Eat your eggs however you like. Who’s eating them? But try them every way. They’re eggs, you’ll like them no matter what. How else will you know?

Life isn’t that complicated. Try stuff until you find what you like, and then do what you like, no matter what anybody thinks.

There’s a phrase I like: “We tend to judge others by their actions, but judge ourselves by our intentions.” I think it’s an accurate phrase and offers helpful insight when it comes to empathy. But I think people only take half the lesson from it that they should.

The lesson everyone takes is to be more sympathetic to others’ intentions. The person that cut you off in traffic wasn’t deliberately being a jerk, they were late and stressed and had a crying kid in the car. And that’s fine; more empathy to our fellow humans isn’t a bad thing.

But the other half of the lesson that I wish more people would take is that you need to judge yourself by your actions more frequently!

If you harm someone, you need to own that, even if your intention wasn’t to do harm. If you have a perfectly valid reason that your actions (or inactions) caused that harm, that is not an excuse. The “why” behind a harmful action is a helpful tool for you to examine, so you can avoid it in the future.

“I forgot your birthday because I have ADHD,” doesn’t mitigate the harm you caused to a loved one. The reason is valid and understandable, but it’s still on you to mitigate the impact of those things, or own the consequences.

I just finished teaching a leadership development course. One of the topics is “appreciation,” and the participants are encouraged to send little notes of appreciation to their teams, never assuming that the team “already knows.” A little bit goes a long way!

At the end of the course, the participants handed ME a note. That they’d all signed and put little words of encouragement in. The double-whammy of both being appreciated AND feeling like my words sunk in has me feeling very, very lucky.

See? It works!

People try to solve problems from afar, far too often. A surprising amount of the time, if you can’t figure out how to solve the problem, the best advice is “go and look.” Up close, in person. Many mysteries reveal themselves when you just see for yourself.

Pull an all-nighter to drive a few states away. Find a 24-hour Waffle House. Read a good book, half-listening to the banter of the special kind of locals to that place and time. Tip $10 for a $3 cup of coffee, because the whole experience was just so damned transcendent. Say nice things when you leave.

That is the start to a rare day.

I read something yesterday that blew my mind; one of those rare pieces of information that totally shifts my mindset on something. I’m still thinking about all the applications of this new knowledge, but that’s why we’re here!

Here’s the pebble that starts the avalanche: If you take the top 100 chess players in the world and gave them all IQ tests, the best of that 100 would be the ones with the lowest IQs.

Let’s back up a bit and examine why. First, this is some major (and intentional) selection bias. We’re looking at the top 100 chess players in the world, not “chess players in general.” In order to become a member of that top 100, you need a large amount of a few specific qualities. Two of those qualities are “overall intelligence” and “skill at chess, specifically.” In the general population, those two qualities might be highly correlated, but they are separate things. Not every super-smart person is good at chess, after all. And (importantly) not every chess savant is super-smart overall.

But in order to get into that top tier, your total value of those traits, taken together, has to be higher than almost every other chess player on the planet. Imagine we put a number on “skill at chess” the same way we do IQ, so you can have a “CQ” of ~60 to ~160 the same way IQ works. Using that idea, we could say that in order to get into the top 100 chess players in the world, your total IQ + CQ has to be 320 or above (arbitrary number for this thought experiment).

So if all of the top 100 players have a total of at least a 320, what does that tell you about the ones with the lowest IQs? If their total is still 320, then their “CQ” has to be higher to compensate!

What does this mean for my (and maybe your) worldview?

Well, it basically means that whenever you’re looking at the top 0.1% of performers in any given category, their hyper-specific skill in that category is probably outweighing more general and related skills that the 99% of that category are seeing as correlated. For example, the general populace probably sees “general fitness” and “skill at pole-vaulting” to be positively correlated. But based on this, I would guess that if you took the top 100 pole-vaulters in the world, the best of that category would have overall lower markers for “general fitness” than their peers in that elite group. If they’re less physically fit overall, but still in the top 100, then they have to be better at the specific skill of pole-vaulting!

But besides being interesting, how does this apply to me?

Well, now let’s imagine that I’m trying to be an Olympic-level pole-vaulter. If the top champion of that sport in the world publicly says that he never does cardio, should I take that to mean that cardio is a waste of time for me? Hahaha, no! He doesn’t need cardio because he’s so insanely good at pole-vaulting that he’s making up for whatever cardio gives most people. And since that works for him, he’s making the intuitive but incorrect judgment that cardio doesn’t positively correlate with pole-vaulting in the general population. And since he’s the champion of his field, lots of aspiring pole-vaulters might consider that to be good advice.

In a way, this is a really advanced form of survivorship bias. You’re looking at the one guy who skipped cardio and became a champion, but you’re not seeing the thousands of people who also skipped cardio and never made it past their high school team, because they weren’t the wild outlier that the champ is. It’s like a guy who won the lottery telling you that the secret to success is to be lazy and unmotivated but buy lots of lottery tickets. Sure, that’s what worked for this one outlier, but if you averaged every person who adopted that strategy it wouldn’t look like a good idea any more.

So the lesson is: be careful about taking advice about your own goals from the absolute top-tier achievers of that same goal category. You’re better off finding out what works most often and applying your own personal deviations based on your local experiences than you are trying to emulate a person bought the right lottery ticket.

Life is good. Humans are good. The more humans, the better! Bring ’em on, I say. If you’re making and/or raising new humans, you deserve all the praise in the world.

Happy Mother’s Day!

…there you are.

Let’s say you fall off a balcony and break your leg. When this happened, you were wearing a red shirt. Would you say “Red shirts cause broken legs?”

That’s an obvious example. Here’s a less obvious one: You got a cell phone as a pre-teen. As an adult, you have an eating disorder. Did the cell phone cause you to have an eating disorder?

Simple narratives are appealing, but in the absence of a counter-factual, they don’t mean anything. Even if you can add details like, “I always watched videos of super-skinny models!” I believe you – but did watching those give you an eating disorder, or did you already feel uncomfortable in your body and so you gravitated to videos like that?

The world is complex. Don’t try to solve the simple version. Work on the complex but meaningful solutions.

There’s a funny sort of “gotcha” that people tend to do when discussing hypotheticals. First, they’ll pose a question like: “Would you rather eat a slice of pizza or a spoonful of dirt?” And you say pizza, and then they go: “Aha! But what if they pizza had the Ebola virus on it? Are you saying you’d rather eat the Ebola virus than dirt?!”

People who say this genuinely think they’ve done something clever.

Look, if you ask me what I’d do in a given situation, I’ll tell you. If you then change the situation, my answer is going to change as well! I’m not dying on a hypothetical hill.

So be flexible. Don’t create identities around answers like this; don’t become a “Die-Hard Pizza Guy” after the first answer and then try to defend it all the way to the Ebola ward. Just shrug, and find better people to talk to.

Advise to everyone, including myself: Disrespectful or hurtful language never serves you. It gains you no points, no advantage. It heals no part of your soul nor psyche. Because words are free, they are easy to choose poorly. It’s free to sling insults or to mock. That’s exactly why it’s a test of character not to do it. Pass that test as often as you can.