Babies and toddlers learn a lot really quickly. I mean, they learn so fast you can watch it in real time. I remember the first time one of my kids learned how to get water into a cup and bring it to her mouth, it was like watching the Moon Landing. And suddenly they go from not even being able to pick up an object to being completely proficient in its use in about 5 minutes.

The other day I was teaching my 3-year-old knife safety. Minute one, she was timid about holding the knife. Minute four, she was slicing up vegetables like she’d been a professional chef for years.

Little kids can learn so much so quickly for two reasons. First, they don’t know anything to start. That’s important, not only because it means there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit of knowledge and plenty of space to put it, but it also means they’re clear of a lot of misconceptions or prior bad habits that would prevent learning.

The second reason is because most parents keep their kids in relatively low-risk environments. There’s almost zero risk to failure for kids. Not only physical danger, but social danger – no one is making mean-spirited fun of a baby for failing to grab a spoon correctly and getting applesauce in her hair.

Humans deeply care about both kinds of risk, and that often prevents us from doing the kinds of stupid things that would actually lead to really rapid information-gathering.

If you want to learn something quickly, first build an environment where you have little risk. This isn’t hard! In front of your computer, by yourself – boom, you’ve done it. Once you have that, get stupid.

You don’t know how to use a new piece of software that your job is introducing? Open it up, and just hit random buttons on your keyboard until something happens. Something will! And your proficiency will grow rapidly from there.

Imagine how quickly and easily you could learn to drive a car if it were impossible to hurt yourself while doing so. Like, imagine they made a virtual reality driving simulator that was so accurate that it really felt like you were driving in real life, except that you could be by yourself, immune from harm, and totally invisible to other people. You could be an expert driver in hours.

Well, we’re not there yet with driving. You still have to learn to drive slowly, because there’s risk involved, so you can’t be stupid. But with a lot of things, that’s not the case. Lower your risk, and then goof around. You’ll have fun and learn quickly – just like those kids do.

I have a particular client who has been doing absolutely stellar work recently. I commented as such, how much she’s accomplished and how far she’s come, and she said “It doesn’t feel like it.”

As a father, something I notice is that my kids never seem to age. I mean, they obviously do, but they never seem to. The only time it becomes apparent is when I have cause to really reflect on what they were like in the past, most usually because I look at a picture of them from the past. I see my children every day, so their growth is always incremental from the last moment I saw them. Taken in small doses, it seems to vanish entirely. Only in big chunks can you notice a distinct change.

On occasion, write down what your life is like on that day. Date it, and just put it away somewhere. That way, on occasion you can look at these snapshots the way I occasionally look at old pictures of my kids. And just as I say “wow, they really have grown,” you can say the same for yourself.

Moving a mountain never feels like moving a mountain. Because you don’t move mountains; you move rocks. But if you move enough of them then the mountain moves, too.

People often have big epiphanies or major breakthroughs that don’t actually lead to any changes in behavior or lifestyle. The inertia of your daily life is a powerful force.

If you think about it, most of what you’ll do each day is set. You’ll sleep, probably in the same spot you slept the night previous. You’ll wake up and do some amount of “morning routine” that doesn’t change. You have to spend X hours a day feeding and grooming yourself. You probably have a schedule of work. And so on.

And in order to do any of these things with even a prayer of efficiency, you probably do them in a relatively stable order. So you don’t have a whole lot of time left over to begin with. And now you’ve had this huge epiphany, but it might not affect most of the stuff I just mentioned. Did your major breakthrough change the fact that you have to sleep and eat and shower and go to the bathroom and dress yourself and talk to your children and pay your bills? Maybe it changed how you do some of that, but if 85% of your day stays the same, how do you expect the new idea to stick?

So… move your desk.

Or your bed. Or park your car in a different spot. Or get a radically different haircut. Do something that you’ll see every day and will remind you that you did that thing specifically to mark the occasion of a major idea that you want to act on. Disrupt your own routine without abandoning what it gives you. So that the idea has something to grab onto, to stick to, and grow.

Some folks will put about a hundred times more mental energy into lamenting the loss of something than it would take to either get it back or make a new one.

There are a very, very small number of “once in a lifetime” things. Most things you value can be repaired or replaced – from favorite mementos to interpersonal relationships. Either accept that it’s gone and move on, or work to undo the damage caused by its absence.

But sorrow will carry you down with it. Shed, and move forward.

Most people say “no” far too reflexively. They dismiss or decline before they’ve even thought about it. They say no to things because they’ve said no to them before, or because there was even the slightest bit of uncertainty in the option, or even because they’ve set their internal default to “no.” This is a terrible habit.

Why? Because a reflexive “no” almost never gains you anything in life, but every single thing you said “no” to was an opportunity to gain something, even if only information. Your two options for answering any opportunity should be “conditional yes” or “deliberate no.”

A conditional yes is just that – a yes, “if.” It’s a good first answer. But the other is equally valid if done correctly. There’s nothing inherently wrong with saying “no,” of course. You can – and should – say “no” to a great many opportunities. But don’t let it be your default or your reflex. Think about why.

