I have observed that people often fall into one of two categories when it comes to how they view the trajectory of their lives.

In one view, your life’s journey is a relatively flat line in which there are many pitfalls and other obstacles. Each pitfall must be avoided or at least mitigated or it will make your life worse. All of your efforts go, therefore, to avoiding these obstacles when they appear. When they’re absent, people with this view tend to just coast. In fact, coasting is often the ultimate goal; they would prefer no change at all, ever.

In the second view, your life’s journey is a climb up a mountain. There are still pitfalls and obstacles, even setbacks, but it’s okay as long as the journey trends upwards, on average. Some setbacks may even be necessary to open up new paths of ascension, so they aren’t automatically avoided as the worst outcome. For people with this worldview, the worst outcome is stagnation. Not climbing at all.

These two worldviews will process events and resources so completely differently from one another that they may seem completely alien to each other. It would be difficult for them to even communicate in many ways.

The “Pit” mindset says “all change is bad.” The objective is to avoid change or mitigate its damage. The goal is comfort; not necessarily great accomplishment, just comfort – meaning, not a disaster, not painful, not anything very bad. For this mindset, the possibility of harm far outweighs the possibility of accomplishment in the calculation of risk, so this mindset will almost never initiate change. After all, change is usually bad! Better to stay where I am. Whenever something bad might happen to this person, they do everything they can to avoid it. When something bad does happen to this person, their obsession becomes a return to the status quo as quickly as possible.

The “Mountain” mindset says “on average, change is good, even if occasionally bad changes happen.” The objective, therefore, is to make many changes, focusing on initiating the ones that benefit them the most. The goal is improvement – along whatever metrics you choose. This could mean being healthier, happier, building a better community, elevating your family, being more financially independent, anything. The “Mountain” mindset initiates change frequently, recognizing that life very rarely lets you stay comfortable for long. When something bad might happen, this mindset takes into consideration the total journey to see if it’s worth worrying about. When something bad does happen, this mindset looks for new opportunities presented and ignores the lost resources as irrelevant.

There is a lot of really good personal development advice for people with the Mountain mindset that not only isn’t good advice for people with the Pit mindset – it would seem totally insane to those people. If someone’s entire worldview is “change is bad” (whether they realize it or not), then advice centering around change will be anathema. Resources that are great for helping someone climb a mountain may be very poor resources for someone trying to avoid pits.

People with a Pit mindset won’t just not benefit from Mountain resources, they’ll actually perceive that they were harmed by them. Taking a course to learn a new skill represents at least two changes (you had to spend money/time/juice to do it, and you may have to change something else to use that skill), and the Pit mindset sees those as bad things. So if you try to show someone with a Pit mindset how they may improve their life by trading one kind of resource for another (time/money for knowledge), they’ll think you’re trying to scam them. Positive change is impossible, they unconsciously believe – so you’re just a snake oil salesman.

If you have a Pit mindset, there is only one piece of advice that can actually help you: develop a Mountain mindset as quickly as possible. Start small; try to make incremental positive improvements in your life at a low personal cost. Record your progress so you can actually demonstrate to yourself in the future the relationship between your effort and the resulting improvements. Even doing this may require you to fight the voice that says it’s a waste of time. But if you don’t do it, your life will be nothing but pits, forever.

—

(Note from Johnny: This is a personal development blog. If you’re reading this with any sort of regularity, chances are good that you already have a Mountain mindset. But chances are also very very good that you know at least one person with a Pit mindset. If that’s so, feel free to share – you never know which catalyst will start someone on their journey.)

I took my children on a typical “autumn outing” today – hayrides, pies, etc. We had a wonderful time, and one of the activities was picking sweet potatoes. In addition to just being fun because we’ll get to eat those later, it also showed me a very interesting lesson – as outings with my children so often do.

You see, all three kids were doing the same activity. But each had declared a totally different goal for themselves. My oldest wanted to find the biggest sweet potato she could; each time she did she’d immediately start searching for an even bigger one. My middle child wanted to find the smallest she could find – her obsession with cute, tiny things apparently extends even to root vegetables, and she wanted something adorable. My youngest just wanted the most; he was obsessed with the ever-increasing pile and straining the structural integrity of the bags we had for the purpose.

