In the same way that many things other people do affect you, whether you like it or not, lots of stuff you do will affect other people. But these aren’t always anonymous, distant recipients! Often, the people closest downstream of you are the very people who are also upstream of you in their own way.

All this is to say, a lot of what happens in your life might not be directly influenced by you, but lots of it is indirectly influenced by what you do. Are you doing things to make the people around you better, or are they living in the toxic runoff from your actions? All in all, being surrounded by healthier, happier people is better for you – which makes it better for them, too.

Keep the waterwheel spinning.

Today, something incredibly unexpected and stressful happened to me. And in response, I did something I never used to do: I told two people right away.

It was marvelous. Both people were supportive, helpful, and kind. And my stress levels, while still higher than I liked, dropped significantly. I felt more able to handle the situation. It’s not something I couldn’t have handled before, but it would likely have done damage in other ways – I would have become irritable, pushed people away, lost progress on other things. Instead, I’m calmer about my plan, and closer to some loved ones.

Life will drop bombs on you sometimes. No avoiding it. You don’t have to leap on every grenade alone, either.

Imagine you painted a picture, but forgot you were wearing your sunglasses. Everything would look darker to you, causing you to make choices you wouldn’t make if you could see without the filter. When you were finished, you might even think it came out “too dark” and be unsatisfied with the result – but to others, the picture might look quite bright.

When you’re carrying a lot of stress or negative emotion and you’re holding it in, it doesn’t just make the world look darker to you. It also starts to affect how you can connect with others, creating a widening gap between you and those you interact with. You’re starting with different perceptions of the world and of your interaction. You aren’t seeing the same things, so your communication becomes harder to understand.

Removing negative emotion or stress isn’t as easy as taking off your sunglasses. But just letting the other person know that you’re in that place can do wonders for bridging that gap. They don’t need to know every detail if you don’t want to explain it, but just saying, “Hey, I’m having a bit of a rough day, don’t take anything personally if I seem like I’m not as high-spirited as you are today” can create a supportive, understanding environment where there might otherwise have been misunderstandings and confusion.

And if that gentle nudge opens up the invitation to talk more deeply? So much the better, that you might share the colors again.

Making something your own is a worthwhile endeavor. Putting stickers on your laptop, drawing on your sneakers with a sharpie, or even tattooing your body are all ways of investing something not only with additional care, but creating something that works better for you.

It’s not only the aesthetic qualities that matter, of course! Organizing something differently to better suit the way you use it or changing the interface on an electronic device to adapt to your style can help you get more out of less.

I vastly prefer the style of having a few things that are truly my own, rather than many things that are more generic. Your mileage may vary, but the life you live should be the one you’ve molded around you.

I have absolutely terrible “object memory.” I have a pretty bad memory in general, and my whole life I’ve built systems to not rely on it as much as possible.

I am very fastidious. I keep excellent notes and a very well-organized calendar. Those are helpful with a lot of tasks, but it’s not exactly practical when it comes to where I put my keys. (Although I am one of those people that takes a picture of my parking spot and the nearest marker whenever I park in a lot or garage, and that helps tremendously.)

When it comes to physical objects, especially the small kind that frequently change location in the course of normal use like the scissors, my wallet, or the remote, the only system that’s worked for me is to be an absolute maniac about always putting them in the exact same spot every time they leave my hand. I have dedicated places for everything I own, and they only go in that spot if I’m not actively holding them.

For a glimpse of how severe this problem is for me: One time I looked for my keys for almost an hour before finding them three inches to the left of the dedicated key tray. They were on the same surface! They were in plain sight! But as soon as they weren’t in the key tray, I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d touched them.

Another trick my father taught me that’s very helpful for unusual circumstances, such as remembering to lock your door before going on a long trip or needing to put things down while you’re away from whatever your “key tray” is: At the moment you do the thing you want to remember, also do something wildly silly, like hop on one foot while going “bippity boppity boo” and sticking your tongue out. It’s absurd, but you will remember that you did that, I promise you, and the memory will most likely also contain the details you need to recall later.

Memory is one of the least reliable subroutines of the human brain’s operating system. I know mine is especially terrible, but everyone’s is a little bit terrible. To the extent that you can, form habits instead; those tend to sustain much more durably.

Friends, family, clan, tribe – these are important things. Not only for community and support. Not only for love and companionship.

But also, who else will swear a blood oath of vengeance if you’re defeated dishonorably?!

Think of a few things you’re both good at and engage in frequently. Ask yourself: How did you learn that, and how do you continue to learn even more about it?

Really ask the question. Remember the little steps, the moments of elucidation, the improvement in your technique. How did it happen? What was your environment of learning?

Why bother asking this? Whenever I want to learn about something new, I have a fairly specific technique that works very well for me. I start with total, confusion-inducing immersion. I’ll go anywhere I can find streams of information and I’ll read/watch a bunch of stuff. I won’t understand 90% of it, but I’m looking for patterns, not details. I’ll scan for citations, even informal ones – do a bunch of these articles/posts/videos seem to reference a specific work? Is there a known book, individual/organization, or core hub that people “in the know” seem to view as a major authority? Then my next step is to get to those things and start diving deeper – but I couldn’t have known where to go without that first step.

