I love hearing about other people’s experiences. I love the everyday minutiae, and I love the big formative events. I love culture, down to the individual level. Many times, I dive in – if someone starts telling me about things I’ve never experienced myself, I’m very drawn to try those things out. It’s very easy to convince me to try a new book, restaurant, musician, etc. Just suggest it and I’m practically there.

Sometimes, however, I’ll learn about experiences that I don’t have any interest in trying first hand. I don’t want to smoke meth. I don’t want to kill a person. Things like that. That means, though, that when I hear someone has done something like that and is willing to talk about it, I’m all ears.

I will hopefully never learn about the experience of meth smoking, person killing, or similar unpleasant things directly. And the people who have done them are probably not as likely to cross my path naturally as someone who hasn’t, simply because of the common consequences of those things. So they represent “rare information” to me. I can read about meth addiction and the criminal justice system from the safety of my office, but that isn’t the same at all.

I also, however, don’t want to seek out murderers and meth heads and strike up conversations with them. But that’s because I have a preconceived notion of what a “murderer” or a “meth head” looks like. I have no idea if those stereotypes are true.

Quick aside: I’ve interacted with – in fact worked with – at least one person I know to be a murderer. They served jail time for it. They paid their debt to society and rehabilitated. Then they were my awesome co-worker. But apart from knowledge that the event occurred, it was never really appropriate to discuss it, so I didn’t learn much. Except, perhaps, to challenge my assumptions.

Quick aside #2: I’m not some morbid person obsessed with locating killers to talk to. That’s just an example.

My point is, humans have a strong tendency to pre-judge and form opinions on what people must naturally be like based on certain criteria, and then if we miss that window to pre-judge we can be really weirded out by it.

Let’s say you’ve formed the opinion that everyone from HokeyTown is a brain-dead jerk, stupid and mean no matter what. Low-brow, no culture, etc. All things you dislike. Then you meat some wonderful person named Sam, and Sam is the love of your life. Erudite, sophisticated, kind and nurturing. You fall in love together and have plans to get married, and Sam says they’d love to have the ceremony in HokeyTown, because it’s their home town.

Blam, ton of bricks. You’ve got to reconcile these two ideas. “Everyone from HokeyTown is an idiot jerk” and “The most wonderful person I’ve ever met is from HokeyTown” don’t jive; the ideas can’t coexist.

The best case scenario is that you say, “Wow, I guess I was wrong about my very strong opinions on the residents of HokeyTown – and in fact, maybe my deeply-held priors could all use a little review.” The worst case scenario is that you conclude that Sam has somehow tricked you, hiding their true nature as a malicious moron in a deliberate attempt to deceive you, and in fact this itself serves as further evidence for your bias.

Most people land somewhere in the middle, unfortunately. They keep their opinions on HokeyTown in general, but come up with some excuse or exemption for Sam that makes them “no true HokeyTownie.” Of course, that won’t solve the problem for long – Sam probably doesn’t share your dismal view of the residents of their home town, and if you insist on holding fast to your bigotry then the relationship is unlikely to persist.

Which, unfortunately, is what often happens. The story of star-crossed lovers who cast aside their societal prejudices in order to be with someone they’ve evaluated on their merits to be wonderful is a great tale, but it plays out less frequently in real life than I would like.

So in my head, I have this sort of mental encyclopedia entry on “meth” that says “Everyone who has ever done meth now looks like this, and no one who looks like this has ever done meth.” So if I meet a bunch of professional-looking folks at a networking event or something, my natural assumption is that none of them have smoked meth before. That’s probably true, statistically, and the assumption by itself isn’t the problem.

The problem come up in the unlikely scenario that one of the professionals A.) has in fact smoked meth in the past and B.) I find this information out somehow. Maybe they tried it once in their teens, thirty years ago, and learned to avoid it ever afterwards?

Because I have this pathological desire to learn everything about people, I’m likely to be the tactless guy that says, “Wow, you’ve done meth?! That must have been crazy! Tell me all about it!” That’s not the standard reaction, though.