Same activity, three totally different victory conditions. Apart from the marvellous fact that this resulted in zero arguments or competition between the kids (hooray!), it really demonstrated a lesson that I think we often forget as adults.

No one else gets to tell you what “winning” is. You pick your own games, and you don’t have to pick the ones other people are playing. You can be happy and have fun for any reason in the world. Biggest, smallest, most, least, fastest, slowest, anything in betweenest. When someone else is happiest, we should cheer the loudest for them. And we should pick our own victory conditions – that’s what makes life sweetest.

In the book Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, one of the characters is a deranged mother who tires of the fact that her family just wolfs down the food she makes without stopping to appreciate it. Her solution is to start putting thumbtacks into the food. That way, they have to eat very slowly and carefully in order to avoid accidentally biting down on or swallowing one, and as a side effect, they really linger on each bite.

Our echo chambers are a lot like the food we wolf down. When we fill our information feeds with sources we tend to agree with, we stop considering the individual bites of information. Everything just gets absorbed as part of a tapestry, each piece becoming supporting evidence for all the others by simple virtue of repetition. We never even notice if something should be triggering alarm bells for our critical thinking mechanisms, because those mechanisms have been shut off – we’ve trained our brains to think “all of this is safe and accurate” so we just pour it in.

So, throw in a few thumbtacks. Follow some accounts and sources that you totally disagree with. Let them disrupt the flow. When you hit those bites in your news feed, you’ll be forced to stop and chew. Carefully. And that will throw the endless conveyor belt into disarray, and you’ll be forced to chew every bite.

Growth comes from discomfort, and never forget it.

I mean that in a literal sense. You can’t give up – who would you even surrender to? Life isn’t your opponent, it’s the field you’re playing on. You can’t quit, because there’s no one to quit to.

Any time you’re overcome with stress, frustration, or anxiety and you feel the desire to just throw in the towel, remember – there’s nowhere to throw it. Any course of action you’d actually take as a manifestation of “throwing in the towel” would be at least as much work as persevering. So you might as well persevere.

Futility is futile. You can only leave the game by winning it. There’s no timer; you have forever. You just can’t quit.

When I go hiking, I like to leave the main trails as soon as I can and strike off where there aren’t any trails at all. It’s a lot of fun to go exploring and find my way around without the obvious path.

Here’s the thing about the non-obvious path: as fun as it is, you can’t just stroll. Strolling is a luxury afforded by clear, straight roads, and those have to be built by prior travelers. If you’re the first, you have to lurch.

The rocks that let you cross the stream aren’t evenly spaced. The roots you have to step over aren’t equidistant from the branches you have to duck under. The broken ground offers only a few safe purchases. Your stride will be uneven. You will fall.

Or, you can stick to the path, and stroll around in circles.

True confidence is the ability to assume the most charitable possible interpretation of anything said to you. To fear no slight nor insult, to erase from your mind the worry about words. The assumption that you are already respected as much as you need to be. You don’t need to go further.

A tremendous thirst for knowledge, an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a joyous love of learning. You need this in order to gain wisdom and information, but it’s not all you need. You also need a healthy immunity to demagoguery.

The point of gaining new information is to change yourself, of course. You want to evolve your thinking, see the world from new angles, and perhaps change your behavior as a result. But you still want to be in the driver’s seat, motivated by your values and your reason. You can’t do that if persuasive information immediately hijacks your brain and starts steering you around.

To a certain extent, you have to look at even the products of your own culture like an outsider, and anthropologist. You have to examine the attempt at influence even as you remain uninfluenced. But you should expose yourself to the info!

Some people are afraid to even read things written by sources they believe are “bad.” And they chastise others for doing so. “Why do you read that? Don’t you know that those people are the bad guys?” Even ignoring the obvious tribalism – so what if they are? If the “bad guys” want to broadcast their message, reading that message can give me plenty of meta-information, even if I don’t absorb the message itself.

The more you can read things critically, the more things you can read. The more things you can read (or watch, or listen to, whatever), the more likely you are to be able to collect a set of information that’s most helpful & accurate.

And it isn’t likely to have all come from one source.

