Imagine that you could take all the words of any kind that were written down in this year, in any medium – newspapers, blogs, emails, kids’ diaries, graffiti, books, everything. It would be a large volume of words, even in a single day! Okay, now imagine that a machine randomly selects 5% of those words and presents them to you.

Of that selection, what percentage would be factual, truthful information? It seems like only a small percentage would be! Most of the words wouldn’t be true accounts – by volume, most words written in a year are pure fiction, speculation, gossip, etc.

Especially if you took that small selection of words out of context – or didn’t have the context – you really wouldn’t know anything by just reading those words.

Now imagine trying to assemble an accurate picture of what 2024 was like if you were reading that contextless, random 5% sampling of our words from the year 3000. If you read that random sampling and then claimed “Here is what was happening in 2024,” you would be absurdly, laughably inaccurate.

I think about that a lot when I think about the study of ancient history.

I like getting rid of stuff. It makes me happy to clear out old junk or unnecessary clutter. If I can sell it or give it away, all the better.

I often see people hemming and hawing about whether to sell an item. They discover something in their house (that they don’t use) is worth something on the secondary market but they hesitate to pull the trigger because “What if I need it someday?”

That’s status quo bias chaining you to that item! Here’s the trick: imagine you didn’t already own that item. Would you buy it for X dollars, where X is the amount of money you could get by selling it? Probably not, right?

So sell it and be happy!

You can only grow so big in the pot you’re planted in. Our leaves reach as far as our roots, as it were.

But roots do more than just provide nutrients. They also grip. They make you stable, and they make you hard to move. The two go hand in hand.

So when you experience the discomfort of moving, of being “uprooted,” just remember that. It’s uncomfortable now. But you can’t grow without it.

No matter how far down you go, there is always a choice. A better and worse path. A way to face it.

In the very last moment of your life, you can grimace or smirk. When you can’t even do that anymore, your worries are over. Until that moment, take your best shot.

It doesn’t all even out; some people just have better luck than others. But even within that, some folks squander good luck and some folks still make the best of the bad.

Nothing else to be done about it. Just keep it moving.

Today my children and I played a board game called “Random World,” designed by my 7-year-old daughter.

It was exactly as incredible as you’d imagine.

When I was a kid – but older than her – I designed games. It was exhilarating and I never stopped. To this day, I still do game design. I even get paid for it! So watching my daughter leap into this with both feet makes my heart absolutely swell.

The kids have a shelf with 30+ board games on it, and we play as a family all the time. It’s a great joy. But now there’s one more, and she designed it.

So it’s the best one ever. And it will be, until she designs they next.

Many people fall into the trap of waiting to solve a problem until they have the right “setup” to do so. Here’s an illustrative example:

Many parents of young babies find that when it’s near to bedtime, the baby starts crying. And some of those parents try to soothe the baby before putting it down to bed, not wanting to put a crying baby down. So they rock the baby, sing to it, pat it, walk around the house – all the while, getting more and more stressed and anxious and frustrated, and all the while doing absolutely nothing for the baby.

They want to soothe the baby before they put it down to sleep. But putting it down to sleep is what will soothe it!

The setup is the solution. If you put that baby down as soon as it started to fuss, it would fall asleep.

This works on all sorts of problems. Whatever you think you need to do before you solve a problem is probably just one step that you’re splitting into two and making it far harder as a result. Figure out what you want to be true – what’s the “sleeping baby” of this situation – and go after it directly. Skip setup steps. If the first attempt doesn’t work, you can always reevaluate and go backward a bit, but chances are good that it’s less complicated than you think it is.

Creating your own space in the world is a good thing. The best lives are lived in small circles. But no matter how beautiful of a bubble you craft for yourself, occasionally you’ll have to leave it and interact with the outside world.

So don’t forget their customs! Remember how to say hello and what they expect. It’s polite, for one. But more importantly, it’s how to get what you want from that world and make it back to your own little one in one piece.

If you want to do something, the question isn’t usually whether or not you can. The question is usually: “How weird are you willing to get to make it work?”

Very few things can be accomplished in a straight line from Point A to Point B. But very few things can’t be accomplished if you’re willing to find that strange and twisting path. The limitation for most people is simply how strange of a path they can imagine.

The stranger the better, when it comes to making it work.

A few decades ago, my father put an addition – a second story – onto my childhood home to make room for my soon-to-arrive baby sister. His goal was to get 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there. Several architects told him it was impossible, that given the size of the footprint he had to work with, the building codes, and so on, there was simply no way to put 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there.

Go into that house now, and you’ll find 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there. They’re all of normal size, too. They’re just configured in just about the strangest way you’d imagine. The rooms themselves are all normal, but the hallway that leads between them is straight out of a carnival funhouse. My father could envision the strange path, so he designed it himself and made it work.

Make it weird to make it work!

It’s natural to equate whatever your situation looks like to the overall health of the system you’re in. Whatever job you do, you think it’s vital to the company – and that the company not prioritizing that job means that they company is making bad decisions. If you paint, then if people like your paintings you say that the art community as a whole is thriving and healthy, whereas if your paintings are unpopular you think art has gotten too commercial and nobody respects true creativity anymore.

“What’s the world coming to?” laments the last beeper salesman or video rental store or horse-drawn carriage maker.

You can’t stand against the tide of the world. You can stay in one place, sure. But the tide moves regardless. If you want what the world offers, give the world what it wants. There’s fun stuff to do everywhere. Don’t get so committed to your thing that you’re doing right this second that you let it drown you.

The point of a goal isn’t always to reach it. Sometimes, the point is to orient yourself in a positive direction. In some circumstances, it’s quite positive to set a goal you know is unattainable, simply because striving for it every day is exactly what you need.