My children all prepare their own lunches for school, something they’re quite proud of. Last week my middle kid (Age 8) was making her customary peanut butter & jelly sandwich when she discovered the bread had gone moldy, so we tossed it and substituted a long roll. The next day when she got home, she commented that her friends probably thought it was silly that she had a PB&J on a long roll. She said, “None of them laughed or anything, but I’ll bet they were all thinking it was really silly.” There was a hint of embarrassment in her voice.

So I asked her: “What did your friends have for lunch?”

She couldn’t remember. I asked her about each of her friends by name to help jog her memory, and she couldn’t remember a single item any of them had for lunch. I told her, “You see? People don’t pay any attention to those little things. You might have thought it was silly, but no one else even noticed.”

She perked right up. It was a wonderful moment. It’s great to recognize early that all the little things you’re self-conscious about, no one else could remember with a gun to their head. Your minor foibles are invisible, so don’t sweat them.

Here’s a good thought experiment for you: think of a position you hold on some issue. Now think of an opposing position, one that you disagree with, on the same issue. Can you name three people or organizations that A.) support the opposing position and B.) you respect and can honestly say are holding their position in good faith?

If not, then chances are that you do not actually understand the opposing position and you live in an echo chamber. If you think the test of reasonableness is whether someone reaches the same conclusions as you, rather than how they approach questions of debate in general, then you are always going to have a limited understanding of the world, and won’t be able to change your mind when it’s warranted.

If you can’t think of three such people or organizations – go find them.

When someone does you a favor, especially if you asked them to, don’t say “I’m sorry.”

They don’t want you to be sorry! They did the favor because they wanted to, because they care about you and want you to be well. You didn’t cause whatever burden they’re helping to carry, and you didn’t force them to help carry it. Apologies aren’t warranted.

When you apologize without necessity, you make the other person feel needlessly guilty. They start to wonder if they did cause your hardship – or at least, they may wonder if you think they did. It’s a rift for no reason!

They don’t want you to be sorry, and you have no reason to be. So replace that apology with sincere gratitude! Thank them for their help, their sacrifice, their effort. And don’t ask if you can do anything for them! Just do something for them, if you can. If you ask, you force them into saying “no,” because then it seems like they’re only helping you transactionally, when their initial effort was probably very genuinely altruistic. Just express your gratitude, and take the next opportunity you can to do something nice for them.

Accepting help is hard, and we’re all a little bad at it. But try this stuff. It helps.

Resilience isn’t stubbornness. It’s not resistance to change. It’s adaptability.

People often confuse the two. They think that being resilient means fighting against the tides of change successfully, but it’s the complete opposite. It’s rolling with the punches.

A long time ago, I managed a sales office for a third-party sales company (that means we did the sales for client companies, rather than selling things we made ourselves). After a long time with a particular client, they changed some of their product and service offerings, which meant we had to re-train our staff, and the commission structure changed. I led the meeting where we went over those details.

I was amazed by what I saw, and recognized then that I was witnessing something very important. As I was laying out the changes in the commissions, products, etc., I watched the whole staff basically divide themselves into one of two categories.

Category A, which was the majority, were people who immediately started complaining. They objected, groused, fought. All for nothing, of course – this came from the client and we had no control over it, except to drop their contract, which we obviously weren’t going to do. Fighting me was especially silly. All that sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nothing, that is, except wasted mental energy and attitude.

And then there was Category B. A minority of people on the staff immediately began figuring. They asked intelligent questions, diving into the new structure. They started doing quick math on scrap paper. They looked up a few things about their territories. In other words, they took the change as a given, despite being no more pleased with it than anyone else. And within that new structure, they immediately started figuring out the ways to make the most money.

Over the next few months, the leaderboard rankings changed within the company. Everyone in the new top 10% of sellers was in Category B in that initial meeting.

That’s resilience. You don’t have to like the changes. But you do have to know when fighting them won’t do a damned thing, and that the smart move is to adapt. The resilient people win.

Here is a secret to lower stress and better productivity: know your own abilities very well.

One of the biggest contributors to stress is a misaligned calendar. If you have too much to do or too little time, you get stressed. And if you have too little to do, you start having that FOMO (“fear of missing out”) creep up on you. Often people say “yes” to too many things, not realizing the cost in time and treasure they’ll have to pay.

It is worth the little bit of extra time up front to build ways of measuring your own ability. When you have a big To-Do list and you don’t get through all of it, spend a little time the next day journaling about the experience. What did you get done? How long did it take you? Why did you avoid the remaining items in favor of the ones you completed? This can help you form a more accurate picture of what you can actually get done in a day, and plan accordingly.