The standard reaction is your brain starts sounding alarms, because if given the choice between revising an entire mental model of how you perceive the world versus throwing this one person under the proverbial bus, your brain will probably try to convince you that this person isn’t worth talking to – no matter what “disguise” they’re wearing now, they’re obviously a deranged, drug-addicted meth head. Forget about the fact that they were just telling you about their 30-year career investing in charities that help crippled children, that’s just a cover for the dangerous scum they really are… right?

The lesson here is complex. It’s not “never judge anyone, ever.” Past behavior remains the best indicator of future behavior. Contrary to folksy truisms, the cover of a book tells you a lot about the contents. The lesson also isn’t “people can always dip their toes in the pool of bad behavior or immorality and come back from it.” Sometimes they can’t – or at least they don’t.

I think my lessons here are: don’t hardline, and try to get first-hand data when you can. Don’t hardline, meaning don’t let your mental encyclopedia define things in terms of “never” or “always.” Leave a little room for exceptions. Leave room to be wrong. People are complex, and rarely entirely good or bad. Leaving yourself room to be wrong about them also leaves them the room to improve. There’s no surer way to make sure someone never gets better than to build a society that tells them they never can.

Get first-hand data when you can, because everyone is biased. You’re biased, and the person you’re getting even first-hand data from is biased, too. So it’s best, whenever you can, to not play whisper-down-the-lane and introduce a bunch of extra biases as well. Don’t let too many editors get their hands on your mental encyclopedia, and screen them well.

I’ve never murdered anyone and I’ve never done meth. But I’ve done plenty that would fall into other people’s unpleasant mental categories. And sadly, I’ve personally experienced the rapid change in opinion when someone learns of one of those things that happened twenty years ago. It makes me less likely to write someone off for the red in their own ledger, and maybe that’s enough for it to have been worth it.

When my oldest daughter was about 4 years old, I showed her a picture. It was an actual photograph, not electronic. She wanted a closer look, so she intuitively placed her thumb and index finger on the photo close together, and then spread them apart while in contact with it. She then tried a few more times and was frustrated that it didn’t change.

She was zooming in. She’d literally never seen a photograph that wasn’t on a screen before, and so she was confused that it didn’t respond to the input. At first I laughed in the way old people laugh about kids that can’t use a rotary phone, but then I realized how impressive it was. She was four years old, and her level of interaction with these devices was nearly innate. Things that adults struggle to learn will be second-nature to her.

A few days ago when she sat down with me to add a few words to this very blog, I didn’t even have to give her any instruction. She knew how to operate the keyboard – how to hold shift to capitalize letters or generate an exclamation point. When I was 7, I certainly didn’t – but I didn’t grow up around keyboards in the same way that she will.

If you’re young, never ever underestimate just how much value you can bring to the table simply because of stuff you grew up doing that older folks are clueless about. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can’t compete with more experienced people solely on that basis. I might have decades more experience than you in certain things, but there are other things that are literally second-nature to you that I have to struggle to learn. Find areas where those skills are in demand and use that to your advantage.

When Microsoft Office Suite was first being introduced, it was all the rage to be able to use it. It was a hugely in-demand skill that impressed employers and moved you along in the application process swiftly. So people caught up and pretty much every white-collar professional learned how to not only use it, but learned to indicate that they knew how on their resumes. For many people of that generation, the learning was formalized – classes or certifications, etc.

Now, I hear younger people laughing about the question. Not knowing it would be the strange departure, so it seems silly to even ask. Imagine there was a 6-week certification course in smartphone use. It covered things like downloading and using apps, text message communication skills, WiFi versus 4G, etc. There’s a segment of the older population that might think that was useful, but for a young person that would be laughable.

Older people and younger people bring different strengths to the table when it comes to value-add for employers. I see both populations struggle with naming that value sometimes. There’s plenty of ageism in both directions among hiring managers, but in general I think the older folks are better at knowing the positives they carry. They know the value of their experiences, their wisdom, and their maturity.

