I hate to argue.

That being said, if I have to, I want to win. So I care about strategy.

There are fundamentally two kinds of arguments: ones where you win by default, and ones where you lose by default. Or to put it another way, there are arguments where you have to convince someone of something in order to get the result you want, and arguments where someone else has to convince you of something in order to get what they want.

Or to put it another another way: who has the ball? As in, “take my ball and go home?”

If it’s your ball, then other people have to convince you. You can win just by not arguing, as long as you’re okay with the “and go home” part. You can be the rock – you don’t have to be flexible. You’re the person being sold to, so you don’t have to be flexible.

Meanwhile, there are arguments where you have everything to lose if the argument just doesn’t happen at all. You don’t have a ball, so you have to convince the kid who does that he wants to stay. You have to maneuver, be flexible, be the reed. You need tact and diplomacy.

Like many problems, you’re halfway to solving it if you can categorize it correctly. A surprising number of people can’t. They argue like a rock when they should argue like a reed, and vice versa.

Imagine someone’s selling a house and despite the best advice of their real estate agent, they’ve massively overpriced it. They’re convinced that their house is worth this inflated price tag, and they refuse to come down on price or do any property improvements. They’re arguing like the rock, as if it’s other people who need to adjust their expectations. “If someone wants this house, they’re just going to have to cough up the cash!”

But… no one does want the house, at that price. You need to be the reed. Change the price, make improvements to the property, or at the very least be super super charming as you hold open houses. You can’t win via stubbornness.

Meanwhile, I once knew someone who had quit his job because he got a much better offer and honestly didn’t like where he worked. His current employer made him a counter-offer to stay. It wasn’t enough, but this guy felt awkward even saying so – as if he owed it to them to accept the offer! He was arguing like the reed when he should have been the rock. He should have made up an offer that would genuinely have gotten him to stay, no matter how high it was, and told them “this or nothing.” He already had all the cards, why debate at all?

Identify your starting position, and whether you need to dig in or bend. If you get good at that, not only will you win more arguments, but the best benefit of all is that you’ll have a lot fewer to begin with.

I remember one particular work meeting I attended many many years ago, near the beginning of my career. It was extremely early in the morning, and my boss at the time had a well-known habit of locking the door to the meeting room at the exact minute the meeting began. He was a stickler for punctuality, that one. Interestingly, one time a co-worker arrived nearly half a day late, without having called or anything, and the boss just helped him get caught up and didn’t say anything else about it. Privately, I asked him about it later.

He told me: “An hour late, and there’s a story. A minute late is just disrespectful.”

I don’t manage like he did, but there are definitely some elements of wisdom in that story.

First, I think it’s good if early in your career you have someone who pushes you on the fundamentals – punctuality, personal presentation, etiquette, etc. There are times when it’s appropriate to be more lenient on those things, but before you flaunt those rules you have to know them.

Next, I think it’s true that easily-correctable mistakes are, when the consequence thereof falls upon another’s shoulders, the most disrespectful. If you’re an hour late because you were in a car accident on the way to work, that’s understandable – and likely rare. If you’re a minute late, it feels more likely to be because you simply didn’t manage your time well (and also likely to be more common).

And of course lastly is the vital piece of wisdom that when someone else has the keys to the meeting room door, they’re the ones calling the shots. If you don’t like it, find another meeting room – one where you have the keys.

More options usually means more power. More choice, more freedom, right? It’s true, but it’s not complete.

Thinking that “more choices is better” leads to an incomplete philosophy; the desire to always have more choices. Recently I was talking to someone about negotiating power with an employer – certainly you have more if you have a hundred employers who want to hire you versus just one, right?

Seems true in relationships, too. If you have a hundred people who want to date you, you’re better off than if you only have one option, right?

Even shopping. If you can only shop at one store, you’re stuck with whatever they sell – but if you have a hundred options you can probably get exactly what you want.

These are all true – to a point. On your side, choice is important – and on their side, your choice means “they” (whoever “they” are) have to compete, making each individual option better than it would be in a vacuum.

But there is a way to have this power without relying on the universe to have multiple options for you. You have to control the Ultimate Option.

Opting out.

If you don’t need a job, then you have as much negotiating power with one employer as you do with an array of hundreds. You get to set all the terms, because you can walk away if you don’t like the deal. If you’re comfortable with your own company, then you don’t have to compromise and take a romantic partner you don’t really want.

Now, some of that is admittedly Utopian. We’re not complete societies as individuals. Most of us need external income, and romantic partners are great, and friends are awesome, and stores have lots of great stuff to buy, and so on. The point isn’t to completely isolate yourself from the world.

Rather, this advice should remind you that “walking away” is always on the table if the remaining deals are bad enough. It’s a reminder to build yourself a life where you have a reasonable amount of independence – maybe most people need a job eventually, but your own level of saving and frugality can be the difference between needing one tomorrow and not needing one for twelve months. Sure, many of us want a long-term life partner, but your healthy personal habits and hobbies can be the difference between being so desperately lonely that you ignore red flags and being comfortable being alone long enough to make good choices. And not waiting until you’re on your last roll of toilet paper to buy more can be the difference between getting robbed at the cash register and waiting for a sale.