Most motivations to take action or to try to influence collective action fall into one of three broad categories:

1. Direct Self-Interest
2. Tribal Interest
3. Genuine Altruism

Most of your simple day-to-day actions fall into category one, which is totally fine. When you’re deciding which groceries to buy or which shirt to wear today, what else should you use as a motivator? Buy the groceries you like and wear the shirt you find comfortable.

Of course, sometimes even simple day-to-day actions veer into category 2. If you’re wearing a particular football jersey to a gathering of your friends, it may very well be that it’s not your favorite shirt, but the one that will give you the best boost in tribal status. That’s fine, too! As long as you’re picking your own tribes and you’re doing so for decent reasons, there’s nothing wrong with then wanting to embrace the ideals of that tribe.

And of course, sometimes you do things in category 3. Not very often, though. A lot of times what looks like category 3 is actually category 1 or 2, and even when it is category 3 it’s often done badly, usually for reasons that veer back into 1 & 2.

Effective actions in category 3 require a level of effort and study that most people don’t want to admit, let alone actually engage in. For instance, let’s say you donate 10 bucks to a local school library fundraiser. Great – there’s nothing wrong with that. But you probably did it more for category 2 than 3 – you want your local tribe to see you supporting their local interests and thus gain a little status. You want to believe you’re being genuinely altruistic, but if you were, you’d be donating to one of a thousand better, more effective causes than a local school library fundraiser. In your local community, 10 bucks buys like one or two books for your school library. In the broader world, you could probably feed a family for a month or save someone from malaria or something. But! You’d probably score fewer points with your local tribe.

But hey – even if you did donate to the Against Malaria Foundation (and you should!), maybe you’re only doing that because your “tribe” is econ nerds that value strict adherence to effective altruism principles. Maybe you don’t give a rat’s tail about malaria, you just want other nerds to think you’re smart.

That’s okay, too. If your desire for tribal status saves a few dozen lives from malaria as a side effect, I’m totally okay with this.

Ultimately though, this lens isn’t just about understanding you. It’s about helping you understand other people. Those are the three reasons people do stuff: they want to improve their own lives, or they want to improve their tribe’s lives, or they want to improve everyone’s lives. The case can definitely be made that the only people who really do things because of category 3 are people who have just mentally aligned “everyone on Earth” to be their “tribe” and are doing a hyper-idealized version of category 2, but again – I don’t care. I just want good done in the world.

If you do too, then recognize why people do the things they do. You can’t usually shift someone from one category to another, but you can shift their opinions of what’s effective within a category. If someone is fixated on doing something good for themselves, then you probably can’t convince them to instead spend that action on something selflessly beneficial to humanity – but you might be able to convince them that there’s something better they could do for themselves, and if that something happens to benefit mankind as a side effect – wonderful.

If someone says that they’re doing something because of category 3, but they remain stubbornly resistant to evidence that there are better things in category 3 they could be doing (or even that the thing they’re doing isn’t helpful at all to the larger population), then the chances are very good that they’re actually motivated by category 2, not category 3. That means that you’re wasting your breath trying to convince them to shift to a more effective form of altruism because their motivation isn’t altruism to begin with. It’s tribal status.

Category 1 and category 3 are much easier to work with. When someone is self-interested, they’re usually motivated to make maximum use of the available resources. If someone just wants to spend money on ice cream, then they’re usually open to the idea that they can get ice cream cheaper next door, or better ice cream down the street. And if they’re truly motivated by category 3 then they’re usually open to making the most of what they’re doing. But if you’re motivated by category 2, then you’re by nature somewhat inflexible. If your motivation is to score points with the tribe, then people outside the tribe won’t be able to convince you to change your actions, because you’re not after better outcomes. You’re after more points, and only the tribe can dictate what actions are worth the most points. The tribe will often pull a bait-and-switch; they’ll espouse certain “tribal ideals” but you don’t get points for embracing those ideals with your actions – you get points for performing the actions that the tribe says are in line with the ideals, even if they aren’t.

Watch what others do – and you, too.

When demand is greater than supply, the suppliers get to set the price. When supply is greater than demand, the demanders get to set the price. There are some limits, of course – an increase in price makes the demand go down, and a decrease in price makes the supply go down, so neither side can go crazy or they’ll lose their advantage. The end result of this is usually equilibrium – if the suppliers have the advantage, they’ll raise the price exactly to the point where raising it any more would give the demanders the advantage, and vice versa.

