My oldest child is 8 – going on 9 in about a week. My middle child is 4 tomorrow.

The oldest one, this year, decided all on her own to throw a party for her younger sister for her birthday. She bought party supplies with her own money, planned out games and activities, and stayed up late the night before decorating. All so that her four-year-old sister would have “a really special birthday.”

This year has been tough on a lot of people, but I truly believe kids are getting it worse than anyone. My oldest is a very social creature, and thankfully she’s quite adaptable – she has many friends that she communicates with regularly online and makes a great game of it. She’s gathered group Zoom calls together just so she could read out loud to them from her favorite books. She’s organized games of “messenger tag” that keep them entertained for hours. And she takes every opportunity (of which I give her all that I’m able) to run around outside with absolutely anyone. All are welcome into the circle of her friendship.

But her younger sister doesn’t have the same resources – for one, she simply doesn’t know as many people. So she primarily relies on her siblings as her friend group.

And because the world is wonderful in many ways, those three siblings are thick as thieves. They’re an amazing circle of friends, those three. I swear, it’s like watching something out of a movie or young adult novel. They’re like the Baudelaires. They play and scheme and build and conspire together as an inseparable team. And when the chips are down, these three kids absolutely pull out all the stops for each other.

Just like today.

Things don’t get steadily easier as you practice, and that’s a good thing. Sometimes there will be spikes of difficulty that can feel like “moving backwards.” In reality, that’s you reaching new levels of mastery.

In the best cases, that is. Sometimes it really is you getting comfortable and starting to atrophy.

See, you can get pretty good at something fairly quickly, and then it can become easy to slip into a comfort zone. Once you’re there, you’ll be, well… comfortable. And you won’t want to get uncomfortable, so you’ll use the same solutions and techniques that work and you’ll stay in your small zone of expertise.

But then those techniques will become boring and tired. So they won’t hold your passion, and so the work will once again start to get harder.

That’s the sign to kick it up. Push harder, try a new thing. Light it on fire again.

“I need a fish.”

Okay. They’re over there in the river. Go get some.

“But I’m not sure what kind of fish I want.”

Doesn’t really matter. There aren’t any fish on land, so no matter what kind of fish you want, you’re in the wrong spot. Go get in the river.

“What if the fish are hard to catch?”

They’re impossible to catch here on land.

“What if I catch the wrong kind of fish?”

Then you let it go and catch a different fish. Right now, you don’t even know what the ‘wrong kind of fish’ is, because you don’t know anything about fish at all. Go in the river and catch some fish, see what happens.

“But it’s wet and cold in the river, plus it’s harder to stand there. It’s warm and dry and easy here.”

There are also no fish here.

“I don’t even know how to catch fish.”

Step 1: Get in the river.

“That’s easy for you to say! You’ve got fish!”

Yes. You’ll notice I’m also wet, because I got this fish from the river. Look, there’s no way around this. Fish are in the river. You can go hungry lamenting that there are no fish on land, or you can try some hare-brained scheme to coax the fish out of the water, or you can just go get wet and get fish.

Some things, even if they’re not easy, are actually very, very simple.

One of the main draws (for me, at least) of travel to faraway lands is the potential for immersion into a culture very different from my own. Human culture flows like a river, both shaping and shaped by its environment. I really enjoy witnessing and experiencing the different shapes that can take.

But I can also do that a mile from home, because subcultures are every bit as interesting to me as cultures. We live in a culture-driven era. People don’t just like certain kinds of music, they form deep and meaningful communities around that music, with slang and behavioral mores and clothing conventions and everything else. They do it for television shows and movies. They do it for hobbies. They do it for everything.

This can sometimes skate the edge of being dangerous; when your subculture subsumes your personal identity you can find yourself in a dangerous place. But that’s why I love multi-subcultural-ism. I love being a tourist in many subcultures, enjoying what they have! I don’t have to adopt it as my own, but I can love the visit.

For example, you may visit a foreign country and marvel at all you see while still desiring ultimately to return home. Now imagine doing the same thing with a Star Trek convention. You don’t have to even be remotely interested in becoming a Trekkie to just really enjoy that visit. Seeing the “native dress” of cosplay and the quaint linguistic charm and even the foreign foods.

Seeing different things helps us examine our own things and realize that they’re not “defaults,” they’re one of many possible arrangements of culture. And once we see that, we also see how it could change, how it could be improved, and how we don’t have to barricade ourselves behind it for fear of any possible alteration.

Go to a punk show. Go to a Star Trek convention. Watch the Super Bowl and then go play Dungeons & Dragons. Go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and then go to New York Fashion Week and then go to a political rally that’s outside your own political tribe. You don’t have to do any of these things with the intention of becoming a permanent transplant. But you can do all of them to become wiser about both improving your own culture, and maintaining your individuality in the face of it. Both good things.

The smaller and more optional the group, the easier it is to define the rules.

Let’s say you only want to hang out with people that wear blue hats. It’s very easy to start a “Blue Hat Club” where the requirements for admission is a love of azure headwear. It’s much, much harder to try to take the broader community you already belong to and force everyone to wear a blue hat.

That’s filtering versus forcing. You can filter for just about anything. You can effectively force very, very little.