Young people, on the other hand, often struggle to realize just how many things are second-nature to them that would represent massive investments to learn for older people. Heck, I’m 36 and the whole reason I’m writing this post is because I started researching how to make short instructional videos that don’t look like garbage and people who are 15 are cranking out stuff that would have gotten you on national television when I was their age.

If someone grew up on a horse farm, then they know more about horses than someone who never saw one in their life before they went to college and got their degree in “equestrian studies.” But the degree gives you a certain sense of confidence that you know what you’re talking about (whether you actually do or don’t). So many young people have essentially a decade or more experience in complex skills simply by virtue of their generation, but there’s no “official” or socially-accepted category for that kind of knowledge. It’s not a degree, it’s not work experience, etc. But it would be insane to discount knowledge you gained because you literally grew up around a particular subject.

Take honest stock of your skills. Pay attention to things that you do well. If you’re thinking, “this can’t possibly be a valuable skill, because it’s so easy for me” – you’re exactly 180 degrees wrong. The fact that it’s so easy for you is exactly why you can use it to add value.

I’ve never been good at sleeping.

Somehow I just never mastered the elementary skill of shutting my brain down for a few hours. I exercise and eat well, but I’ve got very persistent insomnia.

I drink way too much caffeine, but even when I was completely caffeine-free this would happen. I drink caffeine now to combat the fatigue that results from not sleeping.

Years ago I took some time off to try to concentrate on doing nothing but getting a regular sleep pattern going. No work or other responsibilities for a few weeks. I used the time to get a lot of exercise outdoors, read books, avoided electronics, and avoided stress. The closest thing I got to a natural rhythm was a stable pattern of 30 hours awake followed by about 6 hours of sleep. The only way I can sleep for 8 uninterrupted hours is if it’s preceded by at least 48 hours awake straight, or at least a week of 3 hours or less per night.

I don’t like the idea of things like sleeping pills, because I always worry that I’ll need to wake up for some emergency and be unable to. I have three young children and don’t want to be unresponsive if they need something.

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts! If you’ve got any good advice, I’m all ears.

Here’s how to improve your writing: Be more direct. Use fewer words.

I struggle with this. I like to build strong visual analogies. But when you hand your work to an editor, they almost never say “you should make this longer.”

Look at your sentences. Highlight every word you could remove and still have the sentence make sense. Then remove them.

People’s attention is a finite resource. You’ll only have it for so long. Use it well.

Sometimes I’ll get an idea that I like and think has potential, but for lack of available juice it’ll pretty much stay in the back of my head. Since starting this blog, I’ve gotten a nice outlet for those ideas – I can put them here. All the potential results of this are positive:

1. Maybe it already exists! Funny anecdote – when I was a kid, I told my parents I had a great idea to save on our gas bill. I had realized that wood burns, and thought that it would be BRILLIANT to just put wood in a metal box and burn it instead of paying for gas like a sucker. So… I invented a wood-burning stove. I invented backwards. My parents swear I was a smart kid, but most of the stories of my childhood are like this. Apparently I “invented” the icebox the same way. The point is that just because you invented calculus, doesn’t mean someone else didn’t do it sooner. It’s good to pay attention to the world. So maybe this idea I’ve come up with already exists, and someone will read this blog and tell me about it, and then I’ll have the thing I want!
2. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but someone will steal the idea and make it. Why do I think this is a good outcome? Because then I’d have the thing, which is all I really want. If I was going to make it myself, I’d do it. This is me being honest that I’m not. I use a lot of juice on other stuff, and I don’t have an infinite amount to spend on every idea. I have to pick my battles, and I’m working on a lot of other things that make me happy.
3. Maybe it doesn’t exist, and no one makes it, but at some point I’ll circle around to it and do it myself. If that ends up being the case, it’ll probably be because a lot of people gave me good feedback.

I think one of the reasons you often see a lot of good ideas/innovations come from the same person or organization is because once a big part of your juice and daily life is dedicated to “develop ideas I have,” it obviously becomes easier to explore the possibilities of them when they come up. If you spend a lot of time writing, it’s easy to write something new that comes into your head. If you spend a lot of time building stuff already, it’s easy to build a new thing. Which is a good lesson in itself!

