I’ve seen this sentiment paraphrased in one way or another many times, in many different places. The gist is this:

“The cost of success is tons of hours of work, no social life, sacrificing your health & sleep, skipping family events, and putting all your money back into your work – if you’re not willing to do that, you won’t succeed.”

I mean… I can imagine something being worth that. If I truly believed that doing all that would cure cancer, I’d be morally obligated to do it. But for just “personal success?” I mean – if you don’t have any of those other things, what does “success” even mean?

Some people naturally have a high work ethic, and I’m a big supporter of hustle. But you also have to define success, not just seek the word.

Sometimes, when I’m driving, I’ll make a mistake and do something that upsets another driver. Or maybe it wasn’t even a mistake, just a necessary tactical decision due to some unusual but emergent circumstances. In any case, I can see that another driver is upset, and what I would love to do is find a way to contact them, apologize, and explain my reasons for doing what I did.

Obviously that’s not going to happen, so I started doing something else a few years ago, instead. Every time this occurred (and it wasn’t often – I’m a safe and considerate driver, by and large), I mentally noted what my behavior must have looked like to an outside observer, stripped of internal context. And then I filed that impression, and whenever another driver upset me by doing the same thing, I instantly forgave them. I just assumed that their reasons for doing whatever they did exactly mirrored mine in that one instance from long ago. “Sure, it looks like they just were inconsiderate and cut me off to make that exit, but maybe they also have a snapping turtle loose in the back seat and it’s trying to get at grandma’s birthday cake which you’ve been instructed to deliver to the nursing home that closes in ten minutes! Good luck, brother!”

(That one never actually happened, but you get what I’m saying.)

What quickly happened after I started doing this was that I realized no one had the ability to upset me on the road any more. Everything was expected, understandable, forgivable.

This extends way beyond road etiquette. Every mistake might be unique, but they definitely fall into broad categories that you’ve contributed to yourself, more than once. This humility of understanding can lead you to a far more peaceful inner life – I highly recommend it.

If you ask a question on a platform like Twitter, you might get an answer. If you really want an answer the thing to do is confidently state the wrong thing – people will swarm out of the woodwork to correct you, and you’ll have your answer faster.

People absolutely love the chance to be right, and you can use that to your advantage!

Here’s another way – if you want the chance to prove something, make an outrageous statement. Say something that seems untrue, but that you can back up. Make your boldest claim, and people will scramble to call you out. If you claim is one that can only be disproven by you failing, then they’ll have to give you the chance in order to prove themselves right.

And of course, you’ll prove them wrong.

Everyone is unique, but from our perspective, it’s everyone else that’s unique. We’re “normal” – the standard from which everyone else deviates.

That’s a natural thought pattern, but it can often lead to you undervaluing your unique skills or contributions. (Think about how no one thinks they have an accent – only other people have accents!) But no matter what you’re good at, you’re good at it for a unique reason. You have your own approach and methodology.

Identifying it is the tough part. You don’t think you have an accent, even though you do – and you don’t think you have a unique methodology for your skill set, either. You think you do things the “normal” way. Self-awareness is a virtue – step back and examine what you do. Talk to others and see how you differ.

And then strike the word “despite” from your vocabulary. Too often when someone does identify a uniqueness in their work, they say, “I’m good at X, despite the fact that I do it in this unusual way.”

No way! It’s because you do it that way. That’s your value-add! There is no normal way of doing things. There are statistical averages and groupings and so on, but the reality is that every single person has a spin.

Identify yours, and it becomes that much easier to demonstrate it and present it. Your differences are why you’re awesome.

My two youngest children both started pre-school today. Because of the conditions of the last year, the older of the two was delayed in starting by a year, and the school wants to keep general exposure to a reasonable minimum. Those things combined mean that they’re starting at the same time, and are in the same class. So the dynamic duo gets to have this adventure together, a fact which pleases me to no end.

When you’re big, it takes a lot to have a big adventure. But when you’re small, they’re all big adventures.

If you let anyone else assume anything about you, they will be wrong.

You are a complex person, with many facets. To truly understand you, someone would have to have lived every minute of your life, thought every one of your thoughts. Since no one can even come close to that, they have to guess at the gaps – and they will be wrong. Frequently.

So don’t let them assume. Coyness is not a virtue. Play your cards on the table, and be direct. Say who you are, what you want, what you can do. Tell your own story, because if people try to put you in a different one, it will be the wrong one.

Don’t blame people for being wrong. They can’t be otherwise unless you give them the answers.

