(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.

I don’t like the term “necessary evil.” When someone describes something in that way, they’re often putting a lot of work into the “necessary” part, insinuating that it can’t be changed or even challenged. “Yeah, no one likes the payroll system, but it’s a necessary evil. People have to get paid, you know?” Consider the defeatist, fixed-mindset view that sentence proposes!

I prefer to use the term “load-bearing flaw.” In the example above, the current payroll system is bad, and we all know it’s bad. It’s a flaw. But flawed or not, it’s currently holding up a lot of critical infrastructure – if we just ripped it out without consideration, no one would get paid and we couldn’t run the business.

But that term leaves open the possibility of careful and considered change. If you remodel a house, you can move the load-bearing walls. You just have to be careful when you do so and make sure the weight is supported during the transition, the new layout works, etc. It’s harder, but it’s doable. And it’s worth it, if the new layout is that much better.

No evil is necessary, no matter how entrenched it may be. We can, and should, do better – and adopt a growth mindset about it.

I learned today that a “fricative” is what happens when you make a sort of transitive consonant sound between two mashed-together sounds, even though the actual consonant sound you’re making doesn’t appear in either of the two “main” sounds.

Huh?

Okay, if I say, “Whatchy’all doing,” you understand that I was saying “what are you all doing” but with a heavy accent. But where is the “ch” sound coming from? There’s no such sound in any of those words! But in hastily moving from the end of “what” to the beginning of “y’all” and sort of glossing over the “are,” your tongue just makes a quick stop at the part of your mouth that makes the “ch” sound. That’s a fricative.

Why am I telling you about this? Because it’s cool! And because I love that I still learn cool new things all the time, because life is amazing, and there’s so much treasure just lying around. How could anyone be bored? I mean, whatchy’all doing out here?

When you have to make a decision, committing to “think hard” about it first is usually just an excuse to spend longer ultimately justifying your emotional impulse. Yes, it’s better to take some time rather than just fire off a response to an important decision, but unless you’re spending that time in a truly data-driven process, it’s only a little better.

Try this: Right now, without any major decisions looming, decide on a process for making important decisions. Maybe you’ll assemble a council of intelligent, trusted advisors and commit to following their majority input. Maybe you’ll commit to making a list of pros & dealbreakers before settling on the final answer. Or any number of good decision-making techniques might work for you, but the point is to commit to that process now, before you have any specific decision that you’re trying to make. The more you commit now, the more likely it is that you can overcome your emotional rationalization when the time comes.

The more you know, the more you should learn. Think of the glorious chain reactions as some new piece of knowledge connects to some existing one, sparking a chain of a thousand insights. That becomes more possible the more bits there are to interact. As you gain more knowledge, you need to learn more just to keep up with yourself.

The most unpredictable input in your life is what other people do.

You can control so much of your own actions with discipline and mindfulness. The biggest “wild card” is how other people behave. For example, people often talk about how certain demographic factors in your life, such as race, gender, or even height can have a profound impact on how your life plays out. Dwarfing them all, however, is simply whether or not the people who raised you were good, noble people. Nothing else comes close to the advantage or disadvantage that gives you. And you had zero control over it. From your perspective, it was all luck.

Smaller versions of this play out everywhere. You can be an exceptional worker but a new manager comes in who is absolutely terrible, and you had no control over that. You can be a great partner but it turns out the person you were initially attracted to becomes a lunatic. Sure, in both of those situations you can exercise some control and leave, but even if you do there’s damage done along the way.

So the biggest source of randomness and uncertainty in your life comes from other people. But in a great sense of cosmic justice, that means you have a tremendous amount of control over other people’s fortunes.

You can be an amazing parent, leader, or partner. You can be kind to strangers. You can put the shopping cart back. In other words, you can be the reason that someone else’s luck is very, very good. No matter what cards were dealt to you, you can be the pocket aces for someone else.

I am pro-whimsy.

I love putting magic into my kids’ lives. I do the “Elf on the Shelf” thing at Christmastime, and I go all out. One time I deliberately made a mess in my kitchen at night, put several of my kids’ stuffed animals and dolls around it, and then in the morning scolded them for making a mess while playing, just so that they would be convinced for a while that their toys came to life at night and caused mischief. I love the dad in Calvin & Hobbes.

As my kids got older, this sharpened their bullshit detectors (a welcome side effect!), but they also started playing along, creating fun whimsical tales of their own to explain the world to me.

But, as in all things with children, you must be careful of their hearts.

My son recently told me that he was worried that if he asked me a serious question, I wouldn’t tell him the real truth. More importantly, he said that this belief made him hesitant to even ask me important questions in the first place. That is a dangerous place to be, and I never want that.

So first, I apologized to him. Genuinely. I told him that his trust was the most important thing to me, and that I would tell him the whole truth from now on.

He told me he still wanted the funny stories, though. So his suggestion was to give me a code word that meant “I want the real truth this time.” I thought that was amazingly mature of him (he’s 7!), and I gave him my word that I would always adhere to the code word’s command.

Whimsy, magic, and wonder are all vital. But all children deserve truth from their parents when they request it.

One principle I try to remember is “everything is obvious when you know the answer.” People are bad at riddles, and when you know the solution it seems easy to solve. That’s a good principle when designing riddles, but it’s a great principle when remembering to communicate. People can’t guess what’s in your mind, even if it seems incredibly obvious to you what you’re hinting at. So don’t leave clues – give the solution that you want someone to know.

A small tip that works for me to minimize distractions when I’m trying to get a lot of work done: I schedule some.

I don’t schedule “breaks,” because I have a tendency to want to DO things on my breaks. It might be a break from work, but then I still want to squeeze in a quick workout or run some unrelated errand, and I’ll feel the same creeping sense of misplaced energy if I don’t. So instead, I schedule the things I know distract me, right in the agenda.

There will be an entry for “go poke around in your board games for a bit,” and knowing that I’ve accounted for that will keep me from wanting to do it until then. And then I do it, and it actually gives me quite a boost of mood and energy. As a result, I take better breaks than if I’d tried to take a normal one!

What works for me might not work for you, but you can always give it a try.

Imagine reading a series of books. You really enjoy them, and the story is building wonderfully. You finish the fourth book in the series and go to find the fifth, only to discover that there is no fifth, and there never will be – perhaps the author has passed away or has concretely retired from writing. Isn’t that frustrating?

I don’t mind taking my time. I don’t need to finish a seven-book series in a week. But I want to know all seven books exist before I start.