Anyway, now I feel like I wrote a lot of words about ideas in general and didn’t actually talk about this random idea I had. It probably won’t be worth the build-up, but I’m committed!

Here’s the idea: I run into a lot of emailed newsletters. Lots of people whose thoughts I enjoy have them, lots of industries that are relevant to me produce them, etc. The problem is that I don’t want 25+ email newsletters and I’ll never read them all if I get them. What I would LOVE is a software solution that lets me create an account and sign up for email newsletters through it, and then on whatever interval I request (daily, weekly, only Tues & Thurs, whatever) compiles all the newsletters into a single PDF (with links intact!) and emails that to me. Sort of like customizing my own e-zine out of the newsletters that exist. Then I can throw that e-zine on my Kindle or iPad or whatever and read it at my leisure.

Does this exist? Should it? Feedback welcome!

This isn’t going to be my normal blog post for the day, so you’ll sort of get a bonus one today. A few posts ago, I defined a term that I wanted to use in that post. The term was “juice,” and here’s what I meant by it:

Whenever you’re working on something, a lot of resources get used – time, money, effort, calories, social capital, decision-making fatigue, mental energy, sacrifices, and so on. Rather than write all of that out, I’m going to collectively lump all of that together under the term “juice.” So when I use that term, that’s what I’m talking about: the wide variety of resources, both tangible and intangible, that are required to make things happen.

I wanted to have that term defined in its own post, because I intend to keep using it (I think it’s a helpful concept in a lot of conversations), and I wanted to have a post to link back to. So I’m once again using the blog as an idea-organizer – thanks for playing along!

Today is my son’s first birthday!

While no one can predict the future, I don’t have any plans to have any more kids (I’m blessed with three, and I think we’re at capacity!), so that means this is likely the last 1st birthday I’ll be directly involved in for a while. At least until the grandkids start showing up, which is probably a ways off yet.

Buddy is a smiling, happy, active boy. He stomps little happy feet all the time, and laughs easily and often, even for a baby. He eats like a horse. He absolutely adores music, especially when his grandfather plays the banjo. He can beat on the bongo drums pretty well himself.

Before I had kids, I massively underestimated them. I had no idea a one-year-old could have so much personality; I sort of assumed they were all pretty generic until at least kindergarten. I certainly had no idea that a two-year-old could express complex ideas or be intentionally funny. And I couldn’t have dreamed that a seven-year-old could be the most interesting, fun and brave person I knew.

Added all together with the extra months, I’ve raised about 11 years’ worth of kids, given that their current ages are 1, 2.5 and 7.5 respectively. Sometimes it feels like about a hundred years.

Sometimes it feels like a few days. A blink.

I couldn’t possibly list everything I’ve learned about being a parent, every mistake I’ve made, every victory. But here are some big, big takeaways about parenting while I’m thinking about them:

1. Kids want to be good. They just want to be active. Don’t spend your precious time trying to prevent them from doing bad stuff. Point them in a positive direction and let them run. Put all your effort into rewarding and encouraging good behavior, and you’ll almost never have to punish bad. I can’t remember more than a dozen times I’ve had to actually punish a kid with a time out or something – instead we spent a ton of time creating reward games for good behavior and heaping praise on kindness whenever we saw it. It’s worked so far.
2. They are so, so, SO smart. You will never be prepared for how much smarter they are than you think they’ll be. They will figure you out fast. That also works both ways – they can perfectly understand you much younger than you think. By six months they’re not creatures of pure instinct any more, and you would be shocked at how much language they understand by then. You can just talk to them, and they’ll understand way before they’re actually able to talk back. They can also open everything you think they can’t open. At 7 months, Buddy unlocked a pin-protected phone. I mean, then the little “hacker” licked it, but still.
3. You teach them literally 100% of their behavior. They don’t do anything you don’t teach them to do. If they bug you for snacks, it’s because at some point you gave them snacks when they did that. If they cry after you put them to bed, it’s because at some point you let that cry convince you to pick them back up. You can do whatever you feel comfortable with, but if you ever find yourself exasperated and asking “why do they DO that,” just remember it’s because you taught them to. That extends to a lot of behaviors as they get older – they’ll curse if you curse, smoke if you smoke, drink if you drink. You’ll never hide it from them. Use them as your reason for being better. More than anything, teach them to love.

