How can you tell that someone actually wants to be talking to you? Give ’em an out.

Look, you should watch for signs. If someone puts on their coat and puts their bag over their shoulder, then they want to leave. Let them! But the signs aren’t always as obvious. So make sure you’re giving the opportunities.

Here’s an easy one: let them talk last. If they say something nice, give an easy “thanks!” and then don’t respond right away. If they say something else to start a new thread, then great! They want to continue the conversation. Check in like that every few minutes and make sure you’re asking more questions than you’re answering, and 99% of the time you’ll be in conversations the other person is enjoying.

It’s easy to trap people and hard to be self-aware. So build the patterns, give ’em an out, and spend your time with people who want to spend time with you.

We sometimes imbue suggestions or requests with far more power than they warrant. I’m often surprised – though perhaps I shouldn’t be – when people tell me they “have” to do something, even though they literally only received a request to do that thing.

Don’t interpret requests as anything but! You can decline; and you should, if the request doesn’t fit your life right now.

You might think that the “polite request” is actually an order in disguise. All the better reason to say no! If you’re going to order me around, you’re at least going to admit that’s what you’re doing.

Until you do, it’s only a suggestion.

You don’t have to be upbeat just because others are. There’s a pressure not to “bring down the vibe,” but that mustn’t replace your integrity and honestly. You don’t have to ruin a good time to simply not participate.

If something is important and you don’t have it, don’t lament. Replace!

Siblings are an incredible boon; if you only have one child, it’s great to give them siblings. But if you can’t (or don’t want to for other reasons), find surrogate siblings! Find the kid they like best in the daycare or school and become absolute best friends with their parents.

This mentality works for all sorts of things. People can be important figures in your or your family’s life without having been born to the title. Don’t chase them away just because they aren’t the “genuine article.” There’s no such thing, only those who genuinely bring joy to your life.

Something I try to stay very aware of is this: Your World is not The World.

Everyone is so, so much smaller of an information sphere than they think. “Everyone is talking about this!” No they aren’t. That’s your world; lots of people in your world are talking about that, sure. Most people in The World have absolutely no idea, interest, or inkling in it.

So when I see particular shifts in the topic de jure, I often wonder: what am I not hearing about?

There must be hundreds of thousands of such bubbles at any given time. So many interesting things are happening! I like to go looking around. I’ll share whatever interesting things I find with you.

Everyone is different. Just getting that out of the way first.

I want to help people. Primarily, what I want to do is help people help themselves; to teach them how to fish, so to speak. Of the millions of things a person can be good at, I’m better than average at a handful – just like everybody else. So typically, my way of thinking is “If I’m good at a thing that a lot of other people struggle with, then maybe I could benefit them by sharing how I go about that thing.”

There are some big barriers to this.

First is just general humanism: People don’t want advice unless they explicitly ask for it, and a lot of times not even then. When people complain about their situation, they typically want one or more of these three things:

1. Someone to magically solve it for them.
2. Someone to tell them that they’re blameless for the situation, absolving them of personal responsibility.
3. Pity, “victim status,” or some other form of preferential treatment or consideration as a result.

So if someone says, “Ugh, I’m so broke, life isn’t fair,” they’re absolutely not asking you for help with their personal finance and budgeting. Even if someone explicitly says the words to you: “Hey, could you help me with my personal finance and budgeting,” then there’s only about a 30% chance that they actually want that, and a 70% chance that it’s a covert way of asking for one of the other three things.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, but the short answer is basically just to live your life in a way that makes the things you’re good at very visible, and if people ask for your help in one of those spheres, carefully evaluate whether they actually want the help. If they do, give them as much help as you possibly can.

But there’s also, I’ve discovered, a second layer to this problem. Namely: I don’t always know why I’m good at something and other people aren’t.

Here’s a real example that comes to mind – I would never have the hubris to say pointedly “I’m a good parent,” because only time will tell. But I can confidently say I’m a non-stressed parent. The existence of my children and their presence in my life and my day is a joy, and it never causes me stress, frustration, etc. Their behavior aligns to my expectations well, I’ve had to give my children any sort of “punishment” fewer than a half-dozen times in my life, and I never find myself rubbing my temples and wishing for “just five minutes of peace and quiet” or anything like that.

Meanwhile, I see other parents doing that sort of stuff all the time. Lamenting about chaos or stress, trying in vain to correct the same behaviors in their children over and over, feeling crushed under the weight of the responsibilities or sacrifices of parenting.

I want to help! But here’s my barrier: I’m pretty sure (though definitely not certain) what works for me. Why only pretty sure? Well, maybe I’m really good at managing all that stuff. But maybe my kids are exceptionally good! Maybe I wouldn’t actually do as well with a different set of kids, so my success is partially – or largely – due to good fortune rather than my skills as a father. I can’t exactly run a double-blind study here.

