Imagine you walk into a casino with the intent to put some quarters into some slot machines. You go to exchange your dollars for quarters, but you receive a surprising offer from the teller:

You can take normal quarters that work exactly as you’d expect them to, or you can take a special coin made by the casino. The slot machines can detect the special coins, and increase the odds of winning by a factor of ten. The catch: they only work in 10% of the machines on the casino floor.

Would you take regular quarters or the special coins?

Before we discuss the answer, let me tell you about a pattern I see repeated very often. Someone will be trying some sort of general, unspecialized technique to cast a “wide net.” Examples include approaching all women in online dating the same way, or sending the same type of application to every job, or trying to close every sale with the same technique. They won’t be doing very well; a high number of attempts and no successes. Then someone will suggest an alternative – a highly specialized approach that has a proven track record of success in specific circumstances. And the original person will object that the technique is bad because it isn’t broad enough.

Here’s the thing to remember when you “cast a wide net:” you’re typically only trying to catch one fish. You’re casting a wide net because you aren’t sure where that fish is or what kind of bait to use. But ultimately, you’re probably only going to date one person or accept one job. You aren’t trying to succeed with everyone, you’re just trying with everyone in order to succeed once.

Which means, in that casino, you should hands-down take the special coin. You’re only going to play one machine at a time anyway!

Nothing in life is guaranteed. All your effort serves the purpose of maximizing your odds of success – you can approach, but never achieve, 100% success rate. Your actions are meaningful, even if sometimes you fail. But don’t be foolish. Don’t take your special coin, put it in one of the slot machines that won’t take it, and then claim that the coins are a bad idea. Take your specialized approach and apply it to the right circumstance. Your odds of success will always be better than if you just try the most general path.

Do you know the fable behind the phrase “sour grapes?” It’s not long – the gist is just that a fox tries to get some grapes, but can’t reach them. So he gives up and to keep himself from feeling bad about it, goes “eh, they were probably sour anyway” despite having no evidence of that. So that’s the meaning of the phrase – you say “sour grapes” when someone fails at something but then immaturely dismisses that thing as not worth getting anyway.

That is what it is, people do it, and obviously if it’s a common enough part of human nature to have a whole fable written about it you probably aren’t changing it anytime soon. Try not to do it yourself. But that’s not the lesson today.

Today, I want to talk about a complimentary phenomenon, which I see more and more of every day. Some people fail at something and say, “well, the success would have sucked for some reason anyway,” and that’s sour grapes. But more and more people are instead failing at something and saying “eh, the failure wasn’t really a failure and it was actually good.” So I’m calling this “sweet lemons,” – if you thought the grapes were sweet enough that you wanted them, failing to get them might cause you to declare them sour. If instead you bit into a lemon thinking it was going to be sweet, you might try to downplay your mistake by claiming the lemon actually was sweet.

Now, I want to be clear. I’m not referring to the incidences of people saying, “I failed at this, and that’s okay, because failure is part of life and I learned something and I’ll try again.” No, that’s obviously a good thing.

I’m talking about incidences where someone fails at something and then to both avoid the personal shame of failure and protect themselves from having to try again say: “the failure state was what I wanted all along, and is actually better, and so I’m going to wear the failure as a badge of honor.”

It’s a strange thing to witness. There’s no shame in failure by itself. But some people believe there is, and so to protect their fragile egos from it they force themselves to display pride in it. That’s easier, of course, than doing what’s actually required to avoid the shame of failure – learn, try again, and succeed.

Imagine that you are an alien who has landed on Earth by accident. You have the ability, through technology, to look just like a human and to speak any language with basic fluency, but otherwise you know absolutely nothing about any human culture.

You would be absolutely terrified, and rightly so!

I mean, humans sometimes kill each other, right? But what’s more, this doesn’t always seem to be bad! In fact, sometimes we throw people parades for it! Imagine you had no context to understand why. What if you did one of the things that made it okay – even celebrated – to kill you?

The point is that cultural knowledge is a big aspect of safety, in general. It’s not always about life and limb. Think about working with people you’ve been with for at least 10 years, in a company that you’ve been employed by for equally long. You can predict the responses to your actions there much more accurately than when it’s your first day with a brand new job. The (local) cultural knowledge gives you a certain security in your actions.

I once had a conversation with a young man online that had asked for advice about things “every man should do before he’s 30.” I gave him numerous suggestions, and one of them was to attend church, if he hadn’t already. He (and several others) took a good bit of offense to that, as if I were suggesting that they needed to find religion or become born again.

