Sometimes someone really, really dislikes you. It’s unavoidable – even if you’re a complete people-pleaser willing to always be a spineless sycophant, someone will dislike you for that. So you might as well just try to live a moral but honest life, be nice to people as a default, and let the chips fall as they may.

But you also shouldn’t worry too much about it, and here’s why: The actual danger of your enemies doesn’t come from how much they dislike you. It comes from the cross-section of how much they dislike you versus how much actual power they have to influence your life.

Sometimes you can’t make someone like you, but more frequently than you realize you can reduce the power they have. If your direct boss doesn’t like you, that can be a problem! But finding a new job is a great solution, even if you wish it wasn’t. If your neighbor doesn’t like you, that might be hard to change – but so what? What can your neighbor even do in most circumstances?

So don’t lose sleep over powerless enemies. Just be nice anyway, and live a happy life in the rest of the world.

A vital critical thinking skill is being able to understand a baseline fact or idea and keep it separate from exceptions that may exist.

Here’s an example of a baseline idea: Food is good for you, and you should eat it.

Now, can you picture things you shouldn’t eat? Of course. Can you imagine a way to obtain food that is immoral? No doubt. Can you think of a scenario in which it would be a bad idea for you to eat? Absolutely. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a half-dozen examples of each.

Absolutely none of those examples disprove the basic idea that “food is good for you, and you should eat it.” Caveats and addendums exist; few rules are absolute. But if you can’t think past those exceptions to understand the base rule, then that is a major flaw in your thinker.

Sometimes the world dishes out injustice and harm, and all you can get from it is a reminder of the rules.

We can, and should, work to make the world a better place. But in order to do that, we must acknowledge the way the world is now, with no rose-colored glasses to confuse us. We must understand the structures of power, we must be aware of who benefits from the world being bad. And we must not look to those people to save us.

My father always told me that making mistakes was inevitable, but that I should try not to make the same mistake twice.

Of the many pieces of wisdom my father bequeathed me, I really internalized that one. In fact, I consider it a deep character flaw to ever have to apologize for the same thing a second time.

That doesn’t mean you only get one failure before you must succeed at any given task! It just means that it’s a character flaw to fail for the same reason more than once.

Consider: You forget your friend’s birthday one year, and you apologize for it, vowing to not miss it next year. If you simply “try harder” and miss it again, you’ve messed up. However, if you write the friend’s birthday down, put a reminder in your phone, and then your phone breaks? You still missed your friend’s birthday, and you still owe them an apology, but you’re apologizing for a different thing now. You didn’t rely on your fragile memory, you made a genuine effort to adapt your behavior. You own the outcome, but at least you’re no longer apologizing for making the same mistake twice.

If you mess something up twice, do an honest accounting: What did I actually do differently the second time? If you can’t point to a concrete thing, then you’ve made a grave mistake.

Try not to make it twice.

Whenever I had a problem to solve, the first step was to call my father. I valued his advice, because the chances were good that he’d both tackled that particular problem before and because he’d probably have a wild story about it. He would definitely have tried an unorthodox solution and either found a hidden gem of wisdom or encountered a disaster he could thus prevent me from repeating. In either case, we’d have a great time swapping stories and I’d come away more prepared to tackle my own version of the dilemma.

Problems all seem harder, now. I’m more capable every year from my own experiences, but just knowing that font of wisdom is no longer a phone call away adds a weight to carry. I used to relish the moments where I’d found my own unorthodox solution and could call my old man to tell him about it – or better yet, grab some coffee and cigars and tell it in person. Now I like to tell those stories to my sister, my mother, my aunts or cousins; anyone who knew him well enough to give me my favorite compliment in the world: “Just like your father.”

I’m absolutely not just like him, of course. No one could be. But in those moment, though I miss him the most, I am most pleased with my performance.

Here is a reality: not everyone gets taught right from wrong properly. Much of what you think of as intuitive in this regard is actually just a product of your own upbringing and education; very few things are truly innate like that.

So when someone of any age messes up, I base a lot of my reaction on whether or not I believe they knew better. With kids, unless I personally taught them the lesson in question, I will often assume they weren’t taught it at all.

But then I do.

You get one. But then you know, and once you know, you bear that responsibility. It’s not about forgiving an initial infraction, it’s about looking at opportunities to be better versus patterns of bad behavior.

If a wrong was done, I try to draw rightness from it. After that, you carry the weight of your own soul.

One of the easiest ways to invest in something important is simply to say “yes” when it asks you to. A request for your time and attention is a risk, however small – reward it.

My eldest daughter graduated middle school today. I would like to brag for a moment.

She won four different awards, including “Best Overall Student.” She created the class banner, an artistic memento that each class gets to hang permanently in the school – and by “created” I mean both she had the winning concept pitch AND she actually drew & painted the masterpiece. She was in the honor society for academics. She got to deliver a speech, and was the best public speaker on the stage the whole night, and that’s including the adults running the ceremony.

I would also, now that I’m done bragging, like to be humble and honest for a moment: I did none of that.

Parents like to take credit for their children’s accomplishments, and certainly plenty of people congratulated me. But I never did any of her work, never made her do any of her work. I didn’t hound her to do extracurriculars. I didn’t force her to study. Here is what I did do, and I’ll take credit for it: I listened. Every time she was excited about something, I listened eagerly. Every extracurricular she did, I attended all the meetings, games, plays, meets, etc. I was always interested, always impressed. I let her know it was good.

And apparently I did one other thing, taken from the thank-you letter she wrote and delivered to me during the ceremony: “Thank you for always making sure I had everything I needed, even when I needed a lot.”

I love her with all my heart, and I am so very, very proud.

Being accountable is a good thing. You should have to face people tomorrow, always. It keeps you humble, it keeps you diplomatic, and it keeps you connected. Don’t retreat from conflict in a way that eliminates relationships in your life. Learn to live with people.

If you’re paid to do something, it’s easier to do than if you’re not.

I mean the actual task itself gets easier if it’s your job versus if it’s just something you’re doing, particularly for yourself.

Take something like replacing a toilet. If it’s your job, you have dedicated time to do it. You’re not emotionally stressed about it. You’re not worried about it before or after. And you aren’t scrambling to find the time to do it – or dealing with the fallout of other missed responsibilities because this took priority. Those factors, the stress, the worry; they make any job more difficult, even if you have the same training.

It’s good to simulate that in your own life if you can. Build room to deal with emergencies as a professional would, not as a stressed individual. It’s not always possible, but the real lesson is keeping your life from being too overfull.