Have to do a quarterly report? Start up some tracking software to see how long it actually takes you, how many breaks you take, etc. Then next quarter, you won’t think you can get it done in four hours when it actually takes you sixteen.

We are generally bad at estimating our own capacity. When you can do something quickly and with minimal effort, trust yourself to do so and don’t stress about that thing looming on the horizon. Instead, focus on the things that require greater effort while you still have energy to expend.

There is a hospital near me, the major one that serves all the area I live in. The last two times I brought someone there, they never left. Both my father and my oldest friend ran out the last of their clocks in that building.

I know it isn’t the building’s fault; I’m not superstitious like that. Statistically, most people you know will die in a hospital. But both of them were in there for a long time, and as a result so was I – there are bad memories painted on every wall of that place.

Today, I picked someone up from there. Someone dear to me left that place, in my car, and with (apart from a little recovery time ahead) a clean bill of health.

It doesn’t all balance, of course. Good memories don’t paint over bad ones. But it’s nice to know that we can still get a win, we living.

I think threats are silly.

Why threaten? If you want to intimidate someone, actions speak louder – why warn your enemy and give up the element of surprise? If you want to compel behavior, about any other form of influence is better. If you want to preserve a relationship, threats are horrible.

The words “or else” are foolish ones.

You should be nice to people all the time. You should strive to be professional, and courteous, and you should go out of your way not just to avoid offense, but to be extra kind. You should do all of this because it’s good to do, but there’s a large personal benefit as well.

The concept is “social capital.” The idea is that if you are generally a very kind and courteous person, your missteps will be more readily forgiven. We all make mistakes, so it’s good to have a large store of that capital built up. If your account is large, then you can do things like make bold social moves or make risky jokes (risky, not intentionally unkind!) without as much fear of losing the good graces of your community.

Be nice, have fun!

Let’s say that you think that blueberry scones specifically are causing the obesity crisis. You collect two pieces of data very carefully: how many blueberry scones are available in each county, and how many obese people in each county report eating blueberry scones at least once a week. You discover damning evidence: the higher the number of blueberry scones in a given county, the higher the number of obese people who reported eating blueberry scones. Ergo, blueberry scones are directly and positively correlated with obesity, and you stand by your position that we’d have far less obesity if the scones were banned.

But… wait a second.

I mean… of course those things would be correlated, right? And you’re asking the totally wrong question. If you want to make the case that blueberry scones are driving the obesity crisis, then you need to be comparing the availability of blueberry scones with obesity in general. If people in low-scone counties are just as obese but simply getting that way from eating different foods, then scones clearly aren’t the issue (or at least, not alone). It’s even possible that low-scone countries have higher rates of obesity in general, because maybe there’s some other food that’s even worse for you that people eat more of without scones as an alternative.

The point is that it’s a weird take to claim that scones are associated with scone-related obesity as if that was some sort of gotcha. Cars are associated with vehicular deaths too, but unless the total number of deaths are higher in areas with more cars, then you don’t know the whole picture. If you took an island nation and removed all vehicles of any kind, you’d have fewer fatalities from car accidents. But you’d also have more people dying because they couldn’t get prompt medical attention. Do I know that those numbers would wash out? Nope. But I wouldn’t make the claim that they don’t without checking – and measuring the right things.

(Warning: Perhaps one of my more controversial opinions follows!)

Let’s say you watch a popular fictional television show, one that features a large cast of characters. One of these characters does something you don’t like. How upset should you be about it?

My answer: virtually zero. While watching the show, go ahead and make a shocked face and enjoy the narrative, of course. But then the show is over, and you shouldn’t still feel upset. It isn’t real! It doesn’t actually affect you! And if you find yourself remaining very upset for a long time after you’ve seen it, then I suggest that you should not watch the show. It’s purely for entertainment, and you aren’t being entertained – you’re being upset. You should have the mental fortitude to not get upset by it, but if you don’t, then the next best thing is not to watch it at all.

Okay, by itself, that opinion is maybe only a little controversial. It shouldn’t be controversial at all, but I can imagine several people arguing with me about it, so I suppose it is. But here’s the much more controversial view: 99% of “news,” pop culture, or current events is indistinguishable from fiction as far as you’re concerned.

Do you watch the news and get upset? Why? Those people are no more real to you than the characters on the fictional television show. You’ve never met them and never will. You couldn’t prove they’re real by touching them, interacting with them, etc. Every aspect of them could be an elaborate hoax and you’d never know. So why let it bother you?

I adopt the view that everyone I can’t interact with in a real way is fictional. Their exploits are fictional, their pagentry is spectacle for entertainment only. And I’m not entertained by it. So I live in the world of the real, and my life is very good.