The difference between long-term goals and short-term goals is that long-term goals are essentially wishes by themselves. Very few long-term goals can be acted upon by themselves. “I want to be rich.” Okay, but that’s just a hope or dream, it’s not an actionable thing. “I want to be thin,” or “I want to be married,” etc.

Those are directional, and I’m not saying it’s not good to have direction. But you can’t leave it there. You have to break your long-term goals down. The smaller the unit you can break them down into, the better.

“I want to lose weight.” Okay, break that down. How much weight? By when? What will it take – what do you have to do every day, every hour, to get there?

Too Big: “I want to lose weight.”

Smaller, But Not Small Enough: “I want to lose 3o pounds this year.”

Getting Better: “So I want to lose 2.5 pounds per month.”

Even Better Still: “So I want to lose about a quarter of a pound every three days.”

Okay, now we’re onto something. Losing a quarter of a pound doesn’t sound hard at all, does it? You can probably lose a quarter of a pound by going for a walk around the block each day and not drinking soda with lunch for three days.

So even better still: “I will walk around the block each day and I’ll cut out soda. I’ll measure my progress every two weeks and look for at least a pound of loss.” Now that’s an actionable goal! That’s an actual thing you can do, every day, and commit to. And it’s not super hard at all! If you just focus on this really easy thing, you don’t even have to pay attention to the big, daunting goal at all.

Measure your progress. Maybe you’ll need to change, maybe you’ll need to adjust. Maybe it’ll work better than you thought! (Note: I’m no diet guru. This is just an example.) But you now have actionable steps you can take, instead of just wishes.

This method works for pretty much anything you want to do. Break your long-term plans into your action steps, and you not only make real progress, but you don’t make yourself intimidated by a lofty goal. Losing a quarter of a pound is easier than losing 30, writing a page (or a blog post) is easier than writing a book, and working an hour of overtime is easier than coming up with thirty grand for the new car you want.

Baby steps to a better world.

All results you experience from things you attempt will come from some combination of factors inside and outside your control. For sake of shorthand, we’ll call the factors inside your control “effort” and we’ll call the factors outside your control “luck.” So everything that you experience, you experience due to some combination of Effort x Luck.

By our definition, you can’t control Luck. So you want to minimize its impact. You can’t eliminate it entirely, but you can mitigate its effects. To see how, imagine I told you that you had to make delicious rice pudding, but with one caveat: You have to use a full cup of mustard in the recipe. You’re not allowed to use any less than a full cup.

Sounds gross. If you can’t take out any mustard, how are you supposed to make delicious rice pudding? Well, if you try to make only a normal amount of rice pudding, you probably can’t. But you could make 20x the amount of rice pudding, and by that point the one cup of mustard would be so diluted that you probably couldn’t even taste it. Or maybe it would take 50x. Or 100x. But there is some amount you could make to where the mustard would be inconsequential.

That’s how Effort and Luck work. Luck – defined as factors outside your control – will remain fairly constant throughout your life. But Effort is, by definition, up to you. You can’t change Luck, but you can put so much Effort in that the effects of Luck are barely noticeable.

That means putting in the kind of Effort that limits your vulnerability to luck. You can’t control if it rains or not – that’s Luck. But you can read weather reports, carry umbrellas, and give yourself extra time in case traffic is bad – that’s Effort.

Sometimes you’ll fail and it will be because of a random occurrence, something outside of your control, Bad Luck. But if you accept that excuse to yourself, you’ll learn nothing and leave yourself vulnerable. Luck is constant – if a random occurrence knocked you out before, it will again. Instead of saying “Oh well, can’t be helped,” figure out how it can be. Remember, it’s better to succeed than to be blameless in your failures. Don’t worry about fault. It’s just you and me talking, and we’re here to help each other. I won’t judge you, and I know you won’t judge me. So let’s own our failures, even the ones due to chance, and beat it next time.

One of my favorite pieces of wisdom comes from an unlikely place – the garden center at The Home Depot. Specifically, a sign above the shade trees:

“The best time to plant a shade tree was ten years ago. The second-best time is now.”

I absolutely love that. It’s a good reminder that even if you wish you’d done things differently or started something sooner, there’s no time like the present. Maybe you’d be farther along if you’d chosen to start learning some skill or another when you were younger – but you didn’t know then, and you know now. Get started.

The plants you choose to water are the ones that will grow. Soon they’ll expand well beyond your initial investment and the pattern of their growth will be wild and exciting and unpredictable.

