A balance between using your time off to recharge and using your time off to prepare seems, to me, to be the necessary factor for low-stress and happiness.

When I have a day off, if I spend it entirely in “relaxation mode,” I end up feeling stressed and often depressed by the end. But if I’m productive all day, I often feel… well, like I need another day off!

I need to unwind, but like a good watch, I need to be rewound again.

In your view, what’s the primary goal of the education system? What’s the point?

No matter what your answer is, you’re going to have lots of people who disagree with you. Some people might agree that it’s one of the goals, but not the primary. Other people might not agree that it’s a goal at all! They might say it’s a nice secondary effect but not something to specifically strive for, or they might say it should actively be discouraged.

Here’s the core of the problem I’m describing: the education system in America doesn’t have a single, stated primary goal. According to the Department of Education, their goal is to “promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

But like oh so many mission statements, that one doesn’t mean anything. At best, it’s a vague philosophy, not a goal. “Promote achievement?” Sure, but what are we trying to get them to achieve? Anything? A specific thing? Fostering excellence is meaningless unless you define excellence in the first place. What is excellence? Test scores? Graduation rates? Employment rates as adults?

It’s all too broad. People want too many different things to be able to group them all together and say “we’re going to promote more goodness and less worseness” and have it mean anything.

Why is this important? Because it makes more acute conversations about specific educational policy really, really difficult to have in a productive way.

For example: A given school district has gotten a minor grant for an additional program. Should it allocate that to an arts course or a gifted and talented program? It’s a rhetorical question – I’m sure you have your view on the actual question, but I’m not debating that here. What I’m pointing out is that the question itself can only be answered from the perspective of what you think the ed system’s goals should be.

As a professional coach, one of the central pillars of our profession is that we don’t impose a goal on our clients; we help them refine what their own goals are, and then we help them achieve those goals through better processes and decision-making clarity. So if one of my clients asks me something like “Should I take this new job,” I’m not answering whether I would take that job, or even if I think it’s a good idea overall. What I’m doing is running that question through a fairly simple formula with the client.

First, we go back to their Main Goal. Then, we work through whether or not taking the new job (or whatever decision they’re facing) is likely to move them toward or away from that goal. Since we have a Main Goal, this process is much easier than it would be if we’d never defined a Main Goal to begin with. Without a Main Goal, pretty much every decision has pros and cons – the job has higher salary but is farther away, it has a better manager but worse public visibility, etc. – and we don’t know which factors are more important than others because we don’t have an objective to measure them against.

I started off by talking about the education system because it’s a great example to illustrate this problem, but it’s far from the only example. Any project, organization, or endeavor needs to be aimed at something. The more goals you try to mix together, the worse you are at accomplishing any of them. Likewise, the more people who work on any given enterprise, the harder it will be to keep them aligned and communicating well. So big projects with lots of goals have both of these problems.

In general, try to break your goals down into their smallest cohesive endeavor. And before you try to influence someone on what should be done, make sure you’re in agreement on the baseline goal of what you want accomplished! Otherwise, there’s not much point to the discussion.

A tree that falls in the woods with no one around to hear it does not make a sound.

For the exact same reason, a sunset is not beautiful. Roses do not smell sweet.

All that is beautiful in the world is the result of random physical inputs being assembled like a glorious symphony by the incredible machine that is your mind.

The smell of a rose is just bits of rose particles drifting against your olfactory nerve. A sunset is just photons emitted by the sun, bouncing around against particles in the air and curving around the gravitational horizon of the Earth. A symphony is just the rattling of strings and reeds, ricocheting off the air around it.

“Just.”

Of course, all of those things can be sublimely beautiful. But that beauty is in you. We imagine that if we were to vanish, the sunset would still be there – but it wouldn’t be. Not in that way.

A platypus can sense electrical impulses from a distance. Migratory birds can sense magnetic fields. If you had either of those senses, then sometimes you would sense an electrical impulse or a magnetic field that was gorgeous. That would touch you in the way that the most transcendent mountain view or soaring symphony could.

If that’s difficult for you to picture (and I imagine it might be!), then remember – if you can’t imagine a magnetic field being heart-wrenching, then a creature who could detect magnetic fields but who didn’t have a sense of sight would probably have an equally hard time imagining how a sunset could be beautiful.

Imagine a migratory bird became sentient and could talk to you. It has this extra sense you don’t have, the ability to actually perceive magnetic fields. It doesn’t “see” them or “hear” them – those words describe other senses. Human language doesn’t have a word for that sense, because humans don’t have the sense itself. So the bird coins the term “kleet” for the sense. Then the bird says to you one day:

“If a magnetic field shifts and there are no birds to kleet it, does it make a kloot?”

Does it make a what? “A kloot.” Well, I don’t know. What’s a kloot? “A kloot is the word for something you kleet, the way a ‘sound’ is the word for something you hear.” Okay, then that answers your own question – if a kloot is just the word for when a bird kleets a magnetic field, then of course it doesn’t make a kloot without a bird around. The kloot is in the bird, not the magnetic field. I can’t kleet a magnetic field, after all.

Of all the phenomena in the universe, a tiny percentage is perceivable by humans. Within that tiny percentage, our brains make incredible beauty and bestow it upon our hearts. What a fortune it is to be a human, to be alive.

Sometimes you find yourself in a bad situation, but the best proposed solution makes you anxious. Maybe you have a bad boss making your job miserable, and the best solution is to set some boundaries with them, but you’re worried about their backlash. Or maybe your car is starting to make weird noises and overheat, but you’re worried that if you take it in to the shop you’ll be faced with a big bill. Insert any example you like.

