Today I attended a TEDx Talk live. Six speakers gave their insights on a variety of topics, and unlike every other TEDx Talk I’ve ever watched, I got to be present in the room instead of watching it on YouTube.

It was wonderful. These sorts of events – pure speaking for the sake of idea transfer – give me incredible joy.

Listening to people talk about their thing, from their perspective, without any specific prompting or input from me creates an amazing space for my brain. It’s pure reception without navigation. Interest without agenda. This unfiltered flow of new viewpoints catalyzes new ideas at an incredible pace for me.

I encourage it! Watch documentaries almost at random. Pull books off the shelf without much concern for topic. The key isn’t the information you receive. It’s the ideas you generate as a result of your brain firing on all cylinders. Which it definitely doesn’t if it’s just processing familiar information into the same old buckets. So go out and find information so new to you that you don’t even have a bucket for it yet. That bucket will end up filling with gold.

Don’t try too hard to impose one. There is virtue in accepting the inputs for what they are. You can control the outputs anyway.

Remember “connect the dots?” There would be a page full of dots, and if you connected them with a continual line in the order listed, a picture would appear.

Life is like that, except for two major differences. The first is that you’re constantly making the picture yourself, by connecting each new dot to the next one you want. You meet a new co-worker that you like (dot), so you go get some dinner with them at a restaurant they like (dot), so you discover that the restaurant does a trivia night (dot), so you go to that and meet your new significant other (dot), and on and on and on. You keep making the life you want by connecting things in the order that you want.

The other way life is different is that occasionally, very unexpectedly, a totally new dot just appears in your life. Sure, everything is connected in some way, but some things definitely have only the most tenuous of threads tying them together.

Here’s the thing about those new dots, those totally unexpected events – they’re seeds. Seeds of new pictures, new adventures, new paths to even more dots. Or, you know, they could be nothing.

In order for them to be anything at all, you have to take the dot for what it is, and be willing to draw lines. Life is made of these lines – don’t leave them!

Beneath the way you act, the way you think, and even the way you interpret sensory signals are a set of core beliefs that are so deep you probably don’t even realize you have them.

You may have gained them when you were very young. They may have been imparted by important people in your life, such as your parents. They may have come from pivotal events in your formative years. But once you gain them, they almost never change. They’re the bedrock of the rest of you.

That makes them absolutely worth examining.

We are evolved creatures, and much of what we do comes from past experiences. But I don’t want to yield quote that much control over my destiny to a version of me that didn’t know what I know now. I want to be able to take my current knowledge and use it to adjust my core beliefs if doing so will be beneficial. In order to even make that judgment, I have to really be prepared to look at my core beliefs for what they are and accept that no matter what they are, there’s some possibility they’re not as accurate or helpful as they could be.

How would you act if one of you rejected one of your most deeply-held beliefs and replaced it with its opposite? Would your life improve? Would you improve the world?

I don’t think all beliefs are equal. I think some values, views, and convictions are better, and do more for the good of the world. I seek more of those, and I seek to reject those that don’t meet that standard. I would be foolish to claim that I’d already discovered all the truth there was.

You can overshoot or undershoot. You can do too much and you can do too little. Most of the time, you’re doing great either way!

We’ve all cooked too much food at some point. It’s not a waste; a little Tupperware and suddenly “mistakenly making too much food” turns into “intelligently preparing meals for the next few days.” Most effort rolls over. Wrote too many words? Put half of them into a new project.

Or maybe you undershot a little. You meant to build a bridge, but you built half a bridge. Half a bridge, by itself, isn’t much more useful than no bridge at all – but someone else out there is probably in possession of half a bridge, too. In fact, I guarantee it. Not only can you combine efforts, but the very act of doing so builds something even more valuable than the bridge itself – it builds somewhere for it to go. Now you have a new friend!

The point is, don’t get too hung up on “the right amount” of a good thing. Your life isn’t really discrete like that. You’ll be cooking and writing and building your whole life, a continual stream of pasta and pages and bridges. You can always chop it all up into the correct portions later. For now, just do the things you love and let them flow. They’ll connect when they’re meant to.

Today’s post takes the long way around to get to you – I wrote this a few weeks ago and it was picked up by a marvelous organization who shared it on their own blog. (But since I wrote it, it’s totally not a cop-out to use it for today’s post!)

I’ll share the post and also promote the org by linking it here. Go have a read!

People are imperfect. But “imperfect” doesn’t mean “bad.” Far from it!

That’s a vital thing to remember because people are going to let you down your whole life. You’re going to have certain expectations in your times of trouble and need, and people – good people – have no way of reading your mind. You might not even have a good way of reading your own mind, in the sense that many of your expectations will be subconscious ones.

For instance, you may reach out to a loved one because you’re having a bad day, and your expectation is “I will feel better.” And then you do reach out, but you don’t feel better after. You don’t consciously know what you wanted them to do or say – if you did, you probably wouldn’t have needed to reach out. But they tried. Whatever they did, it was their way of helping.

Just love people for that. The world is full of imperfect people trying so very hard to help you. They will fail, time and again. Love them anyway.

A little over twenty years ago, I met two of my closest friends. We met as part of a shared geeky gaming club, and we’ve been together ever since. We’ve all grown up, we all have children.

Today, I took each of our oldest kids and played those same games with them. It was amazing – my childhood and adolescence reignited. They had a blast. They probably didn’t have half as much fun as I did, though.

My father had many hobbies. He never tried to force them on me, but he was always open about them – and if I showed the slightest bit of interest, he poured as much fuel onto that fire as he could. The result was that I shared many interests with him, gaining great bonds together, but I also learned how to pick what I liked. How to become interested in things because I wanted to be.

That’s what I wanted to do with my own kids (and the kids of my dear friends, who I love as my own). My kids share several of my interests, but they also have a bunch of their own.

The torch doesn’t stay the same when you pass it. It changes shape and color, as it should be. I am thrilled beyond measure to simply bask in its light as someone else carries it.

Lots of changes to your timeline would be bad. You’ve heard this concept before, maybe – about how if you weren’t three minutes late for that appointment, maybe you would have been hit by a bus instead. Of course, maybe you get hit by a bus because you’re three minutes late…

But in the larger scope of things, changes to when stuff happens in your life have rippling effects that you can’t possibly visualize. Your life wouldn’t be exactly the same if you’d gotten that new job six months earlier or later. Things are too interconnected for that.

So try not to pick a single moment in time and lament it. Your life wouldn’t contain all the good stuff it contains now but none of the bad stuff if only you hadn’t missed that one phone call or botched that one date. It would be different in many ways, better and worse, because time works like that.

You are who you are, and this is where you are. Build from here. The right place is right here, after all, and the right time is now.