Being able to talk about concepts without endorsing them is a powerful – and necessary – tool for advancing our common understanding. Analogies and shared frames of reference help us communicate, and the ability to create them is the ability to think together with other people.

There are two kinds of people (or perhaps, just two kinds of traits that some people have) that make this sort of shared communication extremely difficult. Some people use hypotheticals in bad faith, and some people accuse other people of doing that first thing.

Sometimes a hypothetical situation is obviously bad, but smart people still want to work through the implications of it because understanding is good, and that understanding can help in a variety of other situations. For example, I could posit the hypothetical of Ukraine losing the war to Russia and want to consider what that would mean. That doesn’t mean I want that to happen, and smart people have the ability to understand that.

But some people will sometimes use these questions in bad faith. For example, a racist might say “Let’s just imagine a hypothetical society with only one race.” They’re not really trying to refine their thinking; they’re trying to sneak an idea through the Overton window.

Because those people exist, people who aren’t very intellectually secure will often accuse anyone who even wants to discuss an idea of being in full support of that idea. So I might want to suggest examining what happens if we have a higher or lower minimum wage, and people will instantly decry that line of thinking as being in favor of a particular position.

The simplest solution is this: always think in good faith, and eliminate people from your intellectual circle who accuse you of doing otherwise anyway. The people who see hidden plots in critical thought are the same people incapable of it, so in a way that serves as a good litmus test of who is worth conversing with. Remember, when it comes to signal and noise, screeching is always the latter.

For any of my readers younger than the age of about 50, there used to be a thing called a “Rolodex.” It was just a little desktop object that conveniently held the phone numbers of your contacts, but the word is still a nice shorthand for “the list of people you have contact info for.”

I once worked with someone with very few actual skills, who was nonetheless one of the most valuable people at our organization because he had a billion-dollar Rolodex. He was in fundraising and having a contact list whose combined net worth was over a billion dollars was a pretty fantastic value-add in that kind of role.

That’s an extreme example, but the point is that contacts are good – and most people don’t cultivate them. See, a “contact” is more than just a person you met once and have a business card for. This is the internet age; I can look up anybody’s phone number, but that doesn’t mean they’ll answer for me. A contact is someone who will specifically take my call if I make it.

So step 1 is meeting them, sure. But steps 2 through 20 are the important ones. Those are the steps where you follow up, provide occasional value, remember little details, and other things like that. It’s more than just adding them on social media; it’s actually giving them a reason to remember you.

Add people to LinkedIn, absolutely. But don’t forget that adding people to a professional networking site does nothing if you don’t actually network. If you’re not chatting, that Rolodex isn’t worth squat, no matter who’s in it.

I don’t think most people appreciate how big a deal it is to make even a small improvement in the odds of success for an activity you do frequently.

If you make driving 5% safer for yourself, you’re doing yourself a huge favor over the course of your life. If you reduce your chance of a heart attack by 5%, that’s years added to your life. But people treat these things like they’re small because their likelihood of affecting a single incident is too small to notice.

Good advice doesn’t always work, but that doesn’t make it not good. Buckling your seat belt is solid wisdom even if you know someone who got killed despite wearing one. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that something isn’t worth doing unless it guarantees success. These little improvements add up. A lucky life starts with a little tilt.

The process of solving problems and the process of creating solutions aren’t exactly the same. They’re adjacent and related, but there’s a time and a place for both. If you mix them up, you’re often making things worse for yourself.

Consider a burning building. While the building is on fire, that’s the wrong time to think about designing and installing a sprinkler system. It’s the wrong time to research pricing for flame-retardant carpeting. If a building is on fire right now, you should put the fire out – even if you have to do so in a less-than-perfectly-efficient way.

This is true even (and especially!) of smaller problems. If you respond to every problem by going to the drawing board for a system-wide solution, you’ll be spending far too much juice on every issue. You’ll also be making a lot of snap decisions when you often should do nothing at all, besides just address the current scenario as-is.

Instead, you should have a set schedule for visiting larger, systemic issues within any system. If you run a business, problems are going to come up all the time. Each one will seem like a major emergency. Most won’t be, and very few will actually require designing an entirely new system to handle.