That analogy holds true for pretty much anything you focus on in your life. If you value knowledge and you invest in it, the knowledge you gain will take on a life of its own and grow beyond your original investment. You’ll have more to talk about, so you’ll talk to more people, and more interesting people, and you’ll in turn learn more and more. Those pathways will open and the branches will grow.

If you value stuff, you’ll be buried in it. If you value experiences, you’ll have more and more. If you value money, it’ll gather size and speed like a snowball rolling downhill. If you value family, your family will grow and grow and grow.

For a long time, if you stop watering a plant it will die. But there does eventually come a time when the plant has grown so large it doesn’t need you directly anymore. The tree has gone from depending on you to providing you shade as you sit and enjoy it.

It’s worth taking the time to really think about what you want growing in your garden. If you water the tree of violence and conflict, that’s what will grow. If you water the tree of knowledge and experience, that’s probably better. Pull the weeds when you see them.

High school seniors in suburban Columbus, Ohio, get to take a class that could well be banned on many college campuses: a political science course where speakers from the most radical groups—from neo-Nazis to die-hard communists—are invited to present their views and answer questions. Thomas Worthington High School has offered “U.S. Political Thought and Radicalism,”…

This High School’s ‘Political Radicalism’ Class Lets Students Hear From Far-Right and Far-Left Speakers — Reason.com

Kicking off a series of videos featuring top scholars co-produced by the Institute for Humane … The post Free Speech on College Campuses: A Bottom-up Approach appeared first on Institute for Humane Studies.

Free Speech on College Campuses: A Bottom-up Approach — Blog – Institute for Humane Studies

You can learn without getting a credential, and you can get a credential without learning. But that doesn’t mean that credentials never match up with an associated learning experience and human capital improvement.

In order for real learning to take place, in general there needs to be three elements: the learning needs to be very specific, there needs to be some form of actionable feedback, and the skill needs to be constantly used after learning it.

Specificity: It is very, very hard – maybe impossible – to teach broad things like “intelligence” or “critical thinking.” Those are descriptive qualities, not skills. Skills are things like calculus and welding. Transfer of learning is a myth; if you want someone to learn something, you have to teach them that specific thing. If you teach someone how to paint a landscape, they won’t even learn how to paint a portrait, let alone how to be a more well-rounded individual, whatever that means.

Actionable Feedback: The better the feedback you get on your work, the faster you’ll learn. If you teach yourself to paint but never study another painter, never get advice, never look at other paintings, etc. you can still improve over time, but you’ll never do so as quickly as someone who does do those things. You’ll probably never reach the same level of skill, either, no matter how long you keep at it. Putting your work into the market is one of the best feedback generators in the world.

Constant Use: You will forget everything you learn if you don’t use it. If you master Spanish in high school (unlikely as that is) but then never speak a word of it in real life, you won’t be fluent in five years. You’ll probably barely be conversational. (Proof of this: Nearly everyone in America has to take a foreign language in high school. Almost no one in America speaks anything besides English an Bad English.)

That being said, if a particular learning environment does have all three of those things – if it teaches a specific skill, gives good actionable feedback, and provides a skill that you will immediately use on a consistent basis – there’s nothing stopping you from attaching a credential to that process.

I don’t have anything against credentials, per se. They’re useful career signals, they can be confidence boosters, and they can motivate you to learn new thing (humans love prizes, after all). But for me, if I’m chasing a credential I want to make sure I’m also actually learning. If that’s true for you as well, then that’s how you should evaluate any program that offers to teach you – if they provide those three things. Otherwise, someone is just selling you a piece of paper.

Every day, do two things you don’t, strictly speaking, have to do.

Make one of them a challenging thing, and make one of them an easy or even self-indulgent thing.

The challenging thing can be a more intense workout than the day before, or writing a chapter of a book, or fixing up your website, or doing your taxes, or searching for a new job.

The easy thing can be reading a chapter of a book, organizing your desk, throwing away something you’ve been meaning to get rid of, or calling an old friend to say hello.

Obviously, what counts as “challenging” and “easy” will vary from person to person, but the goal is to make it a point to do something deliberately outside of your routine at least twice a day. One challenging thing so you get the reward of accomplishing a goal, and one easy thing so you can train your mind to not have to go into “full stress” mode just to get something done.

This is my new initiative. It’s so easy for people to fall into “maintenance mode” where all they do each day are the things they absolutely have to, followed by as much “nothing” as they can fit in. Even ambitious and non-lazy people can often just fill their day with more and more “maintenance” activities to the point where they’re never idle (good) but also never deliberate (bad).