I’ll miss having a little baby, but not nearly as much as I’ll enjoy the person he’ll grow into. Each of my children is more awesome today than they were yesterday; they become cooler people every day, and I love being there for it.

Happy Birthday Buddy, you entire meatloaf. I love you.

I had a conversation with my seven-year-old daughter yesterday. I noticed she had a bandage on her thumb, and I asked her how she got it (the stories of my child’s myriad injuries are always great).

She said, “I was using a sharp knife to cut a cucumber and I accidentally cut myself. It was GUSHING BLOOD.” (Note: That probably means there were three drops, as my daughter’s talent for hyperbole is well-documented.)

I said back, “Oh, then you need more practice. Remember to count your fingers before you start cutting so you keep track of where they all are, and remember that you shouldn’t have to press hard. If the knife doesn’t go into the vegetable easily, you’re using the wrong one.” She agreed, and confirmed that the knife had indeed worked easily, but she’d forgotten to count her fingers so her thumb was in the path of the blade. She assured me she’d remember next time.

We then rode along quietly for a few blocks (this conversation happened in the car) while I thought about that exchange. Then I commented to her:

“Do you know that there are parents out there that would have heard you tell you me that story, and because of it would have told you that you’re not allowed to use the knife any more until you’re older?”

She made a face not unlike this one:

We talked about that for a while. About how parents often see their kids make mistakes, and conclude immediately that a particular activity is beyond them or that they should be shielded from it. Too often parents think their job is to minimize harm – real and imagined, actual and potential – instead of to maximize learning.

I don’t want to raise porcelain dolls that are afraid of knives. I want to raise scarred, knife-savvy badasses. You need to exercise some judgement here – I’m obviously not handing a knife to my toddler – but overall I think we err way too much on the side of caution.

When the bandage comes off my Beansprout’s thumb, she’ll be no worse for wear. But the impact of the confidence she gets from my encouragement and support as she learns to command the world around her will last forever. The Beansprout has many amazing qualities – she’s kind, she’s smart, she’s charismatic. But my favorite of all her positive traits is that she is dauntless. Fearless and unstoppable. And it’s not born from a lack of realism – she’s fallen out of plenty of the trees she’s climbed, taken plenty of nose-dives off the back of her bike, gotten stung by the bugs she catches. It only makes her quicker, more resilient, more sure of herself.

When I see her dangling from a tree branch, every nerve in my body shouts at me to run over, to grab her, to shield her from the consequences of her actions. But instead, I steel myself and say “find your footing, swing over to the next branch. I bet you can go even higher.”

While writing this, the Beansprout came over and asked me what I was doing, and when I told her I was writing about her, she asked if she could write something:

My dad is the best dad in the world. My mom is the best mom in the world. Try your hardest at everything you do!

(The preceding was typed entirely by the Beansprout, including proper punctuation and capitalization, and with no direction from me. I only added the italics. Photo evidence below.)

We are not meant to be static.

Change anxiety is a very real thing. Status quo bias is huge. We fear any disruption to any part of our lives. I think I understand why.

If you never change willingly, change will happen to you none the less. But change that happens to you unexpectedly can often be change for the worse. If all your changes are for the worse, then you’ll fear change and you won’t do it willingly.

Get it?

You’re going to go through changes either way. Nothing lasts forever. So go out and pick the ones you like! Shout “you can’t fire me, I quit!” to all of life. Train yourself to be comfortable with change when it happens, so you can better ride the storm of unexpected disruption, and to grasp the many positive changes that slip by you because you’re otherwise moderately comfortable.

Devil take “moderately comfortable.”

Sometimes things should be discarded even though nothing is wrong with them, to make room for better things. Jobs. Relationships. Clutter. Locations.

The goal of your life isn’t to build a barricade against the world. It’s to live in that world!