That method, the intentional diving into a confusing deep end and looking at a massive volume of information for patterns that I’ll revisit later, works for me. It’s always been what worked for me. I remember my father telling me how to pass my driver’s test: “Don’t bother studying or preparing. Just go take the test, fail, look at what you didn’t know and that will tell you what to study. Go back in two weeks, take it again, and you’ll pass.” That’s exactly what happened.

So like I said, it works for me. That method can give me a good working competency in a lot of different subjects very quickly, and very deep expertise on the ones I continue to study. But over the years, I’ve learned that this isn’t necessarily good advice for everyone. Many people would be stressed beyond panic if they tried to learn in that unstructured, chaotic way. Plenty of people wouldn’t get anything out of the dive into the deep end except more confusion.

For many people, a very structured, planned curriculum is a much better learning environment. For me, that’s torture to the point where I learn almost nothing, because my curiosity about a subject generates questions at a rate twenty times faster than they’re getting answered, so I lose focus. In many ways, I need to be able to chase every wild thought I have while I’m learning, in order to surface the gaps in my knowledge and connect all the dots that are starting to appear in my mind.

My overall point is this: It’s very, very helpful to have a good working model of what learning environment actually serves you. Most people haven’t actually thought about it, and so they spend time in models other people suggest and don’t learn as much as they could. If you take the time to consider how you actually learn, you can experiment and tweak that method and then deploy it whenever you want.

Learning in the way that serves you is fun. It’s encouraging and exciting instead of a chore. And we could all stand to have fewer barriers between us and our curiosity!

I’m very big on the idea of ensuring that the language I use serves me.

That means, almost always, staying polite. It also means staying positive, but that doesn’t mean ignoring problems. Rather, it means framing problems as tasks or opportunities, rather than simply facts about the universe. “Ugh, it’s going to rain,” is a problem statement. “I’m going to dress warmly and bring my umbrella when I go out today” frames it as a task that’s within my power to accomplish. Even better is something like “Oh, I get to wear my new rain jacket today!”

I’ll do these things even if no one is around to hear me. Language isn’t just about how we communicate with others. It’s also about how we shape our own thoughts. The words in your head are soft and squishy. They become much more firm when we say them, which is why voicing your fears – so severe and realistic in your head! – often makes you realize how silly they were.

So I use language as a thermometer. And in the same way you can’t change the temperature by forcing the numbers on a thermometer to change, you can’t force a mindset shift just by policing anyone’s language. But especially with yourself, what words you choose to use are an excellent indicator of your overall state of mind, and that’s worth paying attention to.

An excellent skill and habit to develop is how to turn your experiences into something valuable for others and enriching for you.

This isn’t about how to take more photos of your nature hike to show off on social media; if anything, I think you should do less of that and just enjoy the clouds and trees and stuff. But when you do things in your career or education, your community, or even serious hobbies, learning to make a good “after-action report” is very valuable!

I see it all the time. People in a particular industry go to a conference or trade show of their own accord. If I ask them why they’re going, they say to learn, to network, to advance their careers, etc. Then they don’t really do any of those things!

They attend. But learning is very active. If you aren’t taking notes, practicing the skill, or rephrasing it to teach to others, your learning is very limited. Networking is very intentional; it doesn’t happen just because you show up, it happens because you find ways to make deliberate and meaningful connections with people who share your goals, interests, or talents. And what good does a conference do for your career if you don’t actually learn, don’t actually network – and nobody knows you went?

Give yourself the assignment. Imagine your boss said, “Hey, I want you to attend this conference and return with as much new information and as many new contacts as you can for the whole team. I want a report from you after the conference detailing what you’ve picked up and how you intend to teach it to the rest of the team, make introductions and set up meetings, and overall advance our strategic goals.” If you knew that was part of your job, you’d approach it very differently!

So do that. Are you a hobbyist painter who regularly shows off your work at small galleries? Write an after-action report, complete with pictures from the event! Are you doing a summer internship as part of your degree program? After-action report with a contact list and schedule of follow-up outreach!

You don’t have to show these to anyone; simply doing them for yourself will wonderfully enhance the value you gain from the endeavor. But of course, these also make great conversation starters. If you’re applying for your first job after college, saying “I had a summer internship” is pretty lacking as a compelling reason to hire you. But full details of the experience you gained, contacts you made, and problems you overcame? Maybe even a sample of the kind of work you did? Now you’re making your own credentials!

“But Johnny, in my summer internship/volunteer day/industry trade show I didn’t do anything worth writing about!” Yeah, because you didn’t go in knowing that you were going to have to! That’s why it’s such a good skill and habit: Even knowing that you’re going to hold yourself to it makes you take the whole thing more seriously, strive to do more, get more out of it. It provides wonderful clarity of purpose.

The next time you’re doing something like this, write up a little draft of your report first. Give the sections titles, like “People worth following up with” and “Skills to put into practice,” things like that. Have a good, clear reason about why you’re really doing it. And then use the report itself to talk to more people, and open up even more opportunities.

You know, instead of posting pictures of trees from your camping trip. Just enjoy the sunshine!