A few months ago, I committed to a small experiment. My oldest daughter really wanted her own “art studio.” So we worked together and cleared out the space in the basement, then built her a studio. We went shopping for art supplies, and I basically said “yes” to everything. I didn’t question what she wanted things for, I let her get things just because she thought they were neat. I didn’t make her pre-plan specific projects or even commit to specific art styles.

I just helped her create a space very conducive to her creativity (lots of fun decorations, chalkboards, funky lights, easels, workbenches, etc.) and filled it with the supplies to create. I avoided any of the stereotypical “parent talk” like “now that I bought you all that stuff, I expect you to take it seriously and blah blah blah.” I didn’t turn it into a chore of any kind.

I just created the conditions for creativity. As an additional layer, I also made it her most “free” space – she has to keep her room very clean and organized, but I’m fine with her having a messy art studio as long as it doesn’t get ridiculous.

The end result: she spends enormous amounts of time in there. She creates things constantly – things I’d never have imagined. She paints pictures, but she also makes videos of herself producing fantastically-colored slimes with instructions on how to make them for other kids. She’s started painting old Tupperware containers with bright acrylic paints, turning them into wonderous castles and vessels. She makes tiny animals out of clay.

She creates. She learns, and she explores, and then she talks about that creation – she has a passion, and she shares it with me constantly.

Take the training wheels off – of everything. Create the conditions under which the things you want can manifest, and then let them do so. Put yourself in front of a notebook, put your employees in a room with great tools, put your friends in a room with musical instruments and good acoustics. Watch what happens.

Plant the seed of creation. You don’t have to grow it today. The smallest task can be a single word that starts to grow on its own. When you come back, you’re tending a seedling. But you never get anything if you don’t plant. So don’t be afraid of it – of the single word.

Plant.

Pick a category of experience: cars you’ve driven, bosses you’ve worked for, whatever you want. Quickly come up with your five best examples from that category, then your five worst. Write them down.

Next, take all ten examples and write them down in chronological order. On average, does the most recent half of the list contain more of the good examples or more of the bad examples?

This is a decent way to think about whether a particular thing is getting better or worse for you over time. If they’re getting better, awesome! If not – this might be your first warning flag to start looking a little closer.

Some level of communication will always rely on vulnerability. If you build impenetrable walls to protect you from the outside world, you have to remember that walls work both ways.

It’s better to funnel than to block. Let people know lots of stuff about you! Just make sure it’s all stuff you willingly share. People will want to look, anyway – so let them find.

Don’t be afraid of information, in either direction. I promise, you’ll survive the sharing of it.

“I’m opposed to animal cruelty. So every year, I donate 20% of my income from my ivory-trading job to the ASPCA.”

See… this is a problem. I think most people would recognize it as such. At worst, it’s rank hypocrisy, but even at best (assuming you really are genuinely concerned about animal cruelty), you’re working against yourself.

So sure, most people would recognize the dilemma there. But fewer people recognize weaker versions of this story, even though they happen every day.

“I care deeply about my children, which is why I put almost all of my income from my 90-hour-per-week job into their college funds.”

You’re trading away the thing you care about in order to support the thing you care about in some other (usually weaker) fashion.

There’s a balance, of course. If I spent 24/7 with my kids, we’d be homeless. But it’s not just a matter of deciding exactly how many hours is the right number versus how many dollars earned is enough. It’s about aligning those things together. Making the pieces of your life work in tandem, instead of against one another.

The person that trades ivory to fund the ASPCA might genuinely want to end animal cruelty, and working the ivory trade might be the most money they can make, so they’ve done some misguided math and decided to stick with it. After all, if they make less money, they’ll have less to donate. But they could instead work for the ASPCA, make less money overall, but help their favored cause more. And all the pieces of their life would be in harmony.

Don’t make bad trades just to maximize a single outcome. Make optimal trades by eliminating internal competition between the various aspects of your life. The less you fight yourself, the better.

Sometimes not getting something is a victory, when the conditions for getting it would outweigh the gain. If someone offers you a poison apple and you decline, you shouldn’t lament “oh no, I didn’t get the apple.” You should celebrate: “I didn’t get poisoned!”

The thing to remember in these moments is that there was never an apple in the first place. There was just a conveyor of poison, a Trojan horse to sneak bad things into your life. There’s no equation where you can say, “I’ll be okay with a little bit of poison if I get a delicious apple,” because you won’t even get the apple. You’ll take one bite, and be sick and dying before you’re finished.

Remember that when you summon up the courage to turn down a job offer, or a promotion, or any other opportunity that is dripping with ichor. The “opportunity” was never really there, if it came with so much poison you’d perish before you realized the gains. Instead, celebrate being savvy enough to avoid pitfalls, and look for the apples that aren’t poisoned. I promise you, there are plenty.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s gave me access to a lot of shows for which I hold a great deal of nostalgic fondness. Everything from Masters of the Universe to Transformers, Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers, Gargoyles, G.I. Joe and Inspector Gadget. These shows all shared a fundamental element – they all tried to do some sort of “life lesson” integration, usually in the form of a little pep talk from the heroes to the audience at the end, but also maybe from some mentor figure to the heroes at some point in the episode instead.

These lessons could be wide-ranging, but generally centered on themes of kindness, honesty or acceptance. Nothing wrong with that, for what it was. But every single one of these shows was also – perhaps quite unintentionally – teaching another lesson. The same lesson, week after week, stronger than all the others, albeit with a less likely messenger.

