When you learn about other people, you get better at predicting their actions. That’s helpful and generally makes your life better.

The same is true of learning about yourself. Except it’s harder.

Imagine that you learn that your boss is really cranky every day from noon until 1. Then they eat lunch, and they come back pleasant as a peach. If you’re reasonably intelligent, you’ll recognize the pattern – they obviously get cranky from hunger and are in a good mood after their blood sugar goes back up. You can use this knowledge to make your own life easier; you would make sure to schedule meetings with your boss only after lunch. If you had to meet earlier, you’d make sure to bring a snack and casually offer some to the boss. It would be easy exactly because you have no reason to doubt your own observations.

Now imagine that you get really cranky every day from noon until 1. Then you eat lunch and you come back in a great mood. In theory, it should be even easier to take advantage of this information! Don’t schedule meetings during your low times, and put emergency snacks in your desk drawer for the meetings that have to happen anyway. Because you can control your own behavior, this information about yourself should be even easier to take advantage of than the same information about your manