My co-worker told me a quick story about a client she’s working with: the client wanted to follow some creative pursuits away from her demanding career. She felt a particular burst of inspiration in that vein, and in that moment bought a desk plant so that she could associate that plant with the creative inspiration every time she looked at it.

I liked this, and it gave me an idea.

Imagine if every time you set a goal for yourself, you also bought a small plant to put in a window box or on a shelf in the sun. And you made a label with the title of the project, like “Exercise” or “Write That Novel” or something.

Then you only watered that plant on days when you worked towards that goal.

What would you have? A lush, growing forest of successfully completed or in-process tasks? Or a bunch of dead plants?

Imagine what this rule would do for your visualization of your ideas. First, you’d have a constant reminder to work on your goals every single day. Sure, the lives of the plants depend on it – but so does your life. The plight of the plants is just more immediate, more visible.

Second, it would be a great, intuitive way to see when you were taking on too many projects or ideas. You only have so much room in the sunlight for your plants, after all. Only so much time to water them. Oh yes, it’s a great idea to start painting again – but which plant will you move aside to make room for this one? Priority and focus are necessary in your life.

The tree that grows is the one you water. Treat your goals thusly.

There are two doors in front of you. One is unlocked and in fact wide open, and behind it is $100,000. The other is locked. You’re told that behind that door is $200,000, and the person telling you this offers to sell you a key to that door for the price of $125,000.

What’s the smart choice, here?

People are, in my experience, radically over-concerned with theoretical end results to the exclusion of both “what is actually happening” and “what is the cost to even approach the theoretical end result.”

You could just take the free $100,000. But many people just say “200k is more than 100k! Therefore, Door B is the better choice!” Absurd. Even if the key was cheaper, remember that you don’t even know that Door B has $200,000 behind it!

There are open doors all around you, and you can have a really great life by going through them. Don’t bash your head on the locked one just because you think something good might be behind there. Start with what works.

Once upon a time I worked in a regional convenience store chain. One of my many duties was inventory management, so I ordered the stuff the store ran out of. As a result, I learned a lot about pricing, and the difference between the price you see at the register and the more hidden supply chain prices.

This particular store did about 80% of its profit from one item – coffee. A cup of coffee at this chain ranges from $1 to $2 depending on size, from 12 oz to 24 oz. A pot of coffee made with one of the pre-packaged bags of coffee I would order would make about 100 ounces, give or take. I ordered those pre-packaged bags by the box, and 500 came in a box.

The price to my store for that box was $9.

Do the math. You could take everything else in the store and throw it in the gutter and the store would still bring in a profit, even accounting for overhead, payroll, and all those other pesky operating expenses. In fact, one of the marketing lessons we learned there was that pretty much every item we sold was just a way to get people in the store to buy coffee. Every promo for any item included “buy this item and get any size coffee for just one dollar!” or something. Because even at a dollar for 24 ounces, it was hugely profitable.

Okay, that’s background. That’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is that one time I had the chance to talk to a senior executive at the company and I asked him a question that had been on my mind: Given that competition between coffee chains is SO competitive, and given that we have SO much profit margin to work with, why don’t we sell our coffee for 50 cents or something for a little while just to capture more of the market share? Since our per-unit profit was so huge and our marginal unit cost so low, surely halving our profit-per-unit but quadrupling unit sales would be good?

His answer was really interesting: they had tried it! And sales went way down.

There’s a lot of psychology behind buying decisions, and a lot of historical information affects that psychology. It’s not just an in-the-moment calculation. If people were robots, then seeing a lower marginal unit cost would increase sales in a straight line, no questions asked. They’d done a good bit of research into why that hadn’t happened, though. Here’s what they found:

1. The customer was used to a certain price range for coffee. They were “anchored” to that price. A temporary reduction in price due to a sale was fine, because people “get” sales. But just reducing the price in a way that seemed permanent made people question why the price was going down. Had the quality of the coffee decreased? And if not, were they being ripped off before?
2. Even outside of the relationship with just our brand, the “anchor” effect to a particular kind of product or service is strong. Regardless of brand, people think “a fancy cup of coffee is about 5 bucks, a decent cup of coffee is about 2 bucks, and a cup of crappy gas station coffee is about 75 cents.” So if you sell your coffee for 75 cents, people are going to put it in the category of “crappy gas station coffee” no matter what you do. And just because it’s cheaper than good coffee doesn’t mean it’s a better value in the eyes of the customer – if that were true, everyone would buy their coffee exclusively from Big Al’s Gas-n-Go.

That second point has all sorts of interesting effects in the world outside of coffee chains. If someone invented a fantastic car tomorrow and their process was so good that they could sell the car to the end user for two thousand dollars, it would be really difficult to sell. People’s intuition is that “any car that costs $2k is a beater/junker” so seeing that price tag tells them that about your car even if there’s no other reason to believe it.

There’s one place in our society where this particular psychological effect is doing major, serious harm to really huge swaths of our society: higher education.

You see, the proliferation of university education for the last half-century or so has created another “price anchor” for our society, which is “self-improvement that benefits your job productivity and career prospects costs about $80,000.” The effect of this on the individual is that we see something that gives us new, marketable skills for sixty thousand dollars as “a good deal,” but something that gives us new, marketable skills for five hundred dollars is “obviously a scam.” The price point of more efficient personal development is simply too many standard deviations below the societal price anchor for most people to trust it. The societal price anchor is much slower to adjust than actual productivity.

Don’t be a societal pessimist. It’s fine to examine a new thing that seems great, and you don’t have to leap on every single new option that comes along. But the things society provides the individual really are getting so much better, so much faster than you could imagine. Seven billion people are absolutely falling over themselves to compete to make your individual existence so amazingly great, and the compound effect of that is staggering. Don’t ignore it – it’s all for you.

