My kids asked – asked! – to go camping this weekend. How blessed I am!

Funny enough, looking at pictures from last year, this is the same weekend we went then. A tradition is beginning to form! First weekend after Halloween reserved for camping each year? Perfect! This is the weather I love the best, and the timing works out great.

Time to go bond!

I love a good hunt. When I’m trying to find some exact, specific tool or trinket for a project, I can get very lost in the search itself. It’s probably the easiest way to pass time for me; I can blink and hours or days have gone by while I try to track down the exact item that fits my needs.

While I enjoy this very much, it also means I have to be careful not to indulge too often. You can find anything eventually… except more time.

There are two ways being “undefeated” can affect you. One way can make you a nervous wreck, a target. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and everyone wants a piece of you. You’re destined to go down a peg.

The other way is better: being undefeated becomes a shield, a warning. You’re untouchable. Your record speaks for itself, and anyone going up against it finds themselves a nervous wreck instead.

What’s the difference? The realization that the “undefeated” label, like anything else, is a tool. You can use it well or use it poorly.

If you’re on top of the heap, don’t make more enemies than you have to. Don’t gloat; share. There will be plenty of people angling for you anyway – there’s no reason to add to the pile. Confidence comes from knowing your own abilities, not disparaging others. If you assume everyone else is bad, you’re bound to get surprised.

When you’re undefeated, the most important adversary is yourself. Any day you aren’t better than yourself the day before you’re getting closer to the upset. It’s a responsibility – but the trail of the defeated left in your wake needs to include the avatars of your own growth, or you won’t be undefeated for long.

Letting yourself be distracted by creativity for a day is a good thing. If you really feel that burn and you’re actually creating, let that flow. You don’t have those moments every day, and the work you need to do will always wait a little. Your life moves forward in those creative moments; don’t ignore them.

It’s amazing how unaware we are of the things that influence us, and why. Everyone tends to believe that they’re swayed only by rational persuasion, and appeals to emotion fall on deaf ears. Even when someone has clearly been won over by such tactics, they’ll rationalize that they simply made the correct intellectual choice and it just happened to coincide with the emotional appeal.

What’s very funny to me is those same “rational” people ignore all the evidence that they’re being swayed emotionally. You can’t convince them with a rational argument!

Look, our brains are weird, and I get that it’s uncomfortable to know all the ways they aren’t entirely under our control. But those ways are real even if we ignore them, so it’s better to understand them! At least then you can be predictably irrational, instead of just subject to the whims of a universe you don’t fully grasp.

You have no idea how weird and wild and wonderful humans are. You overestimate them, underestimate them, and fail to understand the vast range of their complexity.

In my experience, most humans can imagine other humans as being about a maximum of twenty percent more or less than themselves on any given personality metric. So if you imagine the most charismatic person you can conjure up, realistically you’re imagining a person about twenty percent more charismatic than you. Likewise, if you imagine the dumbest person you can think of, this phantom is actually only about 20% dumber than you, because that’s the limit of your imagination.

Humans are so, so, SO much more varied than that. The smartest person alive is a hundred times smarter than you, and the dumbest person alive is a hundred times dumber. Likewise on any metric you can think of.

So don’t go into a room thinking you can predict how the people inside it will behave before you’ve met them. You will be surprised!

Paths close up if not used. Weeds grow, flagstones get buried, steps erode. It’s the act of walking, even when difficult, that creates the path that’s easy to walk.

If it looks hard, just remember – it ain’t gettin’ any easier.

Sometimes you simply cannot wait for the leaves to turn and the air to turn brisk. Let it be calmer, cooler, a little more soothing. An autumn balm. I am grateful.

When we believe something is impossible, it shuts down our creativity hard. How can you look for solutions when you know for a fact that there aren’t any?

But make one small shift and say, “this isn’t impossible, it’s only difficult,” and suddenly you’re charged up. Difficult things are interesting to solve, and the creative juices get flowing.

There’s a famous scene in Star Trek where Captain Kirk is faced with a simulated battle as a test. The test doesn’t hide it’s theme – the simulated battle is unwinnable, and the actual “test” is about how you react in that kind of situation. True to his character, Kirk hacks the computer before the exam to change the parameters of the simulation so he can win the battle. When confronted, he says: “I don’t believe in no-win scenarios.”

What a mindset! About a bajillion things throughout history have been “impossible” until someone did them. Almost universally, what follows is a bunch of other people doing the same thing, because now it isn’t impossible. It’s only difficult.

It was well-accepted for all of human history until very recently that humans couldn’t run a mile in under 4 minutes. That was simply out of our ability; humans can’t run a mile that quickly and more than we can fly. And then in 1954, Roger Bannister did it, obtaining the world record. That record lasted forty-six days. In the single year after this feat, more than a hundred people ran a sub-four-minute mile.

When everyone thought it was impossible, no one tried to do it. Once it was only difficult, it became a challenge to overcome.

What things do you think are impossible? Maybe, just maybe, they’re only difficult.