People say the essence of comedy is timing, but I think it’s dedication. Commitment to the bit. I’ve heard it said that 90% of people didn’t think Andy Kaufman was funny, but that 10% found him to be the funniest guy who ever lived. I’m definitely in that 10% – I think he was a genius.

It’s not just comedy that benefits from this, of course. Commitment to a stance can warp the very world around you.

There’s this psychology experiment about fairness. Here’s how it works: you have two people, Person A and Person B. Person A is given $100 and told to split it however they like with Person B. Person B then gets to accept or reject the offer; if B accepts, then they both get the money as it was split by A. If B rejects the offer, both parties get nothing.

The point of the experiment is to demonstrate that humans care more about fairness than personal benefit. Here’s why it appears to do just that: if Person A decides that the split they want to offer is 99 bucks for them and a dollar for Person B, then Person B will reject that offer every time. But look at what they’re rejecting – a free dollar! They’d rather take nothing than a dollar, because the offer was “unfair.” In practice, the offers have to be generally at least 60/40 before people will start accepting them. People will trash 20 bucks!

So this is supposed to show that people are irrational, but I posit that it doesn’t show that at all. First, consider: almost all of our social instincts evolved when you would interact with the same 20 or 30 people over and over again your whole life. In that context, being willing to burn it all down in the name of fairness actually made perfect sense, because it taught everyone around you that you wouldn’t tolerate being treated unfairly in the future, either. It taught people that if they didn’t split that elk fairly with you, you’d rather kick it into the river and both starve than take the lesser cut. That was a strong way of motivating people to be fair to you.

In a world with many strangers who you’ll never see again (and thus, can’t “train” in this way) it makes the most sense to just ignore fairness and take any money offered to you rather than die on a hill. But we commit to the bit anyway, because most of the time we’re interacting with people we’ve interacted with before and will interact with again. It makes sense to teach them things about ourselves that we want them to know.

You can get very far with people by watching what they’re consistent about. And you can get a lot of what you want out of life by consistently committing to the bits you find important.

If you know all the words to something and someone else doesn’t, then they don’t know if you mess up unless you tell them.

My father was (among many other things) a drummer. He once told me one of his ‘tricks’ and it was so utterly brilliant it changed my life. And I’m not a drummer. He told me that if he ever messed up while he was playing, he’d just deliberately repeat the mistake four measures later, and then it would just sound like part of the song and no one would know.

See, when you see your mistakes, you’re looking at them with deep, inside knowledge. You know exactly what was supposed to happen, but no one else does. Your mistakes are mostly invisible – it’s your reaction to them that people notice.

Whether you’re rocking your way through an epic drum solo or delivering the quarterly business report, you might make a mistake. Just roll through it. Repeat it, even – on purpose, and in the right spot. Make all the words yours, and none of them can be wrong.

What decisions do you make differently when there are no do-overs? When you’re at the absolute deadline and you can’t play the long game anymore?

Time is a resource. Like all resources, sometimes you’re a little short – and the smart play is the same, no matter the resource. When you’re almost out, it’s not the time to be frugal. It’s the time to make the big bet. You don’t have anything left to preserve, so take the risk.

When you’re down to the wire, bet on yourself with whatever you have left. Always.

I think people are frequently too careless with words. Assuming that you spend a lot of time talking to people you actually care about in one way or another, you should be aware that the things you say (and do, really), don’t just have a single, initial effect. They aren’t forgotten after. They bounce around inside someone’s brain and inside their life, and they connect. They matter.

I think we tend to view conversations only as important if we set out to make them important from the beginning. We say “We need to have a serious talk,” and think those are the only conversations that will stick. But the comments we make to people we care about stick in weird ways we can’t predict, and they careen off of other things we can’t imagine.

All I’m saying is, be kind. Say the sorts of things that will be remembered in echoing voice-overs during a person’s hardest trials and give them the strength to push through, not the sorts of things that will be whispered over fade-outs at the end of a tragedy.

“A negative emotion is an unmet need.”

I heard this particular insight in a meeting today, and it immediately resonated. This is a spectacular way to view any negative emotion, even ones directed at you or coming from you.

Why? Because an unmet need is an opportunity. It’s a chance to meet that need and improve a few lives – yours included.