Many people get so focused on the things that can go wrong that they can’t even see what could go right.

Look, it’s fine to do a solid risk assessment. It’s fine, good even, to be cognizant of the potential hurdles and obstacles. But they’re hurdles and obstacles – they aren’t the main event.

Start by saying “If everything goes exactly right, if nothing prevents me from attaining my goal – what does that path look like?”

The reason this is so powerful is that 90% of obstacles don’t actually have to be dealt with. You can just go around them, because they don’t matter. You don’t have to fix all the potholes on the way to your destination. You can just drive around them and keep going.

Bravery is something difficult to define. To some people, simply having a high risk tolerance can look like bravery, but I don’t really think that’s it. It’s not brave if I do a bunch of stuff that I don’t think will impact me negatively, even if an outside observer does think those things are dangerous. I prefer the definition of bravery that says it’s when a person does in fact think something is very dangerous, but does it anyway.

Even that, though, is subject to some scrutiny. Let’s say there’s a burning building, which I am very very certain is very very dangerous to me. If my child is inside that building, I’m going in. That’s not bravery – that’s simply me valuing even a slim chance at my child’s life far higher than a high risk to my own. So I’m not sure I’d call that “brave.” Conversely, imagine I ran into the building for no reason at all – is that brave? Or is that just thrill-seeking – me being an adrenaline junky?

So that’s the thing about bravery. It’s tough to define, and it doesn’t simply measure our reaction to risk and danger. Deeper morals and values come into play, for certain. What I do know is that there is a spectrum of people’s willingness to face danger in exchange for benefit, especially “benefit to others” or “benefit to society at large.” So on that note:

If, for any given action, the risk to myself is high, the benefit to myself is marginal, the benefit to society is large, and regardless of my individual choice, someone will perform this action: it’s brave if I do it.

I don’t think it’s brave to do things that don’t need to be done, for instance. That’s thrill-seeking. I also don’t think it’s especially brave to do things of high potential value to you – that’s just risk/reward analysis. But those people that dig tunnels under mountains? Huge risk, huge societal benefit, crappy pay – but if they quit, someone else goes in anyway? I think of those people as brave.

One of the biggest positive externalities of bravery is inspiration in society. Brave people make us want to do better, reach higher, appreciate the world around us more. That isn’t what they set out to do – they set out to dig a tunnel. But as a fantastic side benefit, we hear their stories and we want to become better versions of ourselves.

If you are brave – if you face danger that helps society and does little to benefit you personally – then I applaud you. And you completely, utterly ruin it if you’re a jerk.

The bravest people do the most good if they are also the kindest people. Don’t chide other people for lacking your bravery – inspire them. Don’t push them away as if they were a class of people unworthy of you. Embrace them as if they were the very flock you’re being brave for. If you’re carrying the weight of the world upon your shoulders, shielding others below from having it crash all around them, don’t mock them because they aren’t up there with you. Inspire them, so they want to be.

My oldest daughter, exploring science through technology, telling me facts about the cells of plants that I didn’t know – facts she discovered on her own, because she wanted to, outside of any structured or formal learning. No reward or punishment. Just exploring and sharing.

My middle child, laughing with hysteric delight as I pour a huge box of stuffed animals out onto her head – a box that is her “space ship,” her defeating the “aliens” and then rushing to hug me before we move on to more and more games, games which she plays so well and with such imagination.

My son, just now in that wonderous waterfall stage of language where new words and phrases come by the dozen each day, mastering the phrase “I love you,” and saying it to me at every opportunity just because he delights in the look on my face when I hear it, and embrace him.

There is breath in me yet, and things worth defending. That is enough.

When you’re in a bad situation for a long time, you may find yourself losing sight of anything else.

Imagine you’re deep within a well. Trapped down there. Down where you are is very dark and unpleasant. Sometimes you can see the sky, but only a tiny amount at a time and only straight up. You couldn’t tell what color the flowers were, even if they were right next to the well. You couldn’t tell how high the grass was or who might be walking by.

In the real world what happens is that we start to generalize our bad situation, believing it to be universal when in fact it might be quite specific to us. If you have a spouse that constantly puts you down, you might start to just think that’s an inherent feature of all spouses. If you have a boss that is thoroughly dismissive of your input for long enough, you might just start to say, “Bosses, amirite? They all just throw your ideas out the window!” Note the subtle switch – you’ve gone from complaining about your boss specifically, to making a broad statement about all managers.

It’s understandable. People often value “fairness” over absolute good. Because we’re good at comparing two things but bad at objectively evaluating one, we tend to find even miserable circumstances more bearable as long as we can’t see anyone who has it better than we do. So if we suffer from a particularly miserable circumstance long enough, our brain just starts assuming everyone is equally miserable in that sphere – everyone’s boss dismisses their ideas with a disdainful smear, right?! It’s a defense mechanism.

But it also eats hope.

You see, if you don’t think a circumstance better than yours exists out there, then it’s a very short mental leap to thinking that no better circumstance could exist. You resign yourself to your fate and cope in other ways, but you don’t try to make it better.

Climbing out of the well can be very hard. But it’s easier if you know how deep the well really is (as opposed to how deep you think it is), and it helps if you can put up a periscope and get a glimpse around.

Talk to people without imposing your view. Don’t start a conversation about careers by complaining about your own – start by asking neutral questions. Read positive accounts of other stories from within the sphere in which you’re miserable. Learn that the whole world isn’t trapped down in the well with you.

You may find someone who can lower a rope.

Some people want conditions to be so perfect before they start a project that it’s practically an even bigger project just to arrange those starting conditions. And that’s if they’re even actively arranging them at all – many people just wait for the perfect storm.

Look around you, right now. That’s the starting line. This is what you have to work with. There is no “pre-game.”