That wasn’t my intent; I wasn’t proselytizing. But the fact that he balked so severely was proof that I was right. If you live in a culture where literally hundreds of millions of people go into the same building every week to discuss their deeply-held values, it would be smart of anyone to go in and listen to that discussion. It doesn’t matter if you don’t intend to share those values (or even if you do share them, but for different reasons, or whatever). What matters is that an enormous part of the culture of America is influenced by that sub-culture, and you’re a fool if you don’t try to give an open ear and open mind to the ideas believed in by like a hundred million of your countrymen.

And not for nothing, but it is impossible – 100% impossible – to craft a coherent argument against something if you aren’t at least as familiar with the source material as those who agree with it. You can scream and wail into the void/internet, you can bounce your ideas off the walls of the echo chamber and score cheap points with people who already agree with you, but you will never ever ever create so much as an ounce of substantial argument if you refuse to engage with what you’re arguing against.

You know why? Because a good persuasive argument relies a great deal on being able to predict the other person’s response to your first point, so you can lead the conversation along the channels of logic and away from fallacy. But if you can’t predict how someone will react to even your first word, you can’t do that.

Culture is prediction, and prediction is power. Pay attention to culture, even if it’s not your own.

Many years ago, my grandfather attempted to throw away an old refrigerator.

It didn’t go well. He lived in South Philadelphia and the local garbage collectors wouldn’t take it. So this huge hunk of metal was sitting on the curb for a few weeks, and the local police threatened my grandfather with a fine if he didn’t remove it. But he had nowhere to take it and no way to get it there, so he got clever.

He went down to the local hardware store and bought twenty-five cents worth of chain and a fifty-cent padlock, and locked the refrigerator up to the telephone pole it was next to. Sure enough, the next morning it was gone.

A similar story about my father: some time in the 70’s, when my father was a young man, he had a job for a short while as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He was very good, but he had a very unusual technique. Instead of selling door-to-door in nice suburban neighborhoods with demonstrations of the device’s effectiveness, he would instead go into very bad neighborhoods and tell people that the vacuums were stolen and he needed to unload them. He changed nothing else – he sold the same product for the same price. But he’d sell out in an hour instead of a day.

I think the lesson here is that dishonest people are often more vulnerable to being fooled. If you’re the kind of person who’s willing to steal from others, sometimes you end up stealing a broken refrigerator. If you’re the kind of person eager to buy stolen merchandise, then sometimes you end up buying a retail vacuum cleaner you probably didn’t need at it’s normal market price.

It’s easier for someone who wants to get one over on you to feed your vices than to manipulate your virtues. Give yourself over more to virtue than to vice, and you also won’t get tricked as often.

Most companies are robust enough that a single employee taking a single sick day doesn’t cause the company to go into bankruptcy. Imagine then that the CEO of the company said “hey, since an employee taking a sick day and contributing nothing to the operations of the company for an entire day didn’t do any damage, that means we can operate entirely without employees! Everyone take off!”

There’s a gap in there somewhere, right?

This is somehow related to the “heap problem,” where if you have a million pennies all piled together it’s definitely a “heap,” and if you take one away it’s still a “heap,” so if “heap – 1 = heap” then literally any number of pennies is a heap. So if “Company Success – One Sick Day = Company Success,” then a company should be successful even if every employee takes every day off.

So why isn’t that true? Well, there are two ways to think about it:

The first way is to say that there actually is some minor damage caused even by a single employee taking a single sick day, and while a company can absorb some damage without major disaster, there’s definitely a threshold where the damage becomes too severe. (For instance, consider the difference between a single employee missing a day and a strike.) If we think of it this way, the formula looks more like “100% Company Success – One Sick Day = 99.9% Company Success” and anything below 95% starts to hurt. But I don’t actually think this is the correct solution.

Tangent: if one couple chooses not to have kids, no big deal. If every couple chooses not to have kids, we go extinct. So why shouldn’t we encourage every single couple to have kids?

Let’s create a term “X-Action.” An “X-Action” is anything that would be devastating to the whole if every member did it, but in small doses isn’t just not harmful – it’s beneficial.

“Not having kids” is an X-Action. If no one had kids, species ends. If some people don’t have kids, then we end up with a diverse and specialized human population that can support numerous different micro- and macro-configurations to meet societal needs at any given time.

“Having a lazy day” is an X-Action. If you had nothing but lazy days, your life would be in shambles. But having one every now and then actually improves your life, keeping you in good spirits and recharged for the work you do in the rest of your life.