Patience is a virtue. Walking away takes strength. Strength and patience are both rewards of a life lived with care.

Gradual change drags inertia with it. A radical change can achieve escape velocity.

Your life does not separate easily into discrete boxes, independent of one another. Some people are better than others at building those barriers, but no one can create truly impermeable ones. As your income rises, so do your expenses. As your accomplishments stack up, so does your stress. And so on.

This isn’t a good thing, but it often happens. If you got a steady 10% increase in your income every year for ten years, then at the end of ten years you’d be in relatively the same position of wealth as you were to begin with, just maybe (maybe!) with nicer stuff. It takes more discipline than most people realize, and certainly more than most people have, to increase their income year over year but maintain the same level of frugality.

But if your income suddenly doubled in a single year? Well, there are certainly plenty of people who go bananas in that circumstance and even end up worse off. But for many people the system shock can result in a careful examination of your circumstances. You can say, “okay, I’m making 100% more money, but I could be really happy with only a 20% increase in my living standard and be saving & investing a LOT towards my future.” That’s the smart play.

That’s the high-risk, high-reward scenario. The big promotion that can come with plenty of extra stress, in and out of work. The move to a new city that can have lots of rewards but plenty of distractions. The radical shift.

It’s not for everyone. But some people are born to greatness and others have greatness thrust upon them, so it’s good to give some thought about what you’d do if that shift came to your door. And if you do that, and like what you’re envisioning, then maybe you don’t wait for it to knock after all. You go find it.

Yesterday I was doing a variety of household chores, accompanied (as they often are) by a random shuffle of my music. A particularly great song came on – so great, in fact, that I ended up listening to it on repeat for about four passes, letting it wash over me.

The song is “Hey Mama” by Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, and the theme of the song is a mother telling her son that despite his struggles and pains in life, he hasn’t earned the right to quit yet. He hasn’t yet worked hard enough to proclaim with certainty that life “ain’t gonna get any better.”

The song resonated with me – for one, it’s similar to advice my own father gave me. Advice which changed my life, honestly.

Here’s the truth: most people aren’t afraid of hard work. But most people want their perception of their rewards in life to roughly equal their perception of the pain and struggle it took to get it. Most people just want the scales to balance.

They won’t always balance. If no one’s ever told you that, I’m sorry to break the news – genuinely, not sarcastically. It sucks to tell someone that. It sucks as a parent to tell my kids that there are going to be things that just don’t work, things that fail, goals you don’t realize, pain that never pays you back in reward.

But I can tell you this, the silver lining. The scales don’t always balance. But as long as you’ve got a drop of sweat left in you, then you can’t know for sure that they haven’t. If there’s a prize at the top of a thousand stairs, then things can look pretty damned bleak when you’re on stair number 999. But maybe one more drop of sweat will do it.

No matter how badly the odds were stacked against you, no matter how much you had to go through, you haven’t earned the right to complain if you didn’t give everything you have to it. You ain’t worked hard enough.

The world gets better only through effort. Your personal world, the larger one around you, the one in the future for your children’s children’s children. When you get to the very end, the last breath, when you’ve given it your absolute all – on that day, if you want to complain that it won’t get any better, people will listen.

Except they won’t have to. Because if you do that, the world will be better. I promise.

Don’t let it get to you.

Nothing makes you more agitated than already being agitated. Stress begets more stress. That’s why temporary solutions are often a good idea.

Sure, zoning out with some loud music and a drive doesn’t solve any of my problems. But if it resets the stress levels, then I can solve them.

Do the things that make you feel cool. Get in the zone, enjoy it for a bit, then ride it into battle against your problems.

Are you stressed right now? Then shut it all off for an hour. An hour won’t kill you. Be cool.

Anger is like a grenade that you think is a sniper rifle.

When something makes you angry, you virtually never direct exactly the right amount of energy at the subject of your rage nor to various bystanders. In fact, you’re probably not even picking the right primary target. You want to think your anger will accomplish something, like it’s a targeted laser or a precise scalpel. In reality, it’s a grenade that you pull the pin from and then drop at your own feet.

The biggest victim of anger is almost always you. Anger is something that happens to you, as much as you want to believe it’s a tool that gives you energy and strength. You’re not The Incredible Hulk. You don’t get bigger and stronger when you get angry; rage does not become a shield that protects you from future harm.

Anger and pain are, in fact, very similar. Both are signals that your body sends to your brain in order to inform you that something bad is happening to you. Pain is a signal that tells you “Hey dummy, move your hand away from the stove.” Pain is simple to interpret in most cases. Anger does the same thing if we listen to it. Anger is really a circumstantial version of pain – in the same way that pain tells you to take your hand off the stove, anger tells you to change your oil more frequently. It does that by making you mad when your car breaks down.

Unfortunately, we often miss that message. Our car breaks down, and instead of “moving our hand from the stove,” we pound on the stove harder – and kick the refrigerator, too. We don’t listen to the message.

That’s misplacing your anger – and it’s about as effective as trying to reduce the pain of your burning hand by punching someone else in the face. You don’t reduce your anger by throwing it at other people. You reduce it by listening to it. Let it talk to you, track its path to your door. Then take your hand off the stove, dummy.

The world is unequal in nearly every regard.

From the moment you’re born (in fact, a good deal beforehand), there are already weights on the scales. You don’t come into this world with anything close to a blank slate.

On a micro level, that persists. You will never be exact as “X” as your neighbor – exactly as wealthy, exactly as healthy, exactly as wise. Exactly as happy.

But you will also never be exactly as “X” as you were today, and will be tomorrow. Time exists. We are not static, we are lines flowing through the years.

Some people want to tear and shred when they witness some unequal measure of anything. Your car is nicer than mine, so I’ll flatten the tires and smash the windshield. You’re in better shape than me, so I’ll cut your hamstring. You’re happier than me, so I’ll make you miserable.

Don’t fall into that trap. Every second you spend destroying is a second you could have spent creating. Better to help the future version of you than hurt the future version of someone else.

You can’t build a house out of the ashes of someone else’s.

There’s a great mental heuristic I like to use whenever I’m deciding if I want to purchase something. I visualize a table with both the thing I want to buy on it, and an amount of cash equal to the purchase price sitting next to it. I then decide which I would take, if I could only take one.

That gives me my answer. Shiny new things are shiny and new, but money is pretty dang versatile, despite not being terribly interesting in comparison to some new trinket. So it’s worthwhile to give them both an equal shake.

This trick also works if I’m deciding whether or not to keep something. I can visualize the object I already have next to either a.) the cash I could get for it, or b.) the empty space I’d free up if I got rid of it. That helps me decide which things are worth keeping. (For me, very few things get kept in this instance – I value versatility in my objects, and few things are as versatile as money and empty space.)

Taking those two concepts together made me realize that there’s an additional question I should very often be asking myself, but seldom do.

If I’m looking at, for example, a new tool and I decide not to buy it because it doesn’t pass the heuristic above, I should then immediately ask myself: “should I sell any of the tools I already have?” I mean, if the tool I don’t have doesn’t pass the “better than money” test, then maybe the tool I do have wouldn’t pass, either. If I don’t allow myself to be fooled by status quo bias, then there’s no difference between two objects just because I own one of them and don’t own the other.

The same applies to the reverse – if I’m deciding whether to sell something or not and I decide to keep it, the next question really should be: “should I buy more?” After all, if an object is worth more to me than its cash equivalent, that might still be true for the next one.

Of course, diminishing marginal returns keep this from being a universal rule. The second identical hammer is a lot less valuable to me than the first. The third is virtually worthless. Not everything maintains the same per-unit value if I get more than one.

But that means that for any given category of item, there’s an optimal level – the number where the one I have is worth more than its volume in space or amount in cash, but the next one wouldn’t be. I don’t always know if I’m at the correct level, and certainly I err on the side of less. But asking the question is a good idea.

This goes well beyond personal effects. It’s probably pretty easy to figure out if I own the right number of spatulas. (Even if somehow that number were more than “one,” which it certainly isn’t, the ease at which money can be converted into spatulas means I can probably hold off.) But what about investments? Those are trickier. I think the question helps.

Certainly it doesn’t hurt to ask, and asking unusual questions can help refine your thinking in other ways. So the next time you decide not to buy something, ask yourself if you should sell something similar. And if you decide not to sell something, ask yourself if you should buy more of it. You never know what strange insights these kinds of questions can bring.

If you see a car stalled on the side of the road, you’re likely to drive past it. If you see someone pushing their car down the street, you’re more likely to stop and help.

This phenomenon translates in all sorts of scenarios, and works for a few reasons. First – why do you drive by when you see a car stalled on the side of the road? It’s not because you’re a bad person or callously indifferent to the suffering of others. No, you drive by because there’s probably not a lot you can do, and it’s probably not an emergency. Cars stall and break down all the time, and in most cases you call a tow truck or a friend or whatever and you solve it. Unless you can do something special that the driver can’t, there’s seldom anything meaningful you can contribute.

Now, let’s look at the other example – someone pushing their car.

Why do you stop? Well for one, if someone is pushing their car (as opposed to sitting around waiting for a tow truck or a ride), then the need seems more immediate. You don’t push a car unless you have to. Maybe this person genuinely can’t afford a tow or a taxi. Maybe they don’t have a cell phone so they can call someone. This is someone with a more genuine, immediate need, and the good in us demands we help.

But there’s another reason. We stop and help because there’s an obvious way we can do so. I don’t have to be a mechanic or own a truck. Almost anyone can help push.

And there’s even one more big reason, maybe the biggest – the person pushing their car isn’t just sitting around waiting to be rescued. They’re doing what they can.

What’s the lesson? People are more likely to help not just when it seems like a more severe situation, but also when it’s obvious that they even can help, and when the person they’re helping looks like they’re putting in their own best effort. In any situation, you can do those things as well.

If you have a difficult situation and you want help, making it easy to figure out how to help you and showing that you’re doing your best already are both excellent ways to foster good will among the good Samaritans. There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking for help when you need it. But don’t ask and then sit around – get out and push.