I want you to brag more. And I want to show you how bragging can be a force for positive good in the world.

Sometimes, when you’re hiking through difficult territory for the first time, you plant flags along the way. These aren’t just trophies designed to make you feel good about yourself. They’re also markers so that others can find their way more easily. They’re helpful.

When you talk about good things that you’ve done, that’s the key. Do it in a way that plants flags, that brings attention to things that deserve attention. If you donate to a charity, say so! Then you give not only your money, but your voice – you amplify awareness of that charity.

If we’re discussing status and awareness, there are sort of four categories of commentary: you can put yourself down; you can build yourself up; you can put someone else down; you can build someone else up. Here’s the secret: only do that last one.

Don’t talk about yourself at all, because you don’t need to. Every word you say is “talking about yourself” already because words are a reflection of the speaker. So you don’t ever need to say a word about yourself. Most of the time when we see off-putting “bragging,” we’re reacting to someone speaking too directly about themselves. “I’m the greatest person in the world because I donated to charity, and I donated more than anyone else!” Even though they did an objectively good thing, we scowl.

Compare: “My local food bank had a wonderful fundraiser this weekend and they raised more than double their goal! Congratulations to everyone that helped organize this event, your hard work and dedication are an inspiration to everyone. Kudos!”

If you read that, you’re more likely to smile than scowl. You elevated someone else, and you did it without putting anyone else down. But here’s the thing: you still bragged!

You bragged because anyone who reads that understands that you were a part of those fundraising efforts. They understand that you also did something good. But they also see that you spoke with humility, that you used your voice to amplify others, and that you inspired others to give without admonishing any who didn’t. You invited people in, rather than pushing them away.

That’s a flag for others to follow. If you can wrap your head around that as a force of good, then you’ll feel better about bragging. That will, in turn, motivate you to find more things to brag about. We are social creatures, and if the desire for social status can be harnessed to encourage us to noble deeds, then that’s a wonderful thing!

Plant your brag flag, and plant it high!

There are no universal defaults. There are only decisions that other people made, and which you accept blindly without consideration.

Each time you do this, you yield power over your life to someone who didn’t earn it, doesn’t deserve it, and probably is using it poorly.

“Oh, this task showed up in my inbox, so I guess I have to do it.” No, not necessarily! You might choose to do it because it’s the best option. But you also might delegate it. You might email your boss and have a discussion about priorities and responsibilities. You might flip your desk and jump out the window. But all of those decisions are yours.

In the above example, just doing the thing in your inbox might actually be the best call. But there are great and mighty swaths of defaults that totally aren’t. You don’t have to accept them.

Develop a little healthy belligerence. A little resistance to the natural flow. Remember that “natural flow” leads to the lowest point, always. Sometimes that’s where you want to be; often it isn’t.

This is a true story: I once watched a man approach a city intersection and press the little button that (in theory) summons the “safe to walk” sign. Perhaps the button was broken, or perhaps the button doesn’t do anything anyway. But this man stood at that intersection, staring at the red glowing hand telling him not to walk, for three full traffic cycles. During this entire time, not a single car drove by. This was at a time that was far from peak traffic at an intersection that wasn’t that busy to begin with. Three full traffic cycles of… nothing. And then, then, the little glowing “safe to walk” man showed up. And only then did the man cross the street.

He didn’t even look both ways.

(I don’t wish anyone ill, so I’m glad he was okay, but wouldn’t it have been perfect if he’d gotten clipped anyway?)

Anyway, that guy had totally yielded his power. He’d given over the decision of when to cross the road to poorly-maintained and foolishly-deployed equipment instead of recognizing that his own eyes and brain had the power to make his life better. You have a voice, and it can make your life better.

Don’t be herded. Be heard.

A good decision plus the stress of making it sometimes comes out to more cost than a bad decision. Decisions usually impact you in percentage proportion to their size, but stress tends to be a fixed cost.

So what I’m saying is, if your day is really crazy and you’ll be more present for your family by not worrying too much about it, go ahead and order pizza.

When you build something, you should use it. If you make shoes, you should wear them. If you sell a product, you should also use it – including going through the buying process.

It seems like simple advice, but when you’re a creator of anything it’s so easy to forget how different that thing looks from the consumer side. You make improvements to your process based on what you see, what you want. What makes your life easier, and what you think makes the lives of your consumers better.

But you have to just eat what you cook, too. And not just a taste – the full meal. You need the whole experience. There’s truly no substitute.

You can’t limit yourself to what’s possible. This isn’t some hippy nonsense about dreaming things into existence, either. This is extremely practical advice, and I’ll tell you why:

You have no freaking idea what’s possible. In fact, forget about “possible“. You have absolutely no freaking clue, not even the slightest idea, what’s already happening right now.

So if you limit yourself to what you THINK is possible, you will be limiting yourself to only interacting with about 0.001% of the stuff in the world.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if…” It is. It is right now. However you’re about to end that sentence, go Google it, and it’s already happening. It started six years ago, someone is already making money from it, and it’s gone through three permutations.