And “taking a sick day” is an X-Action. If everyone did it every day, the company would go under. But in small doses, it’s actually helpful, because it prevents sickness from spreading when it occurs and gives employees a buffer so that they can be their best selves when they are at work. A company might crash and burn if everyone took them every day, but a company is definitely better if they have a 2-3% sick day rate than if they had a 0% sick day rate because no one ever took them under any circumstances.

So it’s not just that some things are “always bad, but in small doses not so bad that we have to worry about them.” It’s that some things are “bad in big doses, but good in small doses.”

There’s a difference between those categories. For instance, “murder” is not an X-Action. If everyone was murdering all the time, society would collapse. But even a little bit of murder is bad. Murder is something we should strive to have 0% of as much as the costs for such progress are reasonable.

(Why make that disclaimer? Because you could achieve 0 murder by pre-emptively jailing every single citizen, but that wouldn’t be a “reasonable cost” for a murder rate of zero.)

One of the challenges in life as well as in organizational design is being able to mentally separate those two categories. Lots of managers think “sick days” are like that second category, instead of the first one. I myself am guilty of thinking of “lazy days” in that second category, and feeling guilty when I have one. But recognizing which things, bad in large doses, are actually good in small ones can take tremendous weight off your shoulders.

If something is too hard or too easy, you learn nothing.

I cannot learn to mountain-climb by starting with a solo summit of Everest. In fact, I will die a horrible death.

But I also cannot learn to mountain-climb by just walking up my slightly-sloped front lawn over and over again. I will learn nothing.

Too hard is the danger zone. Too easy is the comfort zone. But juuuuuuust right is the learning zone.

But really, that just means that too easy and too hard are both the danger zone. Because few things are more dangerous than coasting through life without learning anything.

Remember: all self-improvement is uncomfortable. You are shedding weakness and ignorance and failure; extracting those things from yourself is not painless. If you’re looking for comfortable learning, you’re looking for entertainment. That has it’s place, but don’t think you can improve your life from it.

Want to know a sure way to crash? Drive while never taking your eyes off the rear view mirror.

To put it another way – you can’t make choices in the past. “Playing the hand you’re dealt” doesn’t mean “accept everything that happens to you.” It means that you can only start not accepting it right now – not 5 years ago or 5 minutes ago. You can make infinite choices in the future and literally zero in the past.

Missed your exit? There will always be more, and you can make the active choice to take the next one. What you can’t do is go backwards and take the one you missed. Drive on the road you’re on.

Like snowflakes, these days will fall, beautiful in an instant and then gone forever, never to be repeated on this Earth. Holidays are less special for their predictability; the First Snowfall of The Season holds a special place in the hearts of children that cannot be compared.

There are many contests in life that only have a prize for first place. When two teams go to the Super Bowl, only one gets the ring. When you watch the first place runner cross the finish line fractions of an inch ahead of you, it can feel pretty demoralizing.

It shouldn’t.

There may only be an official prize for first place in many contests. But there is an unofficial – yet very important – prize for second in all contests: the knowledge that you rule.

Consider for a moment the gap in ability between Usain Bolt (who won the Gold Medal in the men’s 100-meter dash in the 2016 Olympics) and Justin Gatlin (who won the Silver Medal). Their speeds were 9.81 seconds and 9.89 seconds, respectively. A gap of eight one-hundredths of a second. Now think about the gap between Gatlin’s time, and your best time running one hundred meters. My guess is that the gap between Gatlin’s time and yours is much much larger than the gap between Gatlin’s time and Bolt’s.

Which means Gatlin might have been stinging right after the race. He might have had a strong desire to work on improving himself to close that gap. He may even have felt discouraged that all that work didn’t get him the gold. But he would be wildly, incredibly foolish to think that he wasn’t a good athlete.

I mean, he was literally faster than every human on Earth except one. He rules.

And so do you. Getting so close the finish line and not getting first place might be a gut punch. But it’s also an incredibly strong signal that you should race again, and soon. For you to have come all that way was not wasted time nor effort – it was a trial run that showed you that you are absolutely capable.

Now let’s step away from the Olympics for a moment, and look at the world the rest of us live in. The Olympics are WAY higher-stakes than what you or I did recently that landed us in second place. Come in second at the Olympics, and you can’t compete again for years – and many don’t compete again at all. But if you miss your shot at a job you were interviewing for, a contract you were trying to land, a person you were trying to ask out – you can have a dozen more chances this month. And remember that you’ve already proven that you’re of incredibly high skill; 99th percentile stuff.