How can you raise the cost of a “no” on yourself? Simple. Keep a “No Jar.” It works just like a swear jar (a concept that can be applied in lots of interesting ways), except that instead of putting in a dollar when you curse, you put in a dollar when you say a reflexive no. A “deliberate no” is free – so if you take your time, think about it, come up with several reasons why the answer is “no” and what would have to be different to make it a “yes” – then that’s different. That’s free. But a “no” fired off within seconds of hearing the option? That costs a dollar.

“I don’t know what I want to eat tonight,” you lament. Your friend or partner suggests a place, and you immediately scowl and say “nah.” Boom – one dollar in the jar. Looking for work and a family member sends you a job listing? If you immediately trash it, that’s a dollar. The point isn’t to force you to say “yes” to everything; that’s why it’s a dollar and not $100. It’s just to raise the cost of saying “no” just a little bit so that you’re more likely to give each option a proper weighing and build a habit of keeping an open mind.

And here’s the side benefit – when you’re ready to say “yes” to something truly great, you’ll have a little startup capital to do it with.

A clean house is a fortress in which you can weather any siege the outside world can throw at you.

No matter what your living situation is, it’s improved by cleaning it. You can live out of a car, but it’s still better to live out of a clean car. Clutter is the fertile soil in which grow the weeds that will poison and choke you.

Clean your space.

Kids break stuff. It’s sort of natural. You should encourage it.

Don’t make kids afraid to break things. You should teach them healthy respect and not wanton destruction, of course. But they shouldn’t be afraid to touch things and experiment and even take them apart.

How else will they learn how to put them together? Most sense of the physics of the world comes intuitively, though contact and experimentation. You can’t ever understand how a hammer feels, predict the arc of the swing in your hand, if you’ve never done it. Reading about hammers, watching videos about hammers – it’s not enough. You’ve got to swing one.

And for kids, sometimes that means swinging them onto little toy cars in the driveway. It’s okay.

In the world of sales, compensation is often divided between a flat salary of a certain amount, and then a bonus or commission that’s variable based on sales numbers and performance. Some other professions work this way too, but sales is the most well-known.

In fact, it’s one of the draws of sales. A variable bonus or commission means you can earn more in an immediate way. But it’s also something that some people avoid, because it comes with uncertainty.

That’s why many sales roles have a mix. Sure, there are sales roles that are “straight commission” (no salary at all), and others that are normal salaried or hourly roles with only a nominal or even non-existent commission structure. But a hybrid is the standard.

Now imagine that you’re in sales, and you’re given some control over your compensation package. You can increase the commission percentage at the expense of decreasing the base salary, and vice versa. You have some knowledge of your own abilities, of course, but you can’t predict the future so you can’t guarantee your sales numbers. How would you configure your compensation?

I’ve been in that position, and here’s what I did: I minimized my salary to the level where it exactly covered my essential bills. No extra, no fun money, just keeping the lights on. And then everything else went into maximizing the commission.

This is a pretty viable strategy for a lot of things in life. Make sure your minimum costs are covered, then go high-risk/high-reward with the rest.

You, like most people, probably vastly overestimate what you can get done in a day. Same with a week and even a month.

But like most people, you also probably vastly underestimate what you can get done in a year, ten years, or your life.

I’m not sure why that seems to be the barrier. But for most folks, you should be more ambitious with your years and more deliberate with your days.

I know it sounds strange to say this, but you can probably only accomplish one moderate thing each day. One! Everything else is mostly filler and treading water, because those things actually take up a lot of your day. Just working and feeding yourself and sleeping and stuff takes up a lot of your juice, and if after all that you only accomplish one decent thing you’re in fantastic shape. Why fantastic? Because think about what it would look like if you accomplished 365 moderate things all in a row.

That’s why you underestimate your years.

I really like the term “putting down your thoughts” as a euphemism for writing. It’s more accurate than I first realized.

Imagine picking up a dozen small objects from around your house all at once – a stapler, a frying pan, the TV remote, and so on. Hold them all at once, without anything to carry them in. Now try to do anything. It’s pretty tough!

In order to be productive, you have to put some of that stuff down. My thoughts are like that, except they’re sticky. They don’t want to be put down. They all demand my attention, flashing lights and bright sounds, calling on me to engage with them. Some of these thoughts are negative and imposed from the outside. Some are quite positive and fun, but still demanding!

“Putting them down” is, well… putting them down. So I can free up my brain for a bit. Writing just quiets them for a while, appeases them. They’ll be back, of course – they never stay down long. But it’s manageable.

It’s especially helpful to get unstuck from loops. Sometimes a particular snippet will just repeat ad nauseum and I can’t move past it. Unless I write it down. From there I can build it out to its natural end or just exorcise it completely, but I can take it off the track of my mind.

I carry a notebook, pencil and pen wherever I go. I used to rely solely on note-taking apps, but sometimes the thoughts aren’t words, sometimes they’re pictures or graphs or symbols, and a note-taking app won’t do. But a notebook is always ready.

Some thoughts are tremendously, horrifically bad. Intrusive, unpleasant thoughts can spring when we least expect it. We have fears and anxieties within us, and plenty of ammunition for them externally. It’s only natural that sometimes you have a thought so bad that it will poison you and destroy you if allowed to remain. Like a wild animal that’s gotten a taste for human flesh. Only one thing to do.

Put it down.