The solution might make you anxious, but you always have to remember the grim alternative is staying in the bad situation! Yes, your boss might get mad if you set boundaries. You might even get fired! But what happens if you don’t? You just stay in that bad job forever – or, more likely, you quit or get fired anyway as it gets progressively worse.

Bad situations often have thorny exits. But exit you must. Because otherwise, you’re accepting that the bad situation is the best you’ll ever have.

The kids are back in school today! They’re all so excited. I love that they love learning, they love the social environment, and they love challenging themselves.

I try never to push them toward grades. They’re plenty smart, and if I focus on evaluation I’m focusing on the wrong thing. I want them to enjoy the pursuit of their own goals, and to take pride in their own accomplishments. I ask them about what they care about, not about how other people judged them. I praise them for helping others, for being kind, and for being curious.

Too many things in this world push you to check boxes, pass tests, and sacrifice your own joyous pursuit of learning on the altar of some arbitrary accomplishment. I will not be one of them.

My middle daughter asked me the classic question regarding some long division: “When will I need to know how to do this?”

Now, I could think of a few circumstances when being able to do long division would be helpful, but that answer wouldn’t be the honest one. The honest answer is: “Probably never.”

But I gave her a different honest answer instead, one with a deeper truth. Here’s what I said:

“Right now, your brother is in the other room doing pull-ups. He’s not doing that because he’ll ever need to do pull-ups. He’s doing it to get strong. You aren’t doing long division because you’ll ever need to do long division. You’re doing it to train your brain, to get smarter, to exercise your mind. You’re braining.”

That did the trick. She doesn’t love math, but she does love being smart. Anything that she can view as brain-training, as braining, instantly holds her attention.

Life isn’t a series of things you need to do. It’s an adventure – one that you get to enjoy even more if you’re healthy and smart.

When I was a kid, I loved books. Now that I’m an adult, I still do. But now, I understand a little more about myself, which means I understand a little more about why I love books so much.

A realization you start to have as you get older and more socially aware is this: You can’t just talk about anything with just anyone. Whatever topics you’re most passionate about, chances are good that the majority of people around you don’t share that passion. If you’re really into the history of aviation, then at best you might be able to tell an interesting story or two before people’s eyes glaze over. They have the stomach for a quick visit to your world, but people have their own interests and most won’t overlap perfectly with yours.

And that’s only for emotionally uncontroversial topics! If people aren’t into Colonial-era history or board games or whatever, at least the only emotion they tend to exhibit is boredom. But there are plenty of topics that people get downright mad about. Even (especially!) if they don’t know anything about that topic.

Imagine that you’re really into Australian botany. You think the plants from down under are really rad and you’ve been reading about them and studying them your whole life. You know as much about the topic as just about any other expert; you might be in the top 1,000 people in the world in terms of your knowledge on this. Then one day, you start to tell someone about a cool Australian flower. You’re sort of always prepared for people to not think this stuff is as cool as you, but still, you think about it a lot and you want to talk about it, so you test the waters with a casual acquaintance. How would you feel if instead of reacting with feigned interest or unhidden boredom, they instead got angry? They not only completely disagreed with you about everything you said, but they told you that only a horrible person would have even said what you’d said in the first place?

I would imagine you’d be confused! Especially if it was clear this person had never read even a single thing about Australian botany. But they know where Australia is, and they know what plants are, so they refuse to acknowledge that there’s any gap at all in your respective knowledge bases.

This is a tangent, but: The plural of anecdote is not data. You don’t become an expert on a topic just by hearing words associated with that topic enough times. Listening to pundits on the news argue about whether the space program is a good use of the federal budget doesn’t make you an expert in rocket science, no matter how many times you do it. It’s just noise, and noise doesn’t make you an expert just because you listened to a lot of it.

So, that’s the rub. The more of an expert on a particular topic you become, by actually reading and studying primary sources and refining your ideas in a forum that’s meaningful and progressively developmental, the fewer and fewer people can meaningfully converse with you on that topic. Either they’re too bored to care, or they’re aggressively, angrily ignorant and take offense to things that no person who understood the topic would take offense to. (That isn’t to say that all people with the same level of knowledge always agree, but being able to disagree meaningfully and calmly because you understand the topic is worlds apart from angry, ignorant screaming.)

When you get to that point, you read books.

Books are a way to have that conversation. To engage your mind in a calm but passionate way. To learn about the topic while still having space in your own mind for discourse. You might not be able to communicate with the author in real time, but you can explore the ideas at whatever pace you like. You can write down thoughts as you go, you can research and return, you can even write ideas and arguments of your own in longer form. You can disagree with the book! Or parts of it – you don’t have to just take it as gospel. But there’s no anger in the disagreement; the book doesn’t yell back, even if you do. The parts of your brain wired to react strongly to social danger as a threat to your tribal status are calmed somewhat by the lack of a breathing face, replaced by abstract words.

I love those conversations. I love that chance to open and engage my mind. As much as I love people, there are simply some parts of my brain that aren’t for 99% of them. But give me a book and an evening, and that part of my brain will be very happy.

The connection people want isn’t always the connection you want to give. Quality time, affection, intimacy – these mean different things to different people. Even people you care deeply about.

It’s fine to use your words to explain how you show and experience these things. But don’t let your explanation be the end of the conversation; make it the beginning. Sometimes you’ll need to be uncomfortable to make someone you care about comfortable. That’s what loving people is. Taking care of them when they need it.

Just because your circumstances are bleak doesn’t mean that someone else’s aren’t as well – heck, they might be bleaker still. Scaping together few resources can make two people very wary of one another. But reach an understanding, and you have more than you ever had alone.

The point is, there’s always another dog in the desert. But you can choose if it’s a fight or if it’s a pack.