Perseverance.

You see, all of these shows featured villains. Bad guys who would hatch scheme after scheme, only to be invariably foiled by the heroes time after time. And you know what? They were never daunted for a moment. They never took a week off, never gave up, and never for a single second even doubted that this time, this time, it would work.

Bring that energy into your own life. Have the same confidence that Skeletor, Cobra Commander, or Dr. Claw bring to their 156th plot. After all, even if you don’t succeed, there’s always – always – next time, Gadget. Next time.

It is a very natural trait of humans to admire people, and then desire what they desire, rather than desiring anything from internal first principles. We see this in the influence of our parents, our community leaders, our heroes. What they want, we want – and then we rationalize that desire as if we were its architect to begin with.

Fighting that impulse may be a lost cause, but there’s a nice hack around it. Pick people who desire good things as your icons. Admire people not for what they are or their cultural status, but for the things they desire – the things they truly desire, not just what they say they desire. (The two are often very, very different.)

Some people are not wildly successful, not pillars of their community, not celebrities or influential – but they desire good. Good in themselves, good in the world. And they work towards that desire, because it’s a true goal, and not a status-seeking declaration, devoid of weight.

Admire those people, and absorb their desire as your own.

Step right up, let’s play a game!

In front of you are two opaque jars. The game is simple – reach into a jar and pull out a marble. If you pull out a green marble, you win a prize! If you pull out a red one, you don’t. There’s no cost to play other than your time.

If you pull a green marble out of Jar A, you win $50. If you pull a green marble out of Jar B, you win $100.

You want to know the ratio of marbles in each jar? Sure thing. Jar A has exactly one marble, and it’s green. That’s right, you’re guaranteed to win.

Jar B has ten marbles. Nine of them are green, and there’s one red one.

Now, if you can only choose one: Which jar do you choose?

From a coldly logical standpoint, Jar B is the better choice. A 90% to win $100 translates into the value of that choice being $90, whereas the value of the choice to pull a marble out of Jar A is $50. But some people are super, super risk-averse, and the idea of pulling the one red marble out of Jar B fills them with a sort of existential dread, so they might actually pull from Jar A.

But what if I changed the game up a bit – what if I said you could play the game 10 times in a row, with the one restriction being that you had to make the same choice each time?

Now “Choice A” is worth $500, but “Choice B” is worth $900, and the likelihood that you win nothing is extremely small. In fact, even if you pulled the one red marble 4/10 times, you’d still have won more with Choice B than with Choice A.

Okay, elementary stats discussion is done. Let’s make this a little more challenging, but also a little closer to reflecting reality.

I said in the beginning that there was no cost to play this game other than your time, so let’s keep that rule – but let’s say the game takes an hour to play. After all, it’s popular, so you’ve got to wait in line for an hour. Well, an hour isn’t nothing, and for some people it might not actually be worth it. If you don’t have any other way of turning that hour into at least $50, then it’s probably a good use of your time, but if you make $300/hour at your normal job, then it’s pretty pointless to do this.

But what if you make $70/hour?

Well, now we have an interesting discussion. If you normally can turn an hour into $70, then playing the game is still worth it – but only if you pick Jar B. Picking Jar A is a guaranteed “win,” but at the cost of twenty bucks! Picking Jar B is worth twenty extra bucks to you as a statistical measure, but also carries some risk; 90% of the time you’ll come out $30 ahead, and the other time you’ll lose the $70 opportunity cost you “paid” to play.

So the game is not worth it if you’re risk-averse, but it is worth it if you aren’t!

This is one of the biggest barriers to people becoming much more financially successful in their careers. There is a plateau in almost every career journey where in order to move up, you have to accept more risk. It might be because the best way “up” is entrepreneurship, it might just be that the competitive nature of higher tiers within your industry necessitates an increased willingness to “put yourself out there” and commit to projects or sample work without guaranteed up-front payment. No matter the source, however, there is more risk as you advance.

(Here’s a personal example: As part of my work, I do free consultations with people. Many, even most of these turn into paid work, but of course some of them don’t. If I was so risk-averse that I was never willing to do anything that wasn’t guaranteed to give me income, then I wouldn’t do those consultations, but clearly I’d be poorer overall as a result, given the value of the work they generate most of the time. In a very real sense, I play this marble game every week.)

Many people, at one point or another, find themselves in this position. They’ve reached a point where their “guaranteed” income level has largely maxed out. Their total income level could be much higher overall, but only by accepting some day-to-day statistical risk. And many people, because they don’t have the proper tools for evaluating the choice, make the wrong one. Hopefully this has given you a new tool – so that when it’s time for you to make that choice, you go for all the marbles – the red and green ones alike.

What you’re passively but consistently exposed to will have a far greater impact on your life than intense yet sporadic bursts of information you seek out.

Imagine two topics: celebrity gossip and ornithology.

Imagine someone who really likes celebrity gossip, so they follow a dozen tabloid-style social media accounts, watch shows like TMZ, and have friends who share the same interest. Imagine this person also has to pass a class on ornithology to graduate, so when they have a paper due they research the relevant facts and put them into reports.

Which subject does this person know more about?

If you really want to learn about anything, you have to make that thing part of the natural flow of information that surrounds you. That flow exists no matter what – but you have a great deal of control over its content.