Today, my son told new stories. We, as a large extended family, discussed the new baby that’s on the way from one of our kin. One of my nieces drove my car, with me in the passenger seat giving instructions. One of my cousins asked my advice about buying his first house.

All this growth! And it happened at the cemetery, as we were there together to honor our departed.

Because that’s part of it all. The milestones and growth, the joy and accomplishment. Saying goodbye is part of it.

We say goodbye together.

I’m always interested in ways to avoid arguments. Every time I accidentally argue with someone (a rare occurrence, thankfully!), I reflect after the fact on what went wrong and how I could have better seen the trap before I fell into it.

Here’s a new technique I’m developing for figuring out if a discussion is worth having early on: asking if the other person wants to be “locally right” or “universally right.”

It’s just a weird way of saying “is this an opinion debate or not,” without using those words. (I find that novel phrasing tends to take people out of the mindset of embedding words with meaning that the speaker did not intend.)

For example, let’s say I tell you that the novel Wuthering Heights is a brilliant work of gothic fiction and well worth the read, and that the recent film adaptation is wild, hot garbage. You contend that the movie is a brilliant work of cinema that transforms a dry, unreadable book into something enjoyable.

In this instance, I am of course right. But you can be right as well, in another frame of reference, because this isn’t a matter that has an objective, universal answer. For my frame of reference, you’re “locally right” if you agree with me, and you’re “locally wrong” if you don’t. The further away from me you move, socially speaking, the less wrong you become. If you hang out with other people with terrible taste (ha!), then your opinion can be “locally right” over there.

Now, if you say that the novel Wuthering Heights is set on the planet Neptune in the year 3000 AD, then you’re universally wrong. That’s not a matter of taste, opinion, etc. So if you’re wrong about that here, there’s nowhere else where you’re right.

An important note: people can have incorrect beliefs about universal truths, because people have free will and imperfect information. This fact does not mean that all debates are local matters of opinion! It just means that people can be both universally wrong as well as locally wrong. You can even be universally wrong but locally right, and vice versa! You can say things that everyone around you agrees with, making you locally right, even if that thing is objectively untrue.

So my question is framed in that way – before getting into a debate, I want to find out if the other person believes the subject to be a matter of local or universal debate. Are they arguing about whether the Atlantic or Pacific ocean has better beaches, or are they arguing about which ocean is bigger? A very critical piece of information I’m looking for here is whether or not the other person understands which category we’re in.

If the person says that the Atlantic is bigger than the Pacific and then doesn’t believe me when I tell them otherwise, I don’t want to go one step further before I establish whether or not the other person even believes that there’s an objective answer to that question. While that’s a simplistic answer, I’ve discovered that lots of people believe they’re engaging in a local debate when the subject they’re arguing over has an objective, universal answer.

If they recognize that the subject does, in fact, have a universal answer, then the discussion might (might) be productive. But if they don’t – if they think that it’s a matter of opinion and they’re just trying to persuade you to their side – then you might as well end the discussion. Even if you aren’t sure that you’re right, you’re much better off researching the topic further on your own to seek the correct answer, rather than argue with this person.

If you do choose to argue anyway… well, you can decide what kind of wrong you are later.

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Despite being a truism, I also think it’s an incredibly powerful truth. Mindset directs outcomes so often we fail to see it, which means we fail to change it.

If you have the mindset that you’ll succeed, then you accept that as a default, and you’ll look for how you’ll succeed. So despite obstacles, you’ll look for solutions, because you started with the axiom that a solution exists. If you believe you’ll fail, then any obstacle you see will be confirmation of the impossibility of the task and you won’t “waste your time” looking for ways around it.

The questions you ask are statements about yourself. Ask how to win.

Happy New Month!

Two goals: don’t rest on my laurels and do deep cleaning. Site keeps crashing and I’ve had to re-type this three times, so this is the short version. Don’t relax when you finally get ahead; use it to do stuff you promised you’d do.

Wish me luck!

Here is how to solve every problem in your life, quickly and efficiently: commit & iterate.

Don’t deliberate on ideas. Especially don’t sit around and try to figure out if a particular idea will work or not. It won’t! But it’s the toll – the necessary toll – that gets you to the idea that will work. You need to just pick the very first idea that you (or anyone!) thinks of and try it. Adjust your risk for how likely the idea is. When it doesn’t work, tweak it, but immediately try again.

