It’s so fascinating to me how much of civilization turns on how efficiently we can move a box from Point A to Point B. Think about how much of your life involves getting stuff from somewhere to somewhere else – your commute, the way you buy groceries, how you visit distant friends or family, how Christmas presents get to your house. Billion-dollar companies run on no better of a proposal than: “We can move this thing slightly faster or more efficiently than the next guy.”

And so much of what we do is motivated by avoiding that very thing! Advancements in remote work and 3D printing and home exercise equipment – it’s all based on the idea that moving stuff around is so onerous that we’ll do a whole lot just to avoid some of it.

We even have entire institutions that do nothing but police which cubes can move to which points. Nations are built on it. Customs, borders, all of it – it all can exist because moving cubes around is so important that controlling it can control whole civilizations.

Some day, some scientist will crack the code on the whole “teleporter” thing, and that will be the absolute end of the society we know. I can’t even fathom what our civilization would look like if the logistical task of pushing cubes around vanished. It took so much work to put a cube on the Moon, and look how excited we were! Imagine the possibilities of just flinging them wherever we wanted.

Love is a verb.

The “feeling” you have that you associate with love is nice. It’s pleasant, until it hurts you. But it isn’t love.

Love is the stuff you do. Love is an act. It’s the way you shape your life around those people. The way you offer up parts of your life to improve theirs. The way you become present.

It isn’t what you say or feel. It’s what you do.

I don’t think that everything can be measured. But I do think that far more can be measurable than most people realize. And I also think there’s a pervasive tendency of people to try to define success around things that they aren’t willing to do the work to measure.

Here’s what I don’t like: Throwing resources into a hole. And if you commit juice to a task without knowing how to measure the results, that’s what you’re doing.

What’s the easiest way to avoid this? Don’t make your mission objective an action. Make your mission objective a result. People do the reverse all the time! “My goal is to start a non-profit to advance this agenda.” That’s a silly mission! What’s the result you want? What does it actually look like for that agenda to be advanced?

Call it SMART goals, call it OKRs, whatever framework you want to use – aim for a result, people. Not just something to do.

Sometimes people give you half of what you want. You want a promotion at work, and you’re given a smaller raise and bump in title than what you sought. You ask for a discount on an expensive item, and the seller gives you a smaller one. You ask for someone to put their faith in you, and they tentatively give you a little more leeway, but not full trust.

Try very, very hard to avoid feeling insulted by this.

It’s very natural to feel slighted. I know I often do. But I try to remember: They gave me something. And they moved in the direction of the situation I wanted. The journey isn’t over, and expecting it to happen in one step may have been my mistake. Acting insulted is a good way to make the other party regret that they did anything at all, and reduce the likelihood that they’ll continue.

Instead, demonstrate that they were right to do what they did, that you appreciate them meeting you halfway, and that you understand that they didn’t have to do anything at all. Be worthy of what you’ve received in their eyes, and the rest will come.

Without knowing what will come, sometimes we are shown kindness, as a precursor to being shot into space, never to return. The world can bring the most unexpected dangers upon you.

To look ahead to a future in which that might happen and face it is bravery of the highest order, even if you remain completely unaware of any specifics. Tomorrow may be your last day on Earth. Eat your meal, sleep in your bed, let people love you in their way, even if it falls short – fall short – of what you’d have dreamed in a perfect world.

We don’t live in a perfect world. We don’t even orbit one.

I heard a great comment today from someone who had recently had a frustrating experience. She referred to having “surplus energy” after the event. Our brains generate emotional responses to all sorts of stimuli, and even after the situation has been handled, those emotions don’t just instantly go away. That’s “surplus energy.”

Regardless of whether or not the emotion was helpful in the moment as a guide to your actions, the moment is over. You now have to do something with that energy – ideally, something helpful. Any engineer will tell you that energy that doesn’t get directed properly becomes “waste heat,” and waste heat can absolutely destroy a system if not managed properly. If you’ve ever had a car or computer overheat, you’ve experienced this firsthand.

There’s no single right way to productively direct this surplus energy, but it does have to be directed. You can’t just let it rattle around inside you, or you’ll overheat. Different energy in different people can create the need for different responses – maybe I need to take a walk in nature to blow off steam from an unpleasant personal interaction, but someone else needs to vent to a friend.

The key is to recognize the need and be intentional. Identify it. Say, “The moment is over, but I still have surplus energy from that event. What should I do with it so I can get back to my day?” Even asking the question can prevent a spiral.

And hey, you can always try doing what I do – write!

A man walks into a therapist’s office. He wants to talk, of all things, about his sports car.

He drives a big, loud, expensive muscle car. It rattles the windows in his neighborhood and costs a ton to maintain, but he drives it all the time. He’s had many different ones and has driven a car like it for years, but lately, some people in his life have been complaining about it and pushing him to drive something more sensible. In a moment of introspection, the man decided to talk to a therapist about it.

The therapist suggests that they should explore why the man drives these cars, as a starting point. So they talk about it a bit. The man opens up, and this is what he admits:

“If I’m really being truly honest, all the way down, I drive these cars to impress women. I’ve never been lucky with the ladies, so I drive these cars as a way to impress dates, flirt, ‘pick up chicks,’ whatever you want to call it. It’s all about that.”

The therapist makes a note, and considers this for a moment before responding. “Has it ever worked? Have you ever impressed a single date, picked up a single woman, or gotten even a flirtatious wink from someone who saw you behind the wheel?”

The man doesn’t have to think long. “Nope, not even once.”

“Why did you start driving these cars? What made you pick this method in the first place?”

The man thinks back, and responds: “I’ve never been great with dating, but a long time ago I was in an especially bad patch. I saw this handsome, funny, rich, smart, confident guy effortlessly pick up a girl he’d been chatting with, and he was driving a sports car. So I bought one to do the same.”