Also, I’m not sure at all why other people, individually, have this level of stress. I don’t have a camera in their house; I can observe maybe 2% of their total parenting time when we’re together or cross paths at events and such. So maybe their kids are unusually stress-inducing!

Heck, maybe I’m just a genetic freak with unusually low cortisol levels, or theirs are unusually high. Life is complex, parenting doubly so. Everyone is different, like I said. Even if 100% of my success is due to my direct effort (which almost certainly isn’t true), that doesn’t mean my methods would duplicate perfectly in another home.

A core life principle I believe in is this: If you want success in a particular sphere and you’re not getting it, but someone else is, you should examine how they’re achieving that success and at least experiment with those methods instead of your own. Because I do that myself, I try to make myself available for the reverse: If I do have a lot of success in a particular sphere, and others don’t always, then I want to help. But when people have a problem that’s not my problem, personally, it’s not always clear the best way to do that.

Doesn’t mean I won’t try, of course. I can always look for someone who has a lot of success helping people with problems that they don’t personally experience, and ask them how they do it!

Here is a good formula for living a life with as few regrets as possible: Always help when you can.

Once, many years ago, I saw a young woman walking in the rain, looking cold. I was about to pull over to offer her a ride, but I let fear get the best of me. I was an adult man and she was a teenage girl, and I feared the risk of my intentions being misinterpreted. So I didn’t speak to her, and instead drove off.

I’ve thought about that once a week for two decades. I tell myself all sorts of stories – we were in a populated area, not a lone stretch of wilderness highway, so she probably wasn’t walking far. She could have gone into any store for temporary shelter if she was really in distress. Maybe I even misinterpreted her look as distress; she could have just been wet but perfectly content to experience the rain.

I tell myself those stories as a defense against the guilt of regret. Because my brain also tells other stories – what if she was in real danger, and you didn’t help? What if she was trying to get away from someone? What if she was walking in the rain because she was disoriented or in deep emotional distress? The potential answers to those questions haunt me.

In all the years since, I’ve never once regretted helping someone. Those little gestures – grabbing a door for someone, offering to carry something, helping someone pick up something they’ve dropped, offering a hand if they’ve fallen. None of those have ever turned out bad. I’ve never been burned by any of them, or lost time or effort I couldn’t afford.

In fact, all those little gestures have brought me much joy! As a result of that pattern I’ve made friends, held babies, found new friends for my children, and all sorts of other boons – not to mention the great happiness in my heart that comes from living your life that way. I’ve never had a moment of awkwardness or embarrassment or anything else negative as a result of trying to help. But I’ve had two decades of guilt and regret from the notable time that I didn’t.

Even if someone ever did respond poorly to my offer of help (and no one ever has!), it would be easy to shrug off, since I know I was just trying to help and my intentions were good. So there’s almost no way it could turn out badly.

I try to offer advice rarely, instead just “living my life out loud,” talking about my experiences, and letting people take what lessons from it they will. But in this instance, I will offer the advice very genuinely: Help people. Build it as a habit to give those small bits of assistance whenever you can. Your life will be so, so much better for it.

The ability to tell stories is a wonderful ability. Stories inspire, entertain, and educate – all more memorably than facts and figures alone. So being able to weave a good yarn is a great skill to develop.

But there’s another benefit. A while back, I got my kids into a great bluffing card game. In addition to learning how to bluff, the other (and some might say even more important) benefit is learning how to spot a bluff. The same is true for stories. If you’re good at telling them, then you’re also getting better at being told them.

What elements might the teller be leaving out, exaggerating, or changing altogether? Why this story, framed this way? What’s the takeaway the teller wants me to have – and do I want it?

Learning to hear the world, as it really is, makes us wiser. So tell a few stories!

My father loved trash-pickin’. We’d do it all the time. Pick a nice neighborhood on their trash day and drive around, looking for whatever cool things might be going to the curb. We’d find all sorts of neat stuff – some of it just cool to look at for a minute, some of it in perfect condition, some of it fixable by us. We’d keep some, give some away, throw some back, even sell some.

It’s a very fond memory, and I’d told stories of it to my own children, who loved them. So tonight was a nice night… and off we went.

You’d have thought we were going to Disney Land. They were so excited, talking about opportunities and discussing the world. Why people replace things, what that might mean about those things, how one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. We got some food, made some jokes, sang some songs.

We also came back with a cool table that they kids spotted!

Activities like that – ones with no real failure state, just “let’s do this semi-specific thing until we decide not to, and talk about it along the way” are such perfect avenues of fellowship.

My father’s spirit with us. Treasure from trash.

Observing without reacting is a powerful statement. Making it clear that you can see, and that you are therefore choosing non-interference with whatever you observe, makes it clear that you hold no immediate objection. Your attention grants permission, grants freedom.

Don’t react to every little thing. Not everything needs your opinion, permission, or endorsement. You don’t always need to weigh in. Give people space and respect – and yourself some calm.