where you absolutely will not work, and let the other stuff take care of itself.

A number of small, annoying things happened to me today. In the moment, several of them were more than annoying, in fact. But if I close my eyes and imagine a day in which none of those things occurred, the day would have ended the same way. I’ll wake up tomorrow all the same.

There are two things worth doing to annoyances: ignore them or prevent them. And those are pretty much the only two things worth doing. If you can prevent it, great. If you can’t, ignore it. And either way, you wake up tomorrow all the same.

Our memory of the crash is often dulled, even though typically humans remember the ends of things more vividly than the experience as a whole. So if you eat a bunch of candy and then get sick, you still later might want to eat a bunch more candy.

This is where facing up to what brought the crash is helpful. When you’re writhing with a tummyache, you block out the cause. You don’t want to face the reality of your torture being brought on by the thing you wanted to do – and want to do again.

Whenever you’re in pain, look for how to link it to a choice you’ve made. Heck, it might not even be connected, but why miss the opportunity to trick your brain out of a bad habit? If you break your leg, spending a little time mentally connecting that broken leg to your smoking habit might be just the thing you need to kick it.

Pain sometimes happens, the crash always comes. Don’t waste it.