Who is the nicest person you know personally? How about the meanest? Now how about the wealthiest and the poorest? The smartest and the dumbest? The funniest and the most boring? The most industrious and the laziest?

Why bother to think about these things? There’s a humorous little bit of statistical trivia: for any given positive trait, about 80% of people will rank themselves as “above average” for that trait. So, by default, most people’s personal calibration for where they fall on a given trait’s spectrum is pretty off.

I was thinking about a really mean person I once knew, who of course didn’t think of themselves as mean, self-centered, or narcissistic. But I realized – that person was utterly surrounded by people pretty close to them on that end of the meanness scale. You can try to figure out whether the chicken or the egg came first – whether they were mean because they were surrounded by other jerks, or whether they were surrounded by jerks because they chased away all the nice people – but it’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that they’d been in that environment for so long that they had no idea what a nice person was even like.

So they didn’t think of themselves as mean, because in their personal frame of reference, they weren’t any meaner than average.

So, now and then, it’s good to get a sense of the boundaries of your personal bubble. It may be uncomfortable – but that discomfort may well be a source of clarity and improvement.

People sometimes dream so big that they sabotage themselves. They have lofty dreams and ambitions – which are good! But they think exclusively about them, instead of the tiny action they need to take today to make it happen.

Look, I get that if you have a major problem or a major goal, the tiny, 0.1% action you take towards it can feel so far removed that it actually feels like you’re moving away from it. You feel like mowing lawns for money is a distraction from becoming a millionaire.

But it’s the opposite. Thinking about being a millionaire is what distracts you from becoming one.

Dream big, to set the goals. But once the goals are set and the actions decided on, you should only allow yourself to think about the goals themselves every now and then, to revise and reevaluate. If you allow yourself to do nothing but think about the finish line, you’ll feel like the short steps are beneath you, or are taking you in the wrong direction.

Dream big, yes. But think small.

When you witness something you dislike in a distant sphere, it can be very upsetting. A politician says something you dislike? A tragedy in a far-off city? A growing movement of opinions you disagree with? All things that can rattle you.

The natural inclination for many is to seethe and outrage. To scream into the void, probably finding other voices like yours to scream with. You’ll let that thought rot and fester in your brain and heart. You’ll bring it up in every conversation – at least until the next outrage displaces it. And all your sound and fury will signify nothing. It won’t make a lick of difference. Not only will you be doing a bunch of damage to your own life, but you won’t even be trading that for helping those you feel for or hurting their oppressors.

I would like to offer you an alternative. You should pay a dollar not to care.

The second – the second – something outrages you, find the best charity or fund that exists in support of the side you support. Give them a dollar. Post the fact that you did so if you want. But then immediately shut off all awareness of it. Mute the relevant keywords, unfollow the accounts, or turn off the black mirror entirely. Live your life.

And live it well, and sleep soundly! You did more with one dollar than all those screaming voices did. If all those outraged souls shut up and gave one dollar each, much more would be accomplished. Your conscience is clear. Why one dollar, and not more? Well, first off: give as much as you want. But if you make it a dollar, you can probably safely give without further thought, every single time. A larger share of your wealth requires more consideration and you may have to do more picking and choosing, but the point is not to do that. The point is a quick escape from the trap. One dollar is already more than 99% of the outraged will give to help, and it does help.

And it lets you disengage without turning your back. Sometimes, it may even be a great filter: if you give a dollar and still feel like you want to do more, listen to your soul and do it. But once you give that dollar, you can’t go back to pointless outrage.

I’m thankful for so many things that even a lengthy blog post couldn’t begin to cover them. But in order to keep it brief, I’ll say this: if you’re actually reading these words, however and whenever you might be doing so, then I’m thankful for you.

I recently had a conversation with someone where (I guess) they were impressed with some trinket of wisdom I’d picked up in my travels. And they asked me a question that I feel like I get pretty regularly: “where did you learn this?”

Usually, this question comes up not because I’m especially smart or knowledgeable, but because the stuff I do know is so esoteric and (seemingly) unconnected. Did you ever see Slumdog Millionaire? If not – it’s a movie about a kid who wins a really, really hard trivia game show. He’s not educated or anything, but for each question he gets right, the movie cuts to a flashback of the highly unusual series of coincidences that led to him knowing that particular piece of trivia.

