As we enter into a busy season with lots of disruptions, there’s a small task you could set for yourself that would have tremendous benefits as you enter next year.

Here it is: Keep a list of every time someone asks you for a favor between now and the end of the year, and why.

Before you leap to any negative conclusions, let me put a fear to rest: this exercise isn’t about keeping track of the favors you do for people. This isn’t about getting some sort of repayment or keeping track of who ‘owes you’ in the new year. Perish the thought.

No, this is a private thing that you’re going to do for you and you alone, and here’s the purpose of the exercise: to find out what makes you valuable.

You see, people habitually underestimate the value of their contributions, especially when those contributions are made easily. We also pay attention to the things with Big Obvious Labels, like our college degree or our current job title. Stuff we do “on the side” or “as a hobby,” even if we’re really, really good at it – those things we tend to forget to list when we’re trying to figure out what we’re good at or what we might want or be able to do.

Tracking your favors is a good way to get an idea of what the world around you thinks is valuable. It’s like crowdsourcing your brainstorming on this topic. Maybe you’re in sales, but come December 31st you look at your list and it turns out that on 46 separate occasions someone asked you to “take a look at my computer because it’s being weird again.” Now think – why are they asking you? Is it possible that totally without realizing it, you’ve cultivated a reputation as a tech whiz because you always seem to know how to fix a computer problem? I’ve seen it happen. And I know what happens next! You say, “well, that’s not really a job skill – it’s so basic! Anyone should know it! I just happen to work with incredibly below-average people in this sphere.” You’ve said that about something you’re good at, I guarantee it.

Especially something you didn’t formally train for. You think everyone should be good at it because it was easy for you to learn, so over and over and over again you think of everyone else as uniquely bad at it instead of just realizing the obvious, which is that all expertise is relative and you’re relatively great at this thing.

Trust the favor list. If everyone you know asks you to cook during the holidays, that means they think you’re good at cooking – or that you’re reliable, or competent, etc. That’s why you should track what each favor was, so you can do a little analysis about why you in particular were asked. You should even track favors you don’t do – for this exercise, it doesn’t matter if you say yes or no, just that you were asked.

You know the phrase, “in the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king?” Imagine being the guy with one eye and saying, “well, I shouldn’t be king, because I can’t even see that well.” Of course you can’t – but it doesn’t matter if everyone else is much worse.

You, like all humans, are absolutely garbage at objectively evaluating one thing in a vacuum – in this instance, yourself. Humans are only really good at comparing things, and if the majority of people around you are bad enough at something that they’re always asking you to do it for them – as a favor – then listen to them. There’s wisdom in their request.

The vocabulary of my son (age 2) is coming along nicely. He can repeat many words, and will gleefully point at things he knows the word for and call it out. So we do a lot of reading together, with him pointing out words and so on.

My daughter (age 3) took over this duty tonight. She guides him through words, encourages him, and with great and genuine exuberance calls out “great job” when he repeats after her.

As soon as she began, I backed off. She was doing an absolutely wonderful job and I couldn’t improve on it. I watched, proud as could be, as my three-year-old taught my two-year-old to read.

She leans on the shoulder of her big sister, my 8-year-old, as the big sister reads more advanced books out loud for her younger sister’s benefit.

Ripples upon ripples. You never teach one person – that’s why passing knowledge on to someone else is so good. It keeps going, keeps spreading. It’s a good deed you can do in the world – just share a piece of learning with someone, and watch it grow.

First, it is imperative that you go read this post. Allow your life to be changed by it, as mine was.

Then, prepare for more.

No matter how confident we want to be about a course of action, we can all sometimes feel a little “what iffy.” It’s natural, because before we collapse the wavefunction, there are anywhere from dozens to even thousands of plausible choices and their outcomes, yet we’re going to move forward down but a single path. You stare at the fork in the timeline and it’s only natural that your mind asks “what if?”

Let’s say someone offers you a bet: roll a single die, and choose either the group of numbers 1-5 to bet on, or the number 6. Pay a dollar to bet, win a dollar if you win. If you choose to bet on 1-5 and the die comes up 6, you were still correct to have bet on 1-5.

Why? Because you can’t change the past nor predict the future. Knowledge of present outcomes can’t be handed backwards through time, so it was correct when you made the bet to make the choice that most likely led you where you wanted to be. There will always be outliers. Don’t let that frighten you – instead, let it comfort you. Things are just as likely to randomly work out in your favor as not, so when it comes to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune you might as well just take it as it comes.

Productively use your “what ifs.” So many people ask that question, but don’t actually try to answer it! “What if I don’t get this job,” someone says, wringing their hands and sweating profusely. But they stop there, totally paralyzed. Well… what if? What would your next step be? Go that extra few paces in your mind and the worry often vanishes.