Two things per day. You and me, friend. We can do it.

It’s good to take a day to rest once in a while. I don’t do that often. Even the restful days so easily fill with little chores and responsibilities that it can be hard to find that time to just let your mind be still.

I’m going to go try to do that now. I’ll see you tomorrow, my friend.

There was a guy I went to middle/high school with, I’ll just call him “Steve” for this story. Steve was a great guy, and we were pretty close. We hung out a lot in those days. Steve was also an (as the kids these days say) “absolute unit.” He was huge. He was about 6′ 7″, maybe 6′ 8″, and he’d been that way since 5th grade. I don’t know his exact weight, but it was definitely north of 350. Not fat, either – the dude was just BIG. Imagine a guy that size in your fifth grade class. He was just an early grower, had a full beard in middle school, that kind of guy. And he definitely had the strength to match – when we were in high school my father accidentally left a U-Haul moving truck he had rented in neutral and it started to roll down our street, and Steve just ran ahead of it and stopped it with his hands. I watched him put an ax halfway into an 8-inch diameter tree in one swing, and then break the tree in half the rest of the way with his hands. I could tell a lot of stories about this guy, but the point is just so you know the kind of titan he was.

He was also, however, extremely shy and timid. In high school the football coaches begged him to play, but he always refused. He would shy away from any conflict at all, and in fact on more than one occasion he would be bullied pretty severely and the rest of us (none even half his match in size or strength) had to come in and help.

I asked him why. He told me that when he was in fourth grade, some kids were bullying him because he was different, and they were being really physical about it – pelting him with things, screaming taunts, knocking his books down, etc. They had him cornered and so he hit one of them. But the bully was a fourth-grader, and it was like being hit in the face by a full-grown man. The kid got really hurt, broken bones, had to go to the hospital. Though he was eventually fine, Steve had the world come down around him. Everyone from his parents to the school all told him not just that he had reacted poorly or that he should have done something differently, but that he was fundamentally a bad kid. That he was dangerous. There was talk of transferring him to a different school where they put violent kids with behavioral issues (he managed to just barely dodge that bullet).

Ever since, he’d been terrified of his own strength. He walked down the hallways with his shoulders hunched together, like he was afraid to even brush up against anyone. He was fine with sports like weightlifting, but the thought of using his strength in a sport that put it against other people like football was horrifying to him – he was certain he’d kill someone the first time he went on the field.

I used to think about that a lot and be furious at the injustice of it all. Here was Steve, who was by all accounts one of the sweetest and kindest people I’d ever met. He was a great friend and other than that one bit of defensive violence in the fourth grade had never raised a hand in anger, even in his own defense. And he managed all that at an age where most people are horrible little hormone-raged monsters, and he was a zen monk.

I can still sometimes be mad about the injustice visited on Steve, but the reality is that I was too focused on being mad for my friend, and not focused enough on the lesson I should have taken for myself.

My personality is a lot like Steve’s physical frame. My personality is BIG. I’m loud and gregarious and grandiose. In the right context, it can be charming – put a bunch of friends on a camping trip and I’m the life of the party. But there are a lot of contexts where it’s downright dangerous.

It’s easy for me to make people uncomfortable, even if that’s never my intent. It’s easy for me to just be so loud and so overly familiar that I intimidate people into not speaking up, or offend them, or not take their perspective into account.

There are things I try to do, things I’ve learned to do over the years, to counter those natural tendencies, the same way Steve learned to walk with his shoulders in. I’m never the first person to talk in a meeting. I never initiate physical contact – I never go in for the handshake or the hug, I let the other person, just in case. I solicit private feedback often as a temperature check for how my behavior has been affecting them or others.

But it’s a journey, and I don’t have it all figured out yet. I might not ever. I just try to improve. Because it’s not unjust at all for me to have to alter my behavior to protect people from my words and thoughts and actions – it might not be my fault that my personality is just bigger than the world was designed for, but it is my responsibility. Twenty years ago Steve understood this better than I probably ever will.

People won’t always tell you that you hurt them. Especially when it’s not physical, and there’s no bruises to see. More likely than not, they’ll just walk away from you or cut ties, and one door after another will close and you might not ever know why. I am eternally appreciative of the few that take the time and effort to look me in the eyes and say “ouch.”

And I am sincerely trying to be better. That’s all I can offer.