It’s like that. Most stuff that I’ve made myself useful by knowing didn’t come from some sort of formal transfer of knowledge in an organized setting. It’s just a bunch of weird tricks that I learned, largely through trial and error.

But I’m not even especially unique in that regard. My theory is this: every day, everyone learns about a thousand things. Then, we forget somewhere between 995 and 1005. Gross learning is extremely high, and net learning is pretty flat. I maintain that I have about the same gross learning rate as anyone, but my default retention rate is slightly worse. As a result, I compensated – by writing.

Even as a pre-teen, I wrote down everything. When computers didn’t even have Windows yet, I had a text file on my computer called “RocciasRulesForLife.txt” where I took pretty much any event that occurred in my day and turned it into a general-case rule. It had some real gems in there. Some were genuinely smart, like “Always take gum if someone offers it to you.” Others were just weird, like “When life gives you lemmings, stay away from cliffs.” But the point was that I always wrote them down.

Over the years I filled notebooks with stories, I typed endlessly, and now I even have this blog. That one thing, that proclivity to convert my life’s experiences into stories, notes, and rules – that’s where I learned “this,” whatever this is. I learned it the same place you did, but when you learned it, it was fifteen years ago on a day when you learned a thousand other things and you didn’t remember it. We all experience the same number of seconds per day, for the most part. I just put a lot more of mine into words.

The hardest hurdles to overcome are the ones you through in front of yourself. It’s impossible to argue with yourself and not lose – if you’re of two positions, one of them has to. So it becomes very easy, very tempting, to just pick the side you wanted anyway.

There are multiple versions of you in the future, and all of them are fishing for you. All of them are putting bait on their hooks and attempting to drag you into their particular future reality. All the time. You will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into some future. Pick the future you want.

There are many ways to add value, and one of them is to just identify and categorize a bunch of ways to add value!

People don’t automatically know where the treasure is. Sure, there’s value in digging up the gold, value in shipping it, value in refining it, value in smelting and smithing it, and value in selling it. But there’s also value in just figuring out where to do all that stuff!

If you’re confused about how to add value in a given situation, probably so are a lot of other people. That means you already have the answer: you can add value by identifying other ways to add value, and sharing that information. You can add value by making the treasure map.

While it’s important to maintain a sense of balance in your life, that doesn’t mean every day or season must be the same. It’s important to maintain a balanced diet too, but that doesn’t mean every meal has to have the exact same mix of protein and vitamins. You can have eggs for breakfast and salad for lunch and still be balanced overall.

Likewise, some seasons in your life will require that you upset the balance of things you find important for a time. It’s necessary to have the right mix of family, intellectual pursuits, meaningful work, physical activity, and interpersonal relationships in your life, but you don’t have to do those things in equal measure every day. In fact, there may be times in your life when you have to radically emphasize one of those at the expense of others. It’s okay to take time away from your work to be with a dying family member, and it’s okay to miss your workout for a dear friend’s wedding.

Be careful with your imbalances, and regress to the mean often. But don’t be afraid of the ebb and flow – that’s just the way your ship rocks along its journey.

Problems are like sludge that gathers in one place. They collect and can drown you, but they don’t move quickly. Like zombies in old-school horror flicks, they’re dangerous in large numbers if you let them catch up with you.

Solutions are quick. Opportunities are fleeting, and they don’t always run toward you. You’ve got to catch them.

The upshot is: if you find you have a lot of problems and few solutions, get moving. Go to a new place, new activities, new people. You’ve let yourself get surrounded by sludge and used up all the solutions in your immediate area. But if you shake it up a little, you can give yourself a little breathing room and find some more tools.

Remove your expectations that you “should already know this.” Don’t try to berate your knowledge into existence, and don’t lay guilt on yourself for not already having some ultra-specific piece of information. Your assumptions about what other people in similar situations “already know” are totally wrong and based on all sorts of internal biases.

Instead, just learn it like a kindergartener. You don’t know a thing? Cool, ask someone. If they don’t know, get a book – look for words like “for beginners,” or “for dummies.” Use the power of the vast and inscrutable internet to find specific answers to questions, then read books for the general case.

Watch videos. Take notes.

This is all stuff you know. You know how to learn, you’ve done it a thousand times. But somewhere along the way, you accidentally listened to some voice telling you that you shouldn’t have to anymore, that you should just know this stuff, and be embarrassed if you don’t.

That voice doesn’t know anything. If you learn to ignore it, you can learn anything.