The answer to “what if” is always the same. The universe will continue on, and you with it. You’ll make new decisions and choices and the endless pattern of your life will stretch out to the horizon, just as it always has.

I cannot remember the last time I was bored.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been bored. Given access to everything I normally have access to, I have virtually unlimited future projects. I even have several Evernote files of projects I want to do categorized by how unlikely it is that I’ll ever do them.

Even if I didn’t have access to my normal arsenal of boredom-crushing projects and activities, I have an active imagination and lots of things I want to think about – I’ve been able to comfortably think to myself without an ounce of boredom many times.

(In fact, true story – my father and I went on a long road trip, just over 8 hours, when I was ten years old. I didn’t make a peep the entire time, just stared out the window. Never slept, didn’t bug my dad, didn’t play with any toys. Even then, I was perfectly comfortable in my own head for extended periods of time.)

So when I read this story, I was really amused. Here’s the short version: psychologists left people alone in a room with no source of distraction whatsoever except for a device they could use to deliver electric shocks to themselves. They only left them in there for 15 minutes, and yet a quarter of the women and more than 70% of the men shocked themselves at least once during that time. Some lots of times!

Now, you may be thinking what the authors of the study are thinking – humans are highly affected by boredom and would rather shock themselves than be bored even for a short time.

I disagree with that conclusion.

You see, as I’ve hopefully demonstrated, I am practically immune to boredom. I’ve never encountered a circumstance where boredom would affect me negatively. At the same time, I can tell you right now that I would shock myself within 30 seconds of being in that room.

Not to alleviate the boredom! But because I, like apparently 70% of my fellow men, am curious about novel experiences.

Let me imagine myself in that room, and then tell you what I’d be thinking: “Hmmm, all alone in a room with just this shocker, huh? Well, since I’m in an environment where they’ve hooked me up to this thing, I can guarantee it won’t really hurt me. So at worst it’ll give me an interesting but harmless sensation, and at best it won’t do anything and someone is just trying to see if I’ll do it. I’ll get a better story either way, so I’m definitely pushing this button and–“ BZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!

When we don’t have anything else to do, we seek out new experiences. But we seek out new experiences even if we do have something else to do. Curiosity trumps boredom every time.

When you climb a mountain, you get all sorts of benefits. A greater view, a sense of accomplishment, the thrill of adventure. But you also get one other thing – an ever-growing gap between you and the ground.

People like to climb social ladders. I get it, I do it too. But we so often race so hard to climb that we don’t put anything underneath us. We go higher and higher, but our position also grows ever more precarious.

When someone surfs, they can only go as high as the wave beneath them. There’s no way to go any higher – nothing above you to grab. Think of that as you network and seek promotions and hob-nob with your elders. Remember that if you’re always ascending by pulling yourself up, you’re leaving nothing but empty air beneath you.

As you climb, remember that a safer ascent comes from being lifted. Don’t forget to network with people more junior than you. Mentor them, build those connections. Create systems of lasting importance for those that follow. Mark the trails you blaze and leave maps for others.

As you climb, leave something beneath you. If you climb to 200 feet and slip and fall, it’s awfully nice if there’s a structure that’s 198 feet tall beneath you, and you’ll thank your past self for building it.

If you will ever have to delegate something, it’s best to do it as early as possible. Minimize your ramp-up period, train as little as possible. Use as much of the available time that you’ll be around to just be accessible for questions and feedback.

This is parenting and management advice. Tell your kids to make their own lunch – they’re hungry, they’ll figure it out. Don’t hover over your team when you assign them a task.

In both cases, they’ll make a mess here and there. Don’t kid yourself – you would have too. Your involvement might have made different messes, but not no mess at all. So let them make the mess while you’re there to see, clean it together, and push them back in.

When I was a junior in high school, a girl from my class who I had no relationship with beyond “classmate” came up to me and asked if she could buy weed from me.

I was pretty stunned. I had never used, let alone sold, any drugs in my life. I was pretty opposed, in fact. I certainly hadn’t given anyone any signals, direct or otherwise, to the contrary. And I didn’t know this girl at all beyond a name in attendance in the morning, so I asked her what gave her the impression that I was the right person to ask.

“Nothing,” she said, “but you seem resourceful, weird, and not like a snitch. So might as well start with you.”

What absolutely incredible networking! This girl was a genius. Look at the assessment she made! Even though I wasn’t one, I certainly fit the “stoner” archetype well enough – strong dislike of authority evidenced by lots of smart-aleck remarks in class and frequent detention. Somewhat counter-culture wardrobe (though considerably less cool than I thought of myself at the time). We shared a lot of the Advanced Placement classes, so she knew I was at least not a total idiot. Based on just this knowledge, she figured she could safely ask me if I would sell her weed and not face any consequences if she was wrong. Best case scenario she gets her goal, and worst case scenario she just gets a ‘sorry, nope’ – no risk that I was going to run to the school administration and narc.

