I am pro-whimsy.

I love putting magic into my kids’ lives. I do the “Elf on the Shelf” thing at Christmastime, and I go all out. One time I deliberately made a mess in my kitchen at night, put several of my kids’ stuffed animals and dolls around it, and then in the morning scolded them for making a mess while playing, just so that they would be convinced for a while that their toys came to life at night and caused mischief. I love the dad in Calvin & Hobbes.

As my kids got older, this sharpened their bullshit detectors (a welcome side effect!), but they also started playing along, creating fun whimsical tales of their own to explain the world to me.

But, as in all things with children, you must be careful of their hearts.

My son recently told me that he was worried that if he asked me a serious question, I wouldn’t tell him the real truth. More importantly, he said that this belief made him hesitant to even ask me important questions in the first place. That is a dangerous place to be, and I never want that.

So first, I apologized to him. Genuinely. I told him that his trust was the most important thing to me, and that I would tell him the whole truth from now on.

He told me he still wanted the funny stories, though. So his suggestion was to give me a code word that meant “I want the real truth this time.” I thought that was amazingly mature of him (he’s 7!), and I gave him my word that I would always adhere to the code word’s command.

Whimsy, magic, and wonder are all vital. But all children deserve truth from their parents when they request it.

One principle I try to remember is “everything is obvious when you know the answer.” People are bad at riddles, and when you know the solution it seems easy to solve. That’s a good principle when designing riddles, but it’s a great principle when remembering to communicate. People can’t guess what’s in your mind, even if it seems incredibly obvious to you what you’re hinting at. So don’t leave clues – give the solution that you want someone to know.

A small tip that works for me to minimize distractions when I’m trying to get a lot of work done: I schedule some.

I don’t schedule “breaks,” because I have a tendency to want to DO things on my breaks. It might be a break from work, but then I still want to squeeze in a quick workout or run some unrelated errand, and I’ll feel the same creeping sense of misplaced energy if I don’t. So instead, I schedule the things I know distract me, right in the agenda.

There will be an entry for “go poke around in your board games for a bit,” and knowing that I’ve accounted for that will keep me from wanting to do it until then. And then I do it, and it actually gives me quite a boost of mood and energy. As a result, I take better breaks than if I’d tried to take a normal one!

What works for me might not work for you, but you can always give it a try.

Imagine reading a series of books. You really enjoy them, and the story is building wonderfully. You finish the fourth book in the series and go to find the fifth, only to discover that there is no fifth, and there never will be – perhaps the author has passed away or has concretely retired from writing. Isn’t that frustrating?

I don’t mind taking my time. I don’t need to finish a seven-book series in a week. But I want to know all seven books exist before I start.

Today, I faced a fairly major inconvenience with terrible timing, as the result of actions taken by a small business owner I had hired. He’s a young man; younger than me by quite a bit. He’s a hustler, and good guy, but he did something careless that caused me quite a spot of trouble.

By itself, that wouldn’t be too bad. Accidents and mistakes happen; such is life. But when I brought the matter to his attention only a few minutes after he departed, he got himself fired. How? Instead of fixing the mistake, he told me he could only come back and fix it if he canceled another job and thus would have to charge me. Basically, to complete the job I’d already paid him to do.

Now, I really do think he’s a good guy. I think he’s just inexperienced in the ways of business. I’m open to the idea of him making a high-integrity play and earning back my business. In fact, I’d welcome it! But the lesson I hope he takes away is that doing good work is necessary but not sufficient to keep loyal customers. Your ethic matters, too.

We did have a nice talk where I explained this to him. He apologized and we were both well-mannered. The door isn’t shut forever, definitely. But this lesson in business comes courtesy of my father – though it went through a better filter, first. My father wouldn’t have been well-mannered.

And I didn’t “pass on” the problem. My kids were home, and they volunteered to help me, but I was clear that they didn’t have to. And I didn’t yell at them or treat them like they’d done something wrong. I kept my frustration from weaponizing itself into multi-directional anger, in other words.

Another filter.

We can take the best of the generations before us, all their might and wonder, and still leave behind a few of their flaws. The better filter of time and lessons is us.

If things are going well and you’re comfortable, that’s exactly the time when you need to disrupt yourself a little. You need to push to a new goal, take on a new challenge, or assign yourself something new to build. This is even more true the older you get.

It’s not just because it’s good for the soul, even though it is. It’s because it’s inevitable that your comfort will be disrupted anyway, from the outside. No machine lasts forever, and you will have new challenges thrust upon you by life, whether you want them or not.

When that happens, it’s not good to be out of practice. If you’re too comfortable, too sedentary, then those challenges double in difficulty. The very act of building a new machine becomes overwhelming, regardless of the inherent difficulty in the task itself, simply because your life is so solid. It’s good to have solid walls, but they go both ways.

Is your life good right now? Excellent – go find a way to make it a little harder. Just choose a good payoff for your challenge, and you’ll grow in all ways, and your new machine will be even better than your old one.

Happy New Month!

It’s time to revisit old goals. There are wins and losses, and I’m generally a forward-facing guy. But some of the goals I’ve failed to meet this year are important, and it’s time to build on what progress I made and cross a few finish lines. So this month, I’m taking stock of where I want to be by the end of the year and comparing that to the goals I’ve set so far and refining the plan. There are things to do before 2025 is complete, and I have four months to accomplish them.

Wish me luck, and may your own goals be revisited well!

Nothing lasts forever, and yet everything does. A moment may end, but the moment will always have existed. Nothing can undo what has been done, and so the moments you love can stay frozen in the amber of your heart for all time.

Carry what you want.

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” So waste it with the best people.

Sometimes, you destroy something to understand it.

Think about dissecting frogs in school, if you did that. You’re taking something apart, destroying it. But it’s a physical thing, an object – the understanding it grants you is far greater. Objects only have the value we imbue in them, and our greatest value is knowledge.

So take apart that old toaster or whatever. Don’t cling to a thing so much that it stands in the way of enlightenment.