Someone I used to work with, who was one of my favorite co-workers ever, just left her job. She didn’t get fired (in fact, they adored her there), nor did she leave because she had another job offer. She didn’t dislike her job – she sings the praises of the company and the work they’re doing. So why did she leave?

The same reason a butterfly leaves a perfectly good cocoon. It was time. She’ll do something new, something amazing, see more of what life has to offer. It’s her change, and she can do whatever she wants with it – it didn’t happen to her. She made it happen.

So can you. It’s thrilling.

Turn and face the strange.

Sustainable growth, improving in the face of success, and realistic costs. That’s what I’m going to talk about today. I’m going to put down my thoughts about why we can improve sometimes but other times it feels hard, why the biggest barrier to your future success might be your past success, and why you can “be anything you want” – if.

Before I get into it, I need to define a term I’ll be using a lot in this piece. The term is “juice.” Whenever you’re working on something, a lot of resources get used – time, money, effort, calories, social capital, decision-making fatigue, mental energy, sacrifices, and so on. Rather than write all of that out, I’m going to collectively lump all of that together under the term “juice.” So when I use that term, that’s what I’m talking about: the wide variety of resources, both tangible and intangible, that are required to make things happen.

Part I – The Scramble

When you’ve got nothing, success is easy. That’s because when you’re literally at rock bottom, nearly anything counts as “success.” If you’re broke and you go out and make fifty dollars, that’s a huge win. And I don’t mean to say that in a derogatory way or diminish it – it is a huge win. If everything about your current situation is bad, you won’t waste any juice on maintaining any part of it, so 100% can go towards forward movement.

But the more you gain, the more you have to care about what you’ve gained. If you work incredibly hard to turn a plot of arid land into a farm that can grow crops, that’s a huge win. But now you have to maintain that land – the farm will go south fast if you don’t pay attention to it. So you can’t put the same amount of juice into the next acre as you did to the first one.

When you push off against the side of the pool while you’re swimming, you get a great burst of speed to start. But then you’ve got to propel yourself while also staying afloat.

I recently had an interaction with a company that fell well within my area of expertise, and within that sphere, they were doing a lot of things wrong. But overall they were successful – clearly they were doing something right in other areas. Because I don’t ever want to think I have all the answers, I started digging a little deeper; maybe I was the incorrect one after all. But no, I’d found that similar experts had said similar things about this one area, even though the company was doing pretty well overall. So why weren’t they fixing this one thing?

Because 100% of their juice was fueling the maintenance of the things they’re doing well. They’re spinning plates. Their growth has been very rapid, but that means they don’t have a lot of their processes locked down, efficient and automatic yet. They’re scrambling. That doesn’t mean they won’t figure it out and ultimately be successful (they might!), but it does mean that future growth is going to be very, very difficult until they do.

In other words, their current success is hindering their future success, because instead of having juice to spend on growth, they’re spending it all on maintenance. You’ll always spend some percentage of juice on maintaining your existing successes – nothing will ever be truly automatic – but you want that outlay to be as low as possible, so you have enough left over to keep growing.

Part II – That Which Is Unseen

Frédéric Bastiat (a brilliant 19th-century economist) wrote about how it can be extremely difficult to grasp the reality of things that don’t happen but could have. If you slack off on maintaining your car and then have to pay 100 dollars for a repair as a result, you feel that very sharply. But if you slack off at work and as such don’t get a hundred dollar bonus that you otherwise could have, you don’t feel that nearly so much – maybe not at all. In both cases you’re a hundred dollars poorer than you could have been, but your mind treats those scenarios very differently. In other words, we feel the pain of losses much more sharply than the pain of foregone gains.

We’re always on the lookout for losses, but we’re nowhere near as good as spotting the places where we’re foregoing extra gains. This is true always, but it’s especially true if you’re already doing pretty well! If you’re dead broke, you’re looking out for any opportunity to make money. But if you have a comfortable income, you’re not as tuned to the opportunities where you could be making more if you changed things. If your business is generating good revenue, you’re not as aware of the places where it could improve.