When a problem occurs, solve it and track it. If a light burns out, replace the bulb, and note that you did so; don’t install a whole new lighting system. Every quarter, review your notes on the problems. If a bunch of bulbs burned out, then sure – take a look at a deeper issue. If it was the one time, you’re fine buying a new bulb now and then.

Taking this approach also lets you deploy those solutions in a reasonable way. If you’re running around in a panic all the time, those solutions aren’t going to be implemented well. They won’t be communicated well, either. If you only create new systems at regular intervals, you build for stability in the long term.

Visualize. Imagine you could turn down someone’s volume, make them mute to you. Imagine you can turn someone’s words into physical hooks, so you could see them for what they were. Imagine you simply chose not to bite them.

Visualize. Imagine a physical rope tying you to someone, and imagine cutting that rope. Imagine standing on an iceberg with someone, and it breaks apart, allowing you both to drift in other directions.

Visualize. You take all of your pain, all of your fury, and you unleash it upon a simple grey rock in a field. The rock is utterly unaffected. If you were to take the rock’s entire existence and view it condensed over a day, all your fury wouldn’t even be a blip on the screen.

Visualize. Imagine clenching your fist around a shard of glass. The harder you tense, the more you bleed. The greater your effort, the greater your pain. Imagine the relief when you simply open your hand and release.

Release.

There is no sadder state of existence than being defined by hatred. If your entire identity revolves around things you dislike, are against, or want destroyed: find something to love. Hate does not destroy hate. Put some joy out there. Like something instead.

So much of the secret to a good life is just to shape your environment.

If there’s a river flowing, and you need water for your crops, you could just cup your hands together and transport the water. A few ounces at a time, expending effort with each trip, to bring the water where it’s needed. Or, more wisely, you can shape your environment. Dig a small canal off the river so water flow is diverted to your field. The water is flowing anyway.

Not everything you want to create must be created through conscious effort. If you shape your environment correctly, things will grow. My children are all avid readers. Why? Because I filled the house with books and didn’t otherwise intervene much. I read whenever they asked, but never forced it. I let them sneak a few extra minutes awake beyond their bed time as long as their excuse was book-related. I shaped an environment, and things grew.

Think about what you want. Now, don’t think about what you need to get it – think instead about what kind of environment that thing needs to thrive.

Whether you realize it or not, certain things are keeping you afloat. Some of those things are pretty solid and healthy, things like community or family. Some of them are shaky at best, like a job or caffeine habit. And some of them are downright unhealthy things to cling to in icy waters.

Take a look around you and think about which things would do the most damage to you if you lost. Then take at least one action to make that thing more secure. If it’s a relationship with another human, thank them. If it’s your beloved pet, take them in for a checkup. If it’s your home, revisit your insurance.

And if it’s something you’d rather not be so dependent on, then start to wean off of it. If the only thing keeping you going is a pack-a-day cigarette habit, then you need to quit before the rug gets pulled out from under you and you have to.

The water pulls us all down. We all need something to float on. Stay dry.

Have you ever thrown up bleach? I hope not! And assuming you haven’t ever experienced this yourself, let me describe it for you: it’s agony. I’ve had to do it; to induce vomiting in order to regurgitate a stomach full of it. It’s terrifying, because everything in your body screams at you that it will be agony. That it will hurt worse than anything else you’ve ever felt. You would absolutely prefer not to.

And if you don’t, you’ll die.

That’s the thing. As horrible as it is to vomit up that bleach, it will kill you if it stays inside you. The best thing to do, of course, would be to never get it into you in the first place. But sometimes accidents happen, and you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between bad and worse.

Sometimes you have a thought, or a memory, or an experience – an unpleasant one. Maybe you’ve gotten by for the past few days or past few decades by not letting that thought, memory, or experience work its way out of your system. You resisted it because letting yourself really live through it would feel like throwing up bleach.

But all pain is process. Physical, mental, emotional, spiritual – pain is something happening. And that thing might need to happen, because the alternative might be way worse.