One of the best ways to fail is early.

If you’re going to screw up, it’s great to screw up at the very beginning of a project or endeavor. Because then, you’ve usually expended a very minimal amount of juice and so the waste is at its lowest point. You haven’t sunk anything in yet, so there’s little to lose by failing.

This means you should do your riskiest or hardest parts of any undertaking at the very beginning. If there’s something that’s especially difficult, it’s better to do it – and possibly fail at it, learning along the way – as early as you can. If you do, it’s easy to learn from your mistake and try again fresh. If you put of the trickest parts until the end, you’re tying all your previous work to the risk.

Two years ago today I got the worst phone call of my life. My father’s long fight had ended.

But maaaaaaaaan, while he was here, you should have seen him. There was nobody cooler, and there never will be. He loved those around him with ten times the fervor of anyone else. And he left us a few amazing parting gifts, that we might always remember him as he was.

This one is my favorite.

If you really want to be a minimalist, there’s a certain skill you need to develop. It’s an incredibly helpful skill regardless; the people I know who had this skill were worth their weight in gold.

The skill is knowing where the world keeps its spare junk.

There’s this long-standing joke about dads always keeping some random, odd-shaped piece of wood in their garage for thirty years hoping for the day it becomes useful. I know lots of people like that; I’m even prone to it if I don’t catch myself. But I used to know this guy and if you said to him “Oh, I need a random piece of wood that’s seven inches by three inches in a trapezoid shape,” he would just take you on a long walk to some weird part of town and bam, there one would be.

He didn’t have it. But he knew exactly where to find one. The same was true of unusual food items, obscure electronic parts, you name it. Always either free or cheap, usually discarded or belonging to someone happy to have you take it.

The world has lots of neat spare junk that just collects in the corners. If you’re not careful, you become one of those corners, and that isn’t necessarily good. But exploring the nooks and crannies of your environment, taking weird ways home and opening doors as you see them – these are the things that make the world your garage. You can find the spare junk whenever you need it.

If you have a concrete wall, you can’t bend it a little. You can’t move it a smidge. If anything goes through it, it destroys it. Those are the only options; it holds fast, or it gets destroyed completely.

Remember that when you think about bending your boundaries a little.

Answering questions is not only a great way to satisfy another person’s curiosity, it’s also a great way to refine your own thinking. They say you don’t really understand something unless you can explain it to someone else, so answering someone else’s questions about a topic is a great way to practice your own understanding.

Along the way, that understanding is bound to change. Your willingness to ask questions is an indicator of your own intellectual curiosity, but so is your willingness to answer them. And I mean answer actual, asked questions – not just proselytize at strawmen.

The corollary to that is that if someone holds a position that they’re unwilling to be questioned about, chances are high that they’re intellectually unserious about it. They either don’t understand it or don’t really believe it – maybe both. “It’s not my job to educate you” might be true, but it also indicates that you couldn’t if you tried.

So for every position, a good test of your own intellectual commitment is to always be willing to either ask questions about it or answer them. If you’re unwilling to do either, then that’s not an intellectual position – it’s a bias.

There is always some project or another to do. I’m a father and a homeowner, which pretty much means my To-Do list exists until the end of my life.

Every December, that list gets pretty backed up. The holidays demand my attention in other directions and the project list starts to jam. I’ve had unopened boxes and unfinished projects laying around for a while.

And then I was given an unexpected gift of a nice piece of furniture by a friend. It had to go somewhere, which meant something had to move. But in order for that to move, this had to get cleaned. And if I cleaned that, I’m already adjacent to assembling this, and once I assemble this I need somewhere to put it, so I’ll clear off that…

Before I knew it, the domino effect had knocked a half-dozen items off of my major project list. I’d had a positive cascade, each success invigorating me and making the next project both fun and – more importantly – obvious. An easy path emerged and all it took was some music and I ran it.

Sometimes all you need to get started is one thing you can’t ignore or postpone. One positive event can break through the logjam and start all the pieces moving again.

A promise is a request for faith. A promise is a commitment to the future, almost always in place of an act in the present. When you make a promise to someone, you’re asking for their faith that you’ll do in the future what you aren’t doing now, for whatever reason.

Sometimes you have a good reason for this, but be honest about what it is. And don’t make promises to yourself. You’ll act or you won’t, but you don’t need to convince anyone. You just need to do what you need to do. Promises don’t factor in. If you start treating yourself like someone you can fool, you’ve lost.

Long days, short life. Short days, long life.

Don’t try to stretch every day to its breaking point. Fill it, put a bow on it, and move on.

Hollow bricks build a shoddy home.

As the saying goes, “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” That’s wise… most of the time. But every once in a while an exception slips through because everyone thinks that way.

I took my family recently to a busy event at a small location. Normally no more than a few people at a time would be at this place, but because of the special event, there were maybe ten times the normal number. The already limited parking was overwhelmed and there wasn’t a spot to be had for several blocks around the place. My intention was to drop my family off out front and then go find a spot myself and walk (the classic Dad maneuver).

Instead, I found one open spot directly in front of the building and parked there.

My oldest daughter was shocked. We had seen people drive right past that spot in front of us and then turn down a side street, obviously also looking to park and go to this event. Why had the spot remained open?

But one quick look and I knew why. Because we’re used to a spot directly in front of an establishment to be “reserved” in some way – a loading zone, a handicapped parking spot, something like that. And if such a spot had no cars in it, that surely must be why, right? A free spot right in front is simply “too good to be true.” Everyone thinks that way, so everyone passes that spot right by.

I pulled in. (And after I had pulled in, I checked to make sure I hadn’t missed any signs, but nope – just a normal spot on the street.)

The “efficient market hypothesis” is an economic term that’s basically summarized as “there are no $20 bills on the sidewalk.” The idea is that if there are any free & easy gains, someone will have already grabbed them. There are no $20 bills on the sidewalk because someone will have already picked them up.

That’s generally true – but that “someone” could still, every once in a while, be you. So if you do see a $20 bill on the sidewalk (or a suspiciously convenient parking space), don’t cheat yourself out of it just because you doubt the good fortune. You can always check for signs once you’re parked.