If you try out for contest after contest after contest in a particular sphere and you consistently land in 175th place, then maybe that thing isn’t for you. But if you’re landing in #2? You’re right there! Just do it a few more times – maybe even once – and you’ve got it. People who are bad at things don’t win silver medals for them.

Now, let me add a bit of tactics onto my mentality lesson here: responding to your silver is how you get your gold. When I was a teenager and played video games with other teenagers, a common phrase was “almost had it.” That’s what you’d say when you were so close to beating that last boss, he had a millimeter left on his health bar, and then you slipped and he got you. You’d say “almost had it.” Only there were two ways to say it: one kid would smash their controller on the ground and stomp their foot and say “almost had it” like the universe cheated them out of something they deserved. The other kid tightened their grip and grinned, eyes boring into the screen as they restarted, leaning forward into their next round as they said “almost had it,” like another man in another time said “Eureka.”

Guess which kid won on their next play through?

The person who doesn’t get the job reaches out, has great conversations anyway with those people, stays connected, suggests ways to collaborate in the future, builds a relationship that will create referrals and contacts well down the line (and hey, even potentially another swing in the future). The person who loses a contract bid to another rep studies everything about that rep’s style and their company’s offering to improve their own. The person who strikes out on the date request is charming and gracious about it, impressing other people with their poise and setting up future interest. You don’t lose, you get closer.

If you approach your Silver performance with the keen eye of a student, humble and willing to take every opportunity to learn, to advance, to still find advantage in the scenario you created instead of treating it as a binary, all-or-nothing situation – if you do all of that, do you really think you can’t find eight one-hundredths of a second worth of improvement in there? That’s all it takes to get the Gold next time.

I think concentrated help is better than dispersed help.

I think if you had a thousand dollars that you wanted to give away, giving all of it to one person is better than giving a dollar to each of a thousand people.

First and foremost, giving a dollar to each of a thousand people carries tremendous deadweight costs in terms of your effort. Giving isn’t instantaneous and neither is helping. It takes the same amount of time to give a person a dollar or a thousand dollars, so giving one dollar to each of a thousand people takes a thousand times as long as just giving one person the lump sum.

But beyond that, a dollar just isn’t that impactful to most people. I actually think a dollar helps people less than 1/1000th of $1,000, as counter-intuitive as that seems. But here’s why – if I give you an extra dollar, your life will not change in the slightest. (I’m assuming, of course, that “you” live in a western, first-world country like me. If you live somewhere very different, this statement could be very wrong, but the point I’m making will still stand in the end, you’ll see.) You might barely notice or remember. At best, it would go in a vending machine or stuffed into a spare corner of your car. There’s virtually no problem you could have where one dollar would mark the difference between solving it or not. In econ-speak, there are very few cases on the margin where a lone dollar would change anything. Which means that, for most of those thousand people, I might as well have given them nothing.

But $1,000? That can change someone’s whole month. That can be making rent or not. That can be a wonderful Christmas for some kids that wouldn’t otherwise get one. That can be the medicine someone needs this month. In other words, a thousand bucks can really be a blessing.

So when you concentrate it, you do much more than a thousand times more good, because you’re doing good at all versus probably not.

Now, think about how you can help people. Whatever it is you’re good at contributing that people might need. There’s an impulse of fairness in most of us that calls for us to try to “spread the love” as much as we can. But that impulse can lead us to some bad ends – imagine a village of a hundred starving people. You have just enough food to stave off starvation for one person. You could get out a scalpel and divide that morsel a hundred ways, but then a hundred people would still stave, because 1% of “enough” isn’t enough. Once something falls beneath the “actual help threshold,” then it doesn’t matter how many people receive it.

It doesn’t matter how many people you insufficiently help. It matters how many you actually help.

So when you’re looking to help someone, start by helping one person as much as you can. Get them right again, in whatever way you can. That guy throwing starfish back into the ocean when there were millions on the beach? That makes more sense than moving every starfish a millimeter closer to the water – where they’ll still die.

The impulse of fairness comes from an understandable, if misguided, place. It comes from a desire to not have to make hard decisions. If I only have food for one person, letting everyone starve by splitting it up at least absolves me from making the horrible decision of who to save. Most people couldn’t make that sort of decision and still sleep at night.

But the alternative is a hollow sense of fairness and a starved village.

When you can help, just pick the person closest to you and help. Like anything, you’ll get better at helping the more you do it. That means you’ll get better at putting your help where it’s most needed. But in the short term, getting started there is like getting started at anything at all – just do it. Just start. Someone needs your help, someone nearby. Go for it.