The therapist takes a moment to reflect, and then offers the explanation.

Often people will see a particular action or behavior lead to a certain result in a specific situation. Without a lot of additional context, they’ll adopt that behavior because they want that result, but they miss all the other factors that also contributed to the outcome in that situation. In fact, the behavior they adopt may not even be one of the contributing factors at all – in this case, it’s quite possible that a handsome, funny, rich, smart, confident guy might have done even better without a loud, annoying sports car. Even if that’s not the case, certainly all the other qualities contributed. You can’t just layer one aspect on top of a totally different starting set of circumstances and expect the same results.

Then, pure inertia keeps us committed to that behavior, because we never stopped to evaluate whether we were getting the results we wanted. We take it as a given that the behavior we’ve adopted is contributing to the results we’re seeking because we saw the two correlated. If we’re not getting the results, surely it’s not because of this! And humans are bad at noticing costs. In this case, you didn’t even notice that you don’t even enjoy driving those sports cars. You could have stopped long ago.

If you truly want to be “good with the ladies” – or whatever your goal is – you need to then work backward from that and ask “Is the thing I’m doing to achieve that goal actually getting me closer to it?” And even if you can come up with a scenario where it is, the next question is “Given the cost and effort, is this the best way to get to that goal?”

Let’s call this “The Understanding Turn.” You’re making a turn – a U-turn – around the goal. It’s a simple formula, but requires very deliberate attention:

1. “Why am I doing X?” – To get to Y result.
2. “Is X actually getting me to Y result?” – Maybe a little, maybe not!
3. “If I start from Y result, what’s the best way to achieve it?” – Probably Z!
4. Stop doing X, start doing Z.

So much of life is reactive behavior in response to limited information, and that leads us to what turn out to be very strange decisions when examined this way. But taking several large steps back and making the U-turn can put you exactly on the straightest path to your goal.

Everyone is attuned to a particular kind of mistake. People have “pet peeves” that they’re more prone to notice, be bothered by, and seek to correct. Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with trying to make your corner of the world better, but correcting your particular style of mistake can quickly become a sort of addiction if you aren’t careful.

The problem is that people very rarely step back and establish “detail thresholds” for certain kinds of projects. Let’s say your particular pet peeve is when people use horizontal brushstrokes when painting instead of vertical ones. Minor in the grand scheme of things, but maybe it’s technically better to use vertical ones so all else being equal, you know that’s what you should do. Okay, so far nothing inherently wrong with the little quirk.

But now let’s say that you’re a major project leader for a huge real estate project. You’re in charge of the construction of a dozen six-story apartment buildings, and you have tight budgets and deadlines. If you spend any time or effort going from room to room during the painting process and tell individual workers to use vertical brush strokes instead of horizontal ones, you’re insane.

At that level of responsibility, you need to focus on aspects of the project that will have a large impact on the final outcome. Brush direction falls well below that “detail threshold,” but people don’t generally take the time to establish that concept at all. They look for problems, which is good – but they don’t rank those problems based on impact, but often based on their personal preferences.

Finding and correcting mistakes is not a free or effortless process. Based on the scope of the project and your level of responsibility, many mistakes will simply fall below the threshold where the marginal benefit of correcting them is worth that effort.

Before starting any project, take the time to think generally about that. Ask yourself what kind of impact on the project would be worth your time to address? A sinkhole that threatens the structural integrity of an entire building is well above the “mistake margin.” The wrong wattage of light bulbs in the supply closet isn’t.

Ask it like this: “For any given problem, what happens if I don’t correct it?” This isn’t about being okay with mistakes – it’s about prioritizing the ones with the biggest effect. What would actually happen if the painters used horizontal brush strokes? There’s the tiniest possible chance of a fringe scenario where a potential tenant, who also happens to be a painter, is exactly on the fence about whether to rent an apartment or not and notices the slightly worse paint job and decides not to rent the place, and as a result, it takes an extra few days to find a tenant for one apartment. Maybe a 1% chance of that happening, and even if it did, it wouldn’t change a thing about the final profitability of the project.

Don’t get addicted to a particular kind of mistake. Find the big rocks to move and move them.

A good reminder during the busiest times in your life: If you’ve gotten “behind” on some task or project, the worst thing you can do is try to “catch up” by dramatically increasing your output. You will fry yourself, and you won’t actually catch up at all. You’ll make more mistakes, you’ll get scattered.

The best thing to do is much harder to commit to. The best course of action is to reset. Imagine you’ve been trying to write a book. You committed to writing 500 words a day, and for a while you did it. Then you missed two days from writer’s block, so on the third day you say “Well, I’ll commit to 750 words per day until I’m back on target.” You know what happens? You get even more writer’s block! The best thing to do is just sit down and reset to 500 per day. In fact, it would be fine to ramp and reset – commit to only 100 today! After all, that’s still 100 more than the day before, and anything that isn’t zero is good.

You’ll be all caught up in no time.

When I ask “why,” it isn’t because I’m arguing with you. I’m not using it as a back door to disagreement. I ask because if you don’t know why you’re doing something, then you don’t know if you’re doing it right.

“Why do you want to build a garage,” isn’t me saying “building a garage is a bad idea.” It’s me saying “If you don’t clearly define your motivations and desired outcomes for building a garage, then you run the serious risk of building a garage according to some generic default assumptions that won’t serve your actual goals.” Maybe you want to have a garage to house all your hobbies, but one of your hobbies is fishing, and if you don’t think about that then the default garage size isn’t big enough for your boat, and you’re not helping yourself.

The point is, ask why. Examining the things you want to do is even more important than examining the things you don’t.