Now, this story happened more than two decades ago (ugh) and back then weed was a LOT less legal than it is now, so there was actually a decent risk to what she was doing. And yet she made savvy assessments and went after what she wanted.

Now compare that to you. You probably want something right now. Maybe a new job? A promotion? A date? And these things are legal, but you’re still more hesitant to ask someone to get you closer to your goal than that girl in my junior class.

And there’s the other huge lesson – not only is it silly not to ask when the risk is so small, but it’s also silly to wait to ask until you’re sure you’ve got the “right” person. That girl figured that even if I couldn’t sell her weed, that there was a decent chance that I had a better lead, that I could at least get her closer to her goal. That turned out to be true, by the way – I didn’t smoke, but I knew plenty of people who did, so I directed her to one of them who in turn was able to get her hooked up. Networking!

Just remember that lesson, people – when in doubt, pursue your goals like an 11th-grader looking to score some pot. You’ll probably do better.

Considering how much of our flow of information is moderated by a small collection of very specific gadgets (always, but now more than ever!), I’m surprised at how easily we avoid choice architecture when it comes to them.

“Choice architecture,” by the way, is a neat concept from the world of behavioral economics. Here it is in a nutshell: people buy items that are on the eye-height shelves more than they buy items that are on the bottom shelf, all else being equal. You can go from a 12% organ donor rate to a 99% organ donor rate, even if both systems are totally voluntary, just by changing whether the default is “opted in” or “opted out.”

So “choice architecture” is changing the defaults about our lives – not removing choices, but restructuring them. It’s putting the candy in a difficult-to-reach back corner of your cabinet, out of sight, while putting the healthy foods in the front of the eye-level shelf in your refrigerator. It’s putting your bike in the garage in such a way that you’d have to move it out of the way to access your car.

In my case last month, it was deleting the mobile app versions of certain social media sites I used from my phone. I didn’t delete my accounts or anything. I could still access those sites via browser. But that’s a lot less convenient than clicking the app button – and it worked. In the time it would take me to access the sites by browser, I’d remember why I didn’t want to in the first place. It was using inconvenience as a habit-breaker.

It can work in reverse, too. I genuinely read more when I have a convenient e-reader, so that’s very nice to have. In fact, by making sure I have a nice, new-model Kindle and a somewhat crappy phone with little customization effort put in, I’m more likely to indulge in genuine reading than mindless scrolling.

The thing about these little nudges is you can do them without much internal resistance. Pulling bad habits up by the root, going “cold turkey,” often gets met with a huge outcry from whatever negative part of you was fed by that habit. As a result, sometimes that voice wins and we don’t do anything at all. But you can trick that voice, a little – nudge by nudge.

How long ago does something need to have happened before you can accurately examine it?

If someone asked you to picture “the 70’s,” then lots of images might come to mind. Fashion choices, musical influences, political events, and so on. Things we recognize as having a uniquely “70’s” vibe. Would those things have been recognized as such at the time?

We tend to think of our own culture in terms of “default.” No one thinks they have an accent, for instance, but everyone does – to someone else. We think of things happening right now not as uniquely “20’s,” but as just “normal.” We don’t think of our food as “regional;” it’s just normal food, and everything else is measured against that.

Even science fiction tends to reinforce this kind of view. One thing I’ve always noticed in things like Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever is that there might be tons of different sentient species out in the fictional universe of that particular franchise, but they’re always deviations from an average represented by humans. For every species that’s bigger than humans, there’s one that’s smaller. For each species more peaceful, there’s one more warlike. One more advanced, one more primitive. There’s rarely if ever a space opera where say 95% of other sentient species are larger than humans. Because we always think of our own microcosm as the default from which all other things deviate.

So when you look back at an event or time period, that’s a lot like looking at a foreign culture or alien society. It might have unique characteristics, but you’re framing them in your mind in terms of how far they deviate from your own experiences in the present. That can make it hard to get a realistic view of the significance of those events.

Keep that in mind even when looking at your own personal history. You can look at your own life 20 years ago and think “I was so much more foolish then, so much more reckless,” but that’s because you’re framing it against your current life. You certainly don’t feel foolish or reckless now, but by this method in 20 years when you look back on your current life you’ll judge yourself accordingly.

Don’t undervalue the experiences and choices you made in the past. Understand them, reflect on why you made them, and if you wouldn’t make the same choices today – don’t just chalk it up to capricious youth. Build on that, combine your forces with that younger you, and don’t just let your present be a default to be deviated from. Build a future exactly how you want it.