Imagine that someone tells you as a young adult that there’s a huge market for artisanal butter-churners in the big city. They’re really convincing, so you believe them. You invest a bunch of time and effort into learning how to churn butter; you’re even pretty darned good at it. You buy or even make some really good butter churns, adding to your investment. Maybe you even take out a big loan to buy a cow, confident that it will pay back dividends.

Then you get to the big city and what do you know? Everyone just buys butter in the store, where it’s a cheap and plentiful. Very few people want to hire you to churn artisanal butter for them, and only a few buy the butter you make, since despite it’s quality it’s very expensive at the farmer’s market or wherever you sell it.

In this situation, have you been harmed? Yes! Definitely! Someone did you dirty!

But should you blame all the people who don’t buy your butter?

Imagine doing such a thing! Imagine that you focus your ire squarely on the people who buy butter from the store. They’re the villains here! In fact, someone should intervene. Store-bought butter should be illegal! People should have to buy their butter from honest churners like you – or if not, then at the very least store-bought butter should be taxed extremely heavily and the proceeds should go to supporting and subsidizing the artisanal butter-churner population.

That’s insane, of course. People don’t owe you their patronage, especially if what you’re selling is more expensive than the next option. You were harmed, but the villains here aren’t the masses that don’t want what you’re selling. The villain is the guy that told you this was a good idea.

Does some blame lay with you? Sure, of course – if you didn’t verify those claims, seek other opinions, etc. But you were young and naïve, and that guy was a convincing pillar of your community. He was well-respected! He even gave you a good deal on the butter-churning courses, lent you the money to buy that cow…

…oh.

Look, you got swindled. That sucks. Your primary course of action should be to stop being swindled. And by that I mean, stop throwing good money after bad. Ignore the sunk cost and stop trying to be a butter-churner. Yes, you’re behind. But that can’t be helped now, so start doing the smarter things today so you’re not still behind in a few years.

After you course-correct, it’s natural to want some recompense for being hoodwinked. If you seek that out, and if the juice seems worth the squeeze, then at least go after the right people. Don’t blame innocent bystanders whose only crime was not being swindled alongside you in such a way as to make your investment actually sound. It’s not “society’s” fault that the thing you got good at isn’t a thing anyone cares about, and society doesn’t owe it to you to care about it. Blame the person who lied to you, and stop defending them.

Imagine this scenario: Your job gets 25% harder. That’s it, that’s the whole scenario. In whatever way you want to imagine, your job becomes 25% more onerous and difficult to do.

Now ask yourself – what would your reward have to look like in order for you to be as happy with that harder job as you currently are with your real job?

And I’m not just talking about pay, although certainly that’s part of it. Would a 25% pay increase do the trick by itself? I’m guessing it wouldn’t! That doesn’t scale linearly – if your job became 200% more difficult, a 200% pay raise might be nice for a little while, but you’d burn out fast.

Here’s the thing – your job is going to be 25% harder at some point. Either because your job duties grow in complexity over time, or because you get a harder job as you advance in your career. In fact, if your job 5 years from now wasn’t 25% more difficult than the one you have now, chances are good that your career is stagnating. The question isn’t whether you’ll face increasing difficulty in your life. It’s whether or not your reward will ramp up alongside it.

If your reward, in terms of recognition, mastery, autonomy, or whatever else you want, grows with the difficulty of your job, then you’ll stay satisfied. But that’s not automatic! You have to advocate for your side of the bargain, and that starts with knowing what you even want your side to be.

So don’t skip over this question. Really take the time to think about it. What reward would make you satisfied with the increased difficulty? You’ll get the difficulty either way, so you should know!

Four years is a long time.

On this day, four years ago, I got the worst phone call of my life. My father had passed away.

He was ready. I know that’s strange to say, but he’d told me. He was in pain. And he’d lived a full life, if not a long one. His adventures were legend. He was legend. Larger than life, in every way.

And then he was gone.

But he isn’t. Not really. He never will be. The stories will carry me home.

My two youngest children learned the origin story of Spider-man today. As endlessly redone as that story may be in popular media, it’s still a great story with a great lesson, and when it lands, it lands big.

I love these stories. I love that my children see these as true lessons, as their own modern parables that help guide their moral compasses. It’s a testament to the power of storytelling as well as the stories we choose to tell.

We owe it to the next generation to tell them good stories. It is, after all, our responsibility.

If a new object doesn’t improve your life significantly in the first few days of ownership, then you didn’t need it and it’s clutter. Make those decisions swiftly, or be buried.

A distraction requires two things: a void, and something to fill it. We so often focus on the “thing” that we miss the essential first component.

Did you open up your phone to check a notification, and then suddenly realize 45 minutes had passed? Sure, the flashing lights were distracting, but that ignores the fact that there was a desire in your brain. A need unfulfilled. Why was some new piece of content able to grab you like that?

We talk about the algorithm, how it learns our wants and fills them. But that’s because you starve yourself! Temptation only works on the discontent. What have you fed your hungry brain lately?

When my mind is racing with ideas, nothing can pull me from it. Ideas come from real depth – when I read a book, go for a walk, have an engaging conversation. They don’t spawn from two-minute bursts of color and sound.

Feed your head, people. Don’t try to shut out the distractions – replace them.

A course of action being reasonable does not mean you should be free of consequences for taking it.

Here’s an example: If I am walking with my child and they suddenly have a life-threatening allergic reaction, I will smash a store window to get an Epi-pen from inside. I will do this without hesitation, as it is a reasonable course of action if there’s no other way to save my child’s life. However, if the store owner later demands that I pay for the damages, I will of course comply. Just because my course of action was reasonable and necessary doesn’t mean that the cost of those actions should fall on someone else!

People sometimes get it in their heads that if the thing they did was justified, then that means they shouldn’t face any negative repercussions for it. That’s a silly, immature attitude. You are the captain of your soul, and the owner of your choices. You should make the right ones; you should also own the cost of doing so.

I think it’s a good idea to ask yourself, “what’s the best possible outcome I can expect?”

Things sometimes sound like a good idea, but we don’t take the time to figure out what the upper bound even is. Once we do, we can sometimes discover that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. It might be a good reward, but too little of it to be worth the cost and effort of obtaining it.

Knowing the best-case scenario also helps us evaluate how good we’re doing overall, on projects that don’t come to fruition all at once. If my garden can produce a theoretical maximum of one hundred tomatoes and I currently have 85 growing, then that’s pretty great! And maybe it’s not worth disrupting my operation to try to get a mere 15 more. But if I only grew 10 this season out of a potential 100, then it’s fine to try something radically different next season.

Nothing is destroyed, only changed. Things can be broken, but true destruction is remarkably rare and nearly impossible. You’ll always have scraps, and “scraps” is just another word for “parts.”