This is also why small groups are so much more effective than larger ones at just about everything. Economies of scale aside, it’s way easier to filter for the kinds of working traits you want than to force all of a very large group to adopt them.

This principle applies to just about everything. Don’t try to force all of your larger social circle to engage in the activity you want – present the activity and create a smaller group of people who actually want to go birdwatching or whatever. Don’t try to force your larger society into your cultural beliefs, create or join a smaller community based around those beliefs. Don’t try to force your large company to adopt the practices you think are best, splinter off with the group that agrees with you.

“Live and let live” is powerful medicine for nearly all aspects of live. The smaller community you choose or create will be superior to the larger one that you eternally argue with and have power struggles within. Just leave it be.

Success is best, shared.

We stand on the shoulders of giants! What an honor it is to occasionally be the giant whose shoulders are stood upon. Success builds upon success and grants new power to that which follows. It’s not a fixed pie by any means.

Each victory is a new tool, each challenge overcome is an inspiration to another, each success is a roadmap to a new one. Knowledge begets more knowledge, so share in your successes. Build a hall of many triumphs.

Imagine that at some point during Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career (let’s say around the Predator-Terminator era), I convinced him to let me “train” him. Maybe I even had to pay him for the privilege, or maybe he just owed me an unrelated favor. In any case, I tell him to lift some weights or whatever, having predictably exactly zero impact on his total physique and resulting success.

But guess what that does for me? It lets me say, in perfect truthfulness, that “I trained Arnold Schwarzenegger!”

Okay, so that’s just step one of my devious plan. What’s step 2? Well, using my “success” at training Arnold, I now begin to advertise my training services – my ultra-elite, highly-sought-after (lol) services. If I’m good at marketing, soon I’ll have all sorts of people trying to hire me as their trainer. Except, I don’t actually know anything about training – isn’t that a problem?

Heck no! See, all I have to do is be super exclusive about who I allow to be my client. I won’t take scrawny people trying to get buff, I’ll only take people who are already super buff and want to get even more buff. People that were already going to be successful on average. Then I’ll give them busywork that sounds good and build a lot of ritual into it. There will be plenty of success stories among my clients, I can claim credit, and each new success story feeds into the whole process.

I don’t have to do a thing. And I’d be immune from criticism! My own clients couldn’t criticize me, because if they were successful what could they criticize? They’d never have a counter-factual to prove that they could have been successful without me, and claiming so would make them seem ungrateful or foolish. If they weren’t successful, I could easily blame their own work ethic, and not my training – after all, look at all of my clients who were successful! And people who weren’t my clients couldn’t criticize my methods, because what do they know?

But as long as I always screened for clients who I could predict would be successful without me anyway and convinced them that, on the contrary, they needed me in order to succeed – then I’d have a steady stream of self-sustaining false positives to keep my grift going forever.

Now, you might think all of this was an allegory for something or other. You’re probably right. This grift exists in a lot of different forms, all around you. Whenever you see someone taking credit for contributing to someone else’s success, be careful. It does happen! We help, and are helped by, others all the time. Very few people succeed entirely without help, mentorship, training, coaching, etc. But that just makes the grift version that much easier, because a real version of the same effect does exist. Bill Belichick probably contributed in a real and meaningful way to the success of the Patriots, for example. But that doesn’t mean that you can always tell. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that any team that Belichick coached would do as well. There are lots of factors to consider.

Consider them.

I am more interested in knowing myself better than in knowing most things external to myself. I think of it as knowing your tools being more important than knowing your project. If you know your tools, you can accomplish anything.

But to understand yourself better, you need tools as well. External tools. Maybe there are some truly great philosophers that could get to great insights from just themselves, first principles, and logic, but I’m not among them. I need books and conversation and music and experiences and all these other things. They help me understand myself better, which then helps me get more out of those things, which helps me understand myself better.

And then what? Well, then nothing. Maybe I pass along one percent of the knowledge I’ve gained. Most of it wouldn’t be relevant to others. Maybe a little bit would be relevant to people very much like me, but how many of those could there be? Maybe, again, some truly great philosophers manage to create patterns of thought that can be duplicated by many and helpfully, too. Probably not me. But maybe I can donate a clue here or there.

It’s good to hang lanterns as you go. Leave those clues. For yourself, as much as for anyone.

Your goals aren’t stationary. They will move to evade you. You have to be prepared to track them when they do.

Just because you’ve made 10% progress towards your goal doesn’t mean that there’s always guaranteed 90% remaining. Those goalposts shift! Sometimes they shift in your favor, but often not.

Get reacquainted with your target on occasion. Track it, don’t let it get away.

I am a raging completionist. Whenever I get an idea in my head, I envision the end state of that idea, and then I want to work maddeningly on it until it’s done. Whenever I am delayed by something outside of my control, it itches.

Here’s another problem: I don’t instinctively like sharing my work while it’s in motion. And another: I think (incorrectly) that I do my best work alone.

All of these add up to a dilemma where I take on a project, then get stuck. I can’t finish immediately, and that frustrates me, and the frustration causes me to distance myself from other sources of help and inspiration, and thus I feel incomplete until I’ve ground my way out, using far more effort than should have been required.

Great advice I received today on this topic: you can’t get to a hundred percent without getting to five percent.