Part of that is because you’re spending juice on just maintaining what you’ve got, so you have less for new ideas. But another big chunk is that we tend to think, “If I’m successful, I must already be doing everything right.” We let our egos get in the way. It’s good to be proud of your accomplishments – it’s just bad to be too proud. Leave yourself enough humility to improve.

Another reason we’re bad at that is that it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that only people more successful than us can teach us anything. And as you get more successful, naturally that pool of people shrinks down. But someone doesn’t need to be an expert to teach you something. Even if you’re successful, you’ve found one of potentially thousands of paths to get where you are. Other paths might have taught you different things. You took Path 1, so now that you’re here you’re successful, but you’ve reached a plateau because you’re great at Thing A but not so good at Thing B. Someone who took Path 2 might not have been as successful because they never learned enough about Thing A, but along the way learned a lot more about Thing B than you.

So before you’re quick to say “Who are you to tell me how to run my business, if you’re not as successful as me,” ask yourself – are you the maximum level of success you could possibly be, or is there room for improvement despite the fact that you’ve done well? And if there’s room for improvement – then you don’t know everything, and thinking that you do is holding you back.

Part III – Everything You Ever

When we tell kids “you can be anything you want,” we’re trying to be encouraging. To let them know that their destiny is their own. My favorite Dr. Seuss quote (and one of my all-time favorite quotes, period) is:

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
Any direction you choose.

It’s not only true, it’s an important lesson to teach. But I think it’s incomplete – we leave out an important bit. I’m not the brilliant poet that Dr. Seuss is, so forgive me, but:

Some roads are expensive
And others are cheap.
Some paths are quite shallow
And many are steep.
You can still be a winner
When you’ve just lost the game.
You can take any path,
But they don’t cost the same.

To put it in a much geekier, less-poetic way: We don’t really teach our kids about opportunity cost, and we should. Yes, you can be anything – you can be a schoolteacher or an astronaut. But by any measure, being an astronaut is much, much harder to accomplish. If we measure success only by the end result, we’re getting a very skewed view of reality.

If I offered you a choice between a new Kia Forte or a Ferrari 458, which would you want? Most people would probably take the Ferrari. But if the choice instead was between a Ferrari 458, or a Kia Forte with $200,000 in the backseat, which would you choose now? Sure, a Ferrari is cooler than a Kia. But that’s measuring only the end result. The two hundred grand that the Kia didn’t cost might have bought a lot of cool stuff. That’s “that which is unseen.”

The lesson here is absolutely NOT that we should tell kids not to strive for things that are hard or require a lot of juice to get there. But everyone – kids and adults alike – should recognize that sometimes the thing you think you want costs way, way more than things that would make you equally (or more!) happy.

Putting this all together: Maybe you’re pretty successful. Maybe you wish you were more successful, but for some reason the trajectory has slowed for you. When you were broke and hungry you got motivated and took off like a rocket, but now the steps are longer and you’re not growing like you used to. You had an idea of where you wanted to be by now, but it was based on the rate of growth you saw ten years ago and that rate has slowed, so now you’re not where you thought you’d be.

It’s time to look around. Look over your past successes – are they fueling you, or draining you? Is it taking a lot of your juice just to maintain them, or are they giving you more? If it’s the former, then go reinforce or even rebuild them. Delegate your authority. Someone I used to work for just named a new CEO for his company so he could focus on a new project – that’s bold and correct, and not everyone can do that.

Doing that will help you in another way – it’ll put the spirit of the hustle back into you. You won’t be resting on your laurels, you’ll be back to doing something new. And with that will come the learner mentality again; you’ll pull yourself away from thinking you know everything, because you’ll face more failures, false starts, and setbacks. That will keep you humble and humility will help you learn. That which is normally unseen will reveal itself to you.

And then you can take stock. Success is a journey, but at some point you have to decide what it really means to you. You have to define the terms of your own happiness, and that’s going to involve a little price comparison shopping, too. There’s all different kinds of happiness, and they all cost different amounts of juice. But there’s a particular kind of happiness out there that’s ideal for you – you have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes. You can find happiness that costs just the right juice.