That’s the standard formula. But there are some weird things that can happen to that formula at the micro level, especially if the total number of players isn’t large enough for “The Aggregate” to start smoothing things out.

Imagine that there is a good that more than a few people want, and only one person has. This happens all the time – plenty of goods are unique, like art pieces or rare collectibles, etc. This one person has the ability to set pretty much any price they want, up to the point where the demand for the item at that price reaches zero. The profit-maximizing move is to set the price to the point where exactly the one person with the greatest desire for the item is willing to pay for it (and if you can figure it out, the maximum that person is willing to pay). But that’s not the only move, and certainly not the only move humans actually make.

Consider: Xander has a super-rare art piece, and Al, Betty, and Carl all want it. They’ve all expressed a desire for it, and they all know the other two desire it as well, but none of them (including Xander) know who wants it the most. So Xander sets up some sort of auction and lets them bid. In this way, they’ll reveal their relative levels of desire and Xander will get some new information. If Al wins the auction, Xander has discovered the point where Betty and Carl run out of desire, but not the maximum level of desire Al has. After all, Al might have bid a great deal more if Betty and Carl kept going!

So if Xander wants to raise the price even further he can try to, but Al now knows he’s the only buyer at this price or above. So he’s not incentivized to hand more money away – he knows if he walks away then Xander can’t get more money from Betty or Carl, and he knows Xander knows it too, so likely they’re going to settle on a price that looks very much like the winning bid.

But… let’s back up a minute. First, desire for an item doesn’t necessarily correlate perfectly with the ability to pay. Maybe Betty would have willingly paid twice as much as Al’s maximum price, but Al is much wealthier than Betty. This can kind of throw a wrench into things, for reasons we’ll see below.

Now, back to other “moves.” We’ve discussed how Xander can maximize his profit – but people care about things other than maximum revenue. What if Xander discovers that Betty wants the art piece because she is a dedicated art lover and superfan of the artist, and will display the piece at a local art gallery for the world to enjoy. Al, on the other hand, is an investor who doesn’t care about art at all – he intends to carefully store the piece, let it appreciate in value even further, and then resell it himself in the future. If Xander is an art aficionado himself, he may much prefer Betty to get the piece than Al.

But… let’s back up a minute again. Xander still needs money, or he wouldn’t be selling the piece at all. After all, he could display it in the gallery himself for the world to see. But he needs some liquid funds, for better or ill. So he’d rather let Betty have it – but if he says “I only want to sell it to Betty” then the price he’ll get is going to be way lower than the price he’ll get if Betty has to compete against other people.

What to do?

The thing for Xander to do is apply some conditions to the sale. You see, if you’re willing to forego a little of the control you have over the price, you can “buy” conditions on the sale. Xander could hold an auction for the art piece, but say “as part of the sale, you must sign a contract agreeing to store the piece in a local art gallery for the world to see for a period of at least ten years.” That’s going to lower his maximum price, both because he’ll be eliminating some potential buyers that don’t want to do that, and lowering the expected value of the piece even for the buyers still interested. But it will also satisfy one of Xander’s non-monetary desires, which is that the world be filled with art. He’ll get the maximum price he can within those conditions. Even if Betty is the ultimate winner, the fact that she has to bid against Carl means that Xander will get more than if he just said “I only want to sell to Betty.”

The more control over your price you forgo, the more control you have over conditions. As I said, Xander could forgo all price by just hanging it in the gallery himself – then he’d get to pick the gallery, how long it stayed, etc.

The same is true from the other side, by the way. If you’re the only one who wants a product and ten people have one to sell, you could just take the one who will part with it for the cheapest. But you can also see who will deliver it, who will gift-wrap it, and any number of other things.

The point here is to examine “price” as a concept beyond just the money that comes out of your pocket. As people exchange goods and services with each other, they also shift around the conditions under which we all operate. You’ll often be happier in your life if you look at those conditions, too.

The pattern of your life, that which you create and maintain and nourish, exists as a foundation. Its purpose is to provide the support for those few rare moments of perfection, of pure joy and satisfaction, that will come in their own time. Though they will come without your summons, they are easy to miss – easy to let slip through. You build a healthy pattern in your life so that they don’t.