Don’t think of negative emotions as if they were lasers aimed at you with the purpose of bringing you down. Think of them as distress signals; as requests for help. Sometimes they’re in code, because the person doesn’t know how to articulate their needs in a better way. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be helped! In fact, it often means there’s greater value in doing so.

When you find a way to meet that need or at least get someone closer, you improve their lives. And in the great game of life, that’s worth points. It’s altruism if you want it to be, and it’s productive opportunity if you want it to be that. But whatever your personal motivation, it’s an invitation that you should accept.

When someone offers to help you, try very hard not to get mad about it.

It sounds like wild advice in a vacuum, but some people get absolutely steamed when offered help. Something about an offer of assistance can come across as an insult – a sneering accusation that you aren’t good enough to handle whatever’s in front of you. A status-smashing attack on our very competency! The very insinuation that you aren’t superhuman can feel like you’re being treated like slime.

Our brains are status-evaluation machines that run 24/7/365, so it’s natural that this happens. But here’s the thing – that machine is badly tuned. There absolutely are some spheres of your life where status matters and is actually being observed and evaluated. But it’s definitely not always. If you have five grocery bags in your hands and someone offers to hold the door for you or even – gasp – carry one of the bags, that person definitely isn’t playing a status game with you.

Don’t be too good for free resources. If someone wants to give their own juice to you, then let your life get easier. Don’t be your own worst enemy just because your brain treats status as a live wire. It’s not.

All relationships of any kind begin with a single connection. If you want to improve the number or quality of your relationships, get better at that first connection. Define it better, strengthen your ability to communicate it, and get a better idea of who belongs on the other side of it.

When you sell a product, it’s not enough to understand why the product is great. You also need to understand the needs of the intended user of the product and what they need to know about it in order to appreciate it. In other words, you need to know about the connection itself, not just your side of it.

Some people just don’t know how to cash the check, you know?

It’s important in life to know when you’re beat. But it’s just as important – and apparently, harder – to know when you’ve won. Some people have the check in their hand, and all they have to do is cash it. But instead, they talk. Or they fight, or they cause trouble, or they do anything else.

It’s like a mouse getting the cheese out of a trap without it going off, and instead of running, they suspect some greater trap. So they end up trying to put the cheese back or something, and bam.

When you’ve gotten your prize, go. Know when to win. Know when to cash the check.

The more you try to avoid being “pigeonholed,” the less likely you are to be known at all.

Generalists are fillers. They pinch-hit. It’s the specialists that carve out a well-known niche. Being pigeonholed is one of the best things that can happen to you, as long as it’s for something you want to do.

The best character actors are pigeonholed as heck, but they’re also famous and constantly working. Whereas leading “everyman” characters like the main protagonist of a Hallmark movie are here and gone in a week.

Figure out a thing or two that you like doing, and let people know you for it! Lean into it, make it your brand, do it a bunch. And get good at it – then charge appropriately. After all, you’re the best in your category!

Your brain is full of mush and garbage. It’s a total dumpster fire in there. Whole parts of it are complete mysteries to you; other parts are actively working against you. Most of it is trying to keep you alive, at least, but often in ways that are completely counter-productive to living a healthy and fulfilling life in the modern world.

It’s an autopilot designed by an endless series of serial barbarians going back hundreds of thousands of years. Along the way, it’s picked up a museum of bad wiring.

Most of your brain is reactionary. Without outside stimuli, a lot of that programming is dormant. If nothing scares, threatens, or tempts you, then mostly your brain’s biggest vice is sloth.

Why am I trash-talking your brain so much? As a reminder that you have a reasonable amount of control over what stimuli get through the mental drawbridge into the little castle on top of the trash heap. Above all that other junk is one small oasis of conscious thought, and it’s just enough to be a gatehouse between the outside world and the roiling chemical soup that steers 95% of your actions.

Have you ever mixed baking soda and vinegar? It causes quite a reaction. Once you drop one into the other, you can’t stop the reaction – you probably can’t even contain it. It’s going to make quite a mess unless you’re well-prepared, and maybe even regardless. Trying to contain the reaction once the elements are mixed is a fool’s errand. But that’s what many people try to do – they try to use what little conscious faculty they have to control their reactions to things.

What you should be doing is using that gatehouse to make sure that the baking soda never gets dropped into the boiling vinegar of your brain to begin with. Don’t lower the drawbridge for things with little to no value, expecting that you’ll be able to maintain your values, honor, and nobility even as the chemical reaction has started. You won’t.