I often see and hear discussions about when young people should have their “life plan” set. Sometimes young people feel like they don’t know what they’re doing. They feel lost, and that makes them feel like they’re “falling behind.”

This isn’t just young people, of course. Everyone feels that way sometimes. I certainly do.

So here’s advice to everyone who feels that way: no plan will ever be good enough. No goal will be realistic, or guaranteed to make you happy if you achieve it. You will never have it all figured out to the degree where you no longer have to make active decisions in your life.

Because that’s what we’re all hoping for. We’re hoping to make a plan so good and goals so insightful that once they’re made, we can just “follow the plan” for the rest of our lives and get everything we want just laid out in front of us.

Some of the unhappiest people I know are people who made (what felt like at the time) exactly that kind of plan, and then didn’t get the perfect results ten or twenty years later. They not only feel lost, they feel cheated. They “did everything right” and still didn’t get what they felt they deserved.

The correct answer isn’t to say “It’s okay that I don’t have my plan yet.” The correct answer is to say “There will never be a plan.”

Instead of setting goals or making plans, live by values. You can make the values anything that’s important to you, but if you make a set and stick by them, your life will generally go in the direction you want. You can change your values, too – one of your values should be how, when, and why you do that.

A value that says “This is the set of characteristics I will value in those with whom I form close relationships” will do more for you than a plan that says “I will be married by 27.” A value that says “I will always seek to improve my skills in this category” will do more for you than a plan that says “I’ll make partner by 35.”

If you feel lost, it isn’t because you don’t have a plan. It’s because you don’t know what your values are. Or maybe you have an inkling, but you’re not living them as strongly as you should. Here’s the good news: that’s not something you have to wait for. You can do that today.

“It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sommbitch or another.” – Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly

I’m not a huge fan of statues. Of any kind of monument, really. Oh look, let’s all stand around and look at this big thing someone built, which serves no practical purpose, except to remind us that somebody built it. It’s their keepsake writ large, hauled into the present by the past, and it keeps us from making our own way. It’s like a huge rock dropped in a river, forcing the river to change its course by its very presence.

I think there’s a distinction here between “art that lasts long enough that it becomes like that” and “things that are built just to be monuments.” Sometimes you paint a picture, and people either really like it or a strange series of events make it a historical oddity (or both) and it becomes monumental. That just is what it is.

Cultures throughout history have moved big rocks around in order to say “We were here, we changed the Earth, remember that we did so – that we were like gods, able to shape our creation because we were above it.” It’s in humanity’s nature to do that. I don’t think you can avoid it. But I also don’t stand in awe of it. Because I have my own rocks to move.

Most of them will be small. Maybe some will be large if there’s a reason to move them. Some will just be the tools I used for a time and then flung into the ocean because I don’t need to remember them.

Everything good in life is one or more lesser things mixed together.

I’m one of those people who mixes my food. All of it. I dip my french fries in my ice cream. When I get a plate of dinner, it all gets mixed together. All my Thanksgiving leftovers go in one container.

I mix Skittles and M&Ms.

The point is, I think most good things enhance each other. Most of the time, if I encounter something I enjoy, I’ll immediately start thinking of ways I could mix it with other things I enjoy. If I’m reading a good book, I’ll think “Ooh, I’m going to take this with me when I go camping this weekend.” If I spot a movie I want to go see, I think about friends I enjoy spending time with who might want to see it with me. If I have a successful project at work, I like to talk about it with my children so we share in each other’s triumphs.

And it goes without saying that I like to turn experiences of all kinds into blog posts.

The point is, you do this too, even if you don’t think you do. Oh, you don’t mix your corn and mashed potatoes? But your mashed potatoes are already a combination of things: potatoes, butter, salt, a little milk maybe, etc. You’re not just eating carbon atoms – it’s mash-ups all the way down.

So mix a few things together! Find some new and exciting combinations of joys you never encountered before. Ten different things can be combined in hundreds of thousands of ways. That means if you can find even ten things that make you happy, you can have a new joyful experience every day for the rest of your life.

Would you like to learn an interesting bit of magic? It’s a way to improve the value of even the most mundane thing without changing anything at all about it. Watch the trick:

You walk up to a young relative with two different pieces of candy. You show them both to the child, and then tell them that they get the one on the left; they don’t get a choice. They’ll frown, I guarantee it. They didn’t even know they were going to get any candy ten seconds earlier, and they’re still getting a piece of candy they like, but they’ll frown all the same. Now, when you see the frown, say: “I changed my mind. You can pick which piece you want.”

Poof, magic!

They’ll beam with joy. They might even pick the piece you originally offered! But because they chose it, it will triple in the happiness it brings.

Agency itself brings joy. You can use this to your advantage in all sorts of situations. Need to motivate some employees to do an unpleasant task? Give them a choice between two unpleasant tasks and whichever one they pick, they’ll be thrilled not to be doing the other one. I’ll give my kids a list of seven chores and then say “You can pick any one of these you want and you don’t have to do that one at all! You can skip it and I’ll do it!” They’re thrilled. And instead of having miserable kids grumping their way through seven chores, I have happy kids frolicking their way through six. That’s a solid deal by any measure.

Humans love freedom. It’s in our bones. Even a small measure of it helps the medicine go down, so to speak. So let people choose, whenever you can.

I am not an artist.

To clarify: I guess writing is art and I do that a lot, but I’m not a visual artist. I don’t draw, paint, sculpt, etc. My children, especially my oldest daughter, do this a lot. So did my father. So do many of my other family members. But I don’t even doodle.