Are you familiar with the flow state?

(Warning: deep rabbit hole. You could get lost learning about this!)

Every task you perform, you engage with somewhere at the intersection of your ability and the difficulty of the task. If the task is too easy for your ability, you’re bored. You won’t do your best work, you won’t fire all the creative cylinders, and you won’t want to do it for very long. If the task is too difficult for your ability level, you’ll be stressed. You won’t do your best work because you’ll be scrambling just to get over the most basic thresholds, you’ll encounter too much that you don’t understand, and you probably won’t do it for very long without a ton of mental strain.

If the ability and difficulty match, on the other hand, you get in the zone. You do really creative work, you engage and are satisfied. This is true regardless of where actual ability and difficulty rank, as long as they’re roughly even – toddlers can get into the flow zone as well as adults. The important thing is that as your ability increases (and it will; this is where it happens!), you have to push yourself into more difficult tasks as well.

In that section, you’ll find all the greatest rewards. Not only personal rewards such as learning and satisfaction, but also tangible, worldly rewards. Matching difficulty to ability is where you do things that other people value most, and therefore you get the most out of them. If you’re a fantastic defense attorney, you won’t get much reward from helping people get out of parking tickets, but you also won’t get any reward out of taking on cases that are so difficult that you always lose and never learn anything. You want to be right where you should be.

This isn’t easy! Most of the time, we’re in that “bored” or “stressed” section instead. The flow state has to be constantly adjusted, since if you’re in it, your ability is increasing all the time. And on top of that, there are major psychological barriers to changing from either “bored” or “stressed” to “flow.”

If you’re bored, the major psychological barrier is fear. If you want to move from bored to flow, you’re naturally trying to make your life harder, because right now your ability is outstripping the difficulty of your tasks. You know, intellectually, that the rewards are better, but any well-adjusted brain will have at least a little fear response when you’re about to try to level up your difficulty.

If you’re stressed, the major psychological barrier is guilt. If the difficulty if your tasks is outstripping your ability, then moving towards a flow state means taking on easier tasks, and that can wrack us with guilt. It can feel like giving up, or abandoning work we saw as important. And maybe it was important! But if you can’t accomplish it (yet), then you need to get into the flow state to level up.

If you’re any sort of video gamer, there’s a natural analogy here. Lots of video games of the RPG variety have a mechanic called “experience.” For non-gamers: your character in the game will get more powerful as you get experience, but you only get experience from tasks that are reasonably difficult. Most game scale this experience with the relative difficulty. So if your character is “level 10” on a 1-50 scale of power, then level 10 tasks will be appropriately difficult and give you some experience. Level 8 tasks will be easier, and probably give you a lot less experience. Level 12 tasks will give you more experience, but be much harder. When you reach a certain amount of experience, you “level up” and become level 11.

The important part of the analogy: if you’re Level 10, then level 1 tasks won’t give you any experience. They’re too easy to challenge you, and (just like in real life) we only grow from challenge. Meanwhile, a level 30 task would probably give you a ton of experience – except you can’t do it. Those tasks are impossible for a level 10 character.

So you can do level 1 tasks forever, but you’ll never grow. And you can attempt level 30 tasks forever, but you’ll always fail at them. The only way to grow is to get into the flow of doing tasks that are roughly equal to your level.

That’s a GREAT analogy for your life. Pick tasks that are at your level, get good at them, and then mentally award yourself the next level when it feels appropriate (hint: if you’re bored with tasks that challenged you two months ago, it’s time to level up!). If you can’t accomplish something, don’t get down on yourself and say “I guess I’m not good enough,” just say “I need to level up a few times first.”

Keep this in mind, and your life will be less frustrating, more fun, and far more rewarding.

As I opened up this page to write today’s entry, my oldest daughter bounced into the room.

“What are you writing about today?”

I asked her what she thought I should write about.

“Write about us kids, and how great we are. Or about how much fun you have with work. Or about teaching us stuff like art. Or just how happy you are with your family.”

I told her that those are the things I write about every day.

So I think it’s pretty great that she gets me, and that clearly I’m living the life aligned with the things I care about. I always try to do that, but it’s nice to get some outside confirmation that it’s going well. If you care about things, talk about them – especially to the people you love. They’ll help reinforce the path that your heart truly wants to travel.

There will be so many days in your life. So many more days than there will be hours in any one of them. Heck, far more than there will be minutes in any one of them.

Doing something for a whole day, every minute, pales in comparison to doing that thing one minute a day, every day of your life.

And a minute isn’t much.