You have to be careful who speaks for you. For better or for worse, we all have agents out in the world. My children represent my family, and their behavior is a reflection on my values. An employee represents you simply by virtue of the fact that you’ve chosen to continue your working relationship.

Association matters. I once worked with someone who was so intolerable to me that I didn’t work with that company again for years. Only many years later did I discover that everyone at the firm also thought that person was intolerable, but no one had the guts to fire her. As a result, they lost a thousand business partners and clients like me, people who simply quietly assumed that any company culture that allowed a person like that must be a culture like that. The rest of them were quite nice, but because they’d allowed that person to stay, they’d tacitly endorsed her behavior towards the company’s vendors and clients.

Aggressively shape your circle. When someone has to stand in a room for you, make sure they’re standing tall.

One of my family’s biggest traditions is the annual 4th of July party held at my mother’s house. It’s a big shindig every year, and since my father’s passing, it’s also become something of a memorial for him; he was a great patriot and tremendous scholar of Colonial-era history, and oh how he loved that day.

This year, the heat wave was so dangerous that the town canceled both the parade and the fireworks, normally the two bookends of the day’s festivities. My mother made the wise but sad decision to cancel the party for the first time.

And everyone… showed up anyway. No parade, no fireworks, and an officially canceled party, but friends and family came by. Officially just to stop in and say hello, but finding my mother overjoyed to see them and with a wide-open door (not to mention all the food she’d already bought for the party!), they just stayed.

People just came out of love, and stayed to share it. No fireworks, no parade. Just each other.

Guess you can’t cancel family. Thank goodness!

As always on this holiday, let it be remembered that freedom in all forms is the ultimate virtue from which all other benefits flow. Do what you can to increase liberty – for all – in this world.

It’s a painful experience, but sometimes you have to decide not to do a thing you wanted to do for pragmatic reasons. You have to not take that hiking trip because of a rolled ankle, or cancel the party due to inclement weather. Being painful doesn’t make it the wrong call, though. A sign of maturity and wisdom is being able to invest in more fun in the future by not causing more harm to yourself now. Life deals out small misfortunes, but perseverance is a great boon.

A burst of energy and motivation when facing a new project is a strong mental signal that not enough people pay attention to. Especially if it isn’t common for you, pay attention to the source! You may be discovering a passion you didn’t realize you had, and that can be refined into a new shape for this chapter of your life. Take some time to journal about it, talk to friends, anything to explore the idea. You never know what new doors may open!

My children, all three of them, have a keen eye for clues and pattern recognition. They love to watch monster movies. They almost always guess the monster’s hidden weakness in the first few minutes of the film, even with the most subtle of clues.

It might not be the most practical skill directly, but indirectly it’s amazing. Being able to pick up on what kinds of things annoy or delight a person early in knowing them is a great way to navigate complex social situations. They might not be “monsters,” but everyone eventually gets a boss they’d like a few clues about.

There’s an expert on everything, no matter how obscure. Today I had a meeting with people who were well outside my area of expertise, but who needed my help. They weren’t just shocked that I was an expert on learning modalities, they were shocked that anyone was. It was so far outside of their normal zone that they hadn’t considered it as a subject that someone could master.

But that’s the nature of human knowledge! What you know is a drop, and what you don’t know is an ocean. You can be an expert on that drop and still no next to nothing, broadly speaking. So when you’re troubled by some dilemma, fear not – just do a little searching. The expert on that particularly troublesome drop is out there, waiting to help.

There’s a line between allowing yourself to become overly reliant on certain comforts and being a silly masochist.

I once knew a guy who never let himself eat a full meal, not because he was afraid of gaining weight or anything, but because he didn’t want to let himself get used to the feeling of not being hungry, since he couldn’t be certain he’d be able to eat tomorrow.

I get that, to a degree. I get that you don’t want to let yourself become too reliant on something that someone else can control and take away from you. If there was only one person in the world who supplied food, that might be valid. But you can maintain a sense of self-reliance and internal fortitude without living a life of misery.

The thing you’re working hard for is a good life. Don’t throw that life away just to prove you can earn it.

There is always a way to engineer a solution. Some combination of spare parts and ingenuity will improve your life no matter what the dilemma is. This “dirtbag engineering” is a skill to hone – or at least, to look for in potential friends. The haphazard life you build may look odd, but it will work better. Don’t be afraid of weird solutions.