Now that we’ve established that I don’t know anything about art, here’s my opinion on it (ha!).

I think there is a key and crucial distinction between “art” and, for lack of a better word, “illustration.”

Art is communication. Art is expression. Art is the ability to take the million-year-old part of our brain that learned to recognize shapes in clouds and faces in bushes and speak to it directly, to try to find some way to communicate ideas or emotions in a language so old and so deep that it transcends our modern minds’ ability to even hear the tones, let alone understand the words. I think it’s wonderful.

But I also think that there’s a growing sentiment against “AI Art” being used for… well, anything, just because it isn’t that.

AI Art isn’t art. I’m comfortable with that assessment and position. But just because all illustration is currently art doesn’t mean it has to be, any more than all copy has to be “writing” just because it currently is (or recently was, anyway).

“Writing” is done by humans, too. It’s inventive, communicative. But an AI can make the copy for a Burger King ad because that doesn’t have to be “writing.” And likewise, the image in that ad doesn’t have to be “art.”

The smaller the gesture, the greater its weight in determining how much the person behind that gesture values you.

My father once worked in a large office building for a software company. One of the perks at this job was that the soda machines in the break rooms didn’t charge for the soda. You could just go in there, hit a button, and have a Coke or whatever. Wholesale cans of soda probably run around a quarter apiece, so this wasn’t exactly breaking the bank for the software company. But the employees loved it, even though it maybe represented less than a few dollars per week of actual “benefit” to any given person.

One day the company was bought by a larger software company, and the new bosses changed the soda machines to charge standard retail prices, like 2 dollars per soda. The employees went berserk. There were mass walkoffs. My father told his new bosses why everyone was quitting, and they were flabbergasted. This was a few dollars a week difference. They couldn’t imagine why anyone would care so much.

But that’s the test. The less “valuable” the gesture is, the more you look like a complete asshole if you don’t do it.

If you get a $20 meal, the difference between tipping 10% and 20% is two dollars. That’s minor to you and, quite honestly, probably minor to the person you’re tipping. Which is why you should do it: it’s so minor that not doing it makes you a jerk.

Someone else I told this story to recently told me that his similar test of an employer’s value system is to see what kind of toilet paper they stock in the employee bathrooms. It’s not a huge price difference between the bad kind and something with some quality, but you buy far more goodwill by spending a pretty minor amount of money.

Small gestures that you don’t have to do are exactly the ones that carry the most weight. So don’t cheap out on the soda, the toilet paper, the small compliments, or the extra 10% on that tip. You’ll earn far more than you pay.

Your energy doesn’t keep forever. You aren’t a battery. You need a flow of energy, in and out, to stay healthy and realize your goals.

It would be wonderful if we could wake up in the morning with a lot of energy, realize we didn’t have much to do that day, and somehow roll that energy over into the next. But that’s not how it works. You’ll need new energy tomorrow, but what’s more – you need to find a way to use up that energy today.

If you don’t, it goes stale. It starts to rot. It comes out in other ways: as anxiety, as fidgety distraction, or as bad habits. Every day you have to both empty and fill the tank within you – you can’t skip either.

“If this was destroyed in a fire, would I replace it?”

Sometimes you work really hard on something, for a long time, and then one day despite your best efforts it goes poof! By some random act of the fates, it’s now gone. Nine times out of ten, I’ve found that people who experience that aren’t sad – they feel free.

“I was a slave at that job for ten years. When I got laid off, it was actually a godsend.” Except you weren’t a slave – you could have left at any time. But we dig our own graves, one day at a time.

Look at the things you work hard on. The things into which you pour your effort. And ask yourself: if you lost this in a fire, would you chop off a hand to replace it?

That’s a high bar. My family passes it, and not much else. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put effort into anything that doesn’t pass that test, but it does mean you shouldn’t put yourself in anguish because of it. Because it could all burn away at any time – so you might as well spend your days with the best experiences there are, whatever that is to you.

The voice of fear in your head exists to keep you safe. It’s not concerned with accuracy. In fact, in its goal to keep you safe, it will outright lie to you.

It won’t even just lie about what might happen. It will lie about what is happening, right now. It will do this because the fear voice wants you to take it seriously, and it’s willing to do anything it can for that to happen.

Fear will make pain hurt worse than it does. If you’re afraid, small nicks will feel like deep wounds and light taps feel like severe blows. The physical damage is the same, but being terrified makes it seem much worse. The fear voice is amplifying your pain – it’s saying “See?! What did I tell you?! You should have listened to me and run!!”

In the moment, this clarity might not help much. But fear is weakest when it’s dormant, and during that time you can build dams against it. You can be aware that this will happen and gird yourself with mantras to remind you. The next time you’re afraid to go to the dentist because it’s going to hurt, just remember – it’s the fear that’s making it hurt. Lessen the fear, and the same physical sensation will be far more mild.

After a period of high-intensity activity, especially social activity, I find myself in a sort of mental slump. It’s hard to bring the full focus of my brain onto a specific task willingly. Usually, what breaks this pattern is that something will just demand my brain’s efforts and I’ll have no choice – work or some other project will rear up and then off we go. But without that, it can feel like I’m just winding down to be put away for a while.

Sometimes my brain and my body want vacations at different times. My body could use rest, but my brain wants to power up, or vice versa. Bringing those things in sync with one another is a key part of a healthy cycle of rest and activity, I think.

Many of the things I do these days are asynchronous. There’s very little sun. I think it’s time for a project.