Things must constantly be in action. Movement is the only path to solutions. You must always be experimenting. Science is a verb.

Ten failures and an eleventh success can happen in the time it might take you to even decide to do the first thing, if you let that net snare you. So don’t. Just commit to the process, and go!

How we react to errors and failures is very important – much more important than avoiding them in the first place.

I recently taught my children how to play a card game called “Bullshit.” If you’ve never played it, it involves lying about the face-down cards you play and lying about the contents of your hand. If someone calls you and you were telling the truth, they’re penalized. If they catch you lying, you’re penalized. The first time we played, my son lost badly because he was very trusting. The second time we played, he won – because no lie works on him twice. Each time he was fooled in some way, he was careful about that particular error. I told him I was very proud of him – not for winning, but for learning from his mistakes so well.

If you fail in a task, usually you’ll make some change before attempting it again. If you fail again, you now have two mistakes to consider! The first is the original error in overall planning, but the second mistake is that you thought your fix would work, and obviously it didn’t. To avoid cascading, chaotic failures, the second time not meeting your goal is really the critical one. Simple mistakes happen all the time, and simple fixes are usually enough. But if they aren’t, now you’re in “fool me twice” territory. You’re in danger of just flailing around instead of being purposeful.

That’s the time to go back to the drawing board. Look at the whole system you’re trying to navigate. Make a new plan. Get new information. Ask for a second set of eyes to look at what you’re working on. Take the time; by the second failure, it’s almost always worth it. Otherwise, shame on you!

For any given opinion you hold, the more it aligns with the mainstream opinion of your demographic and tribal groups, the more you need to be able to seriously defend it.

And the more skeptical of it you should be!

If everyone in my town thinks that maple syrup is amazing, then someone from my town espousing that opinion isn’t a surprise. But it’s also very likely that they’re parroting that opinion more than having reached it themselves. If I challenge it, there’s an above-average chance that they can’t actually defend it. But if they say something like “actually, I think honey is way better than maple syrup,” then at least they’re probably honest!

I’d expect Honey Guy to have reasons & arguments in favor of his position. Right or wrong, he’s probably much more capable of defending his claim, simply because he’s had to.

I like to believe in correct things. The less I’ve examined a belief, the more likely it is to be wrong. So I try to be very wary of beliefs that slip in without consideration, and “the popular opinion” will always be that.

Don’t ask permission to try things. In most cases, you’re better off if you just try the thing, even if you fail. Learn on your own terms, don’t waste a bunch of time looking for someone to say “no” to you. Better to seek forgiveness than permission if you want to achieve anything!

A funny sign of good leadership is that everything can seem worse, at first.

I’ve heard this from many leaders – when they start really putting in the effort to improve their team dynamics, suddenly it seems like there’s nothing but problems. They panic, thinking they’ve caused all sorts of issues with their new leadership style.

But what’s actually happening is much, much better. Those problems were already there, but now their team isn’t hiding them anymore! The team is willing to share feedback, expose issues, and even complain. That can seem scary, but remember: the alternative isn’t the absence of those problems. The alternative is that those problems fester until they cause disaster, and you never knew because your team didn’t have the trust and rapport necessary to work on them in the light.

Trust can be scary, but the very point of it is to get those issues out in the open where they can be solved. No team is perfect, so if you think yours is, that just means that all the messy stuff is being hidden from the scary boss.

I am a big proponent of “learning out loud,” showing your process, and inviting feedback. It’s a great way to learn faster and to showcase that you’re learning at all. This week I delivered a leadership development seminar with a co-facilitator, and I trialed a new method I’d developed for getting diverse audience participation.

At some point during the seminar, my co-facilitator told everyone that the organizational method we were using was a trial run, an experiment that I’d designed, and this was our first time using it. I felt myself gasp! My secrets! But I quickly realized – this was exactly what I said to do!

And wouldn’t you know it – because everyone then knew it was an experiment, they gave me a lot of (positive!) feedback on it that they wouldn’t have otherwise. I got a lot of great insights that will be very helpful in iterating the process!

It was two great reminders. One, always learn out loud. And two, take my own advice!