There Is Always A Thing. Today I read a story about an organization that has saved thousands of lives by getting hotels to donate their old soap (you know, the bars you open while you’re there, use once, and then leave 90% of the remaining volume on the sink for housekeeping to – usually – throw away), which they then melt down into new bars of soap and give to kids in developing countries so that they can cut down on hygiene-related diseases that kill thousands of people a year. Hahahaha, what a ridiculous thing! Someone thought, “Wow, look at that gross bar of used soap on the hotel sink, what a waste, what should I do with that?” And then they saved thousands of lives.

There are billions of people in the world. You don’t know what that number means. When you read it, in your head, you pictured a crowded subway station or something like it, which means you pictured a few hundred people. You can’t even conceptualize what billions of anything looks like, let alone how billions of thinking minds, each existing for decades, will think and act and invent every single day of their lives.

So of course, what you think of as “possible” is vastly, vastly less than what is true.

So don’t limit yourself to “possible.” Just start with the assumption that absolutely every single thing you could ever think of is not only “possible,” but is already happening right now and the people doing it have a seat for you if you want to do it, too. If you think that about everything, you will be right a thousand times for every time you’re wrong.

If you are unwilling to take a step on the path, you will never reach the destination. This seems elementary, but a shocking number of people struggle with this.

I meet people who are willing to invest absolutely staggering amounts of work, time, money – juice – into something, as long as that thing can be accomplished in one step. They’re not lazy; it doesn’t matter how big the step is, just that there’s only one.

What do I mean? I mean that there are people who would be willing to go to school for twenty years at $100,000/year to be an astronaut, but they wouldn’t be willing to be a janitor at NASA for six months, even if that meant they could go into space immediately after.

Some of it might be ego. “I’m an astronaut” and “I’m training to be an astronaut” both sound about the same in terms of pride and status, but “I’m a janitor at NASA” doesn’t. It takes confidence and a little humility to live your plan, and good plans have more than one step.

Some of it might be fear of getting lost. If a plan has six steps, then any one might be a misstep, and then you won’t get to the thing you want at all. Sure – but you definitely won’t get to it in one step. You’ve got to risk it.

So these people waste years – sometimes their entire lives – in search of a single step, no matter how difficult, that leads directly to what they want. It doesn’t exist. No one is born an astronaut. No matter what you want to do, sometimes moving closer will feel like moving farther away, but that’s a mental trap. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – but then it takes a few more, too.

There is a very valuable skill that I’m working on sharpening: being able to do more with less.

A historic weakness of mine is that my ideas for how to improve something tend to be grand in scope. They often involve lots of time, effort, juice – and while they’re often good plans, they require so much up-front commitment as a result that they’re non-starters.

I’m terribly good, usually, at finding low-juice ways to make impacts. My biggest mental barrier is that I fall into the trap of measuring impact only by the potential results. “Plan A would only make X impact, but Plan B would make 3X impact! We should do Plan B!” But Plan B requires ten times the Juice – more effort, more time before the impact is realized, etc.

The good news: I’m getting better at it! Lately, I’ve initiated several low-juice projects with the potential for huge impacts. Some of those impacts are already starting to show! And those, in turn, make more juice. It’s a scale.

So, lesson learned (or at least, learning): don’t always look for the best thing you can do. Sometimes (often!), look for the thing that can make the most impact while costing as little as possible.

When your gas light comes on, you don’t floor it. You stop for gas.

Before you get completely burnt out, there are signs. Indicators that you need to refuel. Most of the time, those indicators come in the form of decreased productivity or efficiency. So what do a lot of us do half the time? We work harder to compensate!

That makes as much sense as flooring it when the gas light comes on.

One of the problems I see is that for a lot of people, they don’t actually know what refuels them. They default to “not working,” but for a lot of people (myself included!) that makes us feel worse. Lazing around my house doesn’t refuel me at all.

What refuels me, specifically, is productive time spent on something totally self-indulgent – but productive nonetheless. Tinkering with my camping loadout. Organizing my board game shelf. Building a piece of furniture that I want. Stuff like that. When I come away from that, I feel totally refreshed and ready to floor it again.

It took a while to figure that out, though. Like lots of people, I assumed that if I was feeling burnt out, what I needed was just rest. So I would set aside a day to do nothing… and feel like garbage.

Some people need “R&R.” Other people recharge with social activity. Still others renew themselves with a physical reward of some kind. There are plenty of different ways to fuel up. But the one thing that never works is putting the pedal to the metal and trying to make it on fumes. The fumes run out. Fuel up.

Here is an undervalued but incredibly effective tool for rapport- and relationship-building: learn to summarize.

Whenever you meet and interact with someone for more than a few moments, the information transfer is dense. Many words are spoken, and not all of them are retained. If at the end of the meeting, you can summarize what happened in one or two sentences, you add tremendous value.

You add value because you show that you listened. You show that you paid attention and cared. Because the last moment of an experience is often the one most saliently remembered, a final summary can really help the meeting live in the other person’s mind.

You can summarize easily while also expressing gratitude, and also building a bridge to the next interaction: “Hey, thanks again for meeting today! I’m really glad we got to finalize what we want to do about the book launch and initial print run. I’m really looking forward to the art team meeting with you next week!” It doesn’t have to be awkward – in fact, it can be downright smile-inducing.

And if you make it a habit, it really will make you pay better attention. Your memory will sharpen. You’ll listen better. All valuable things, while building better relationships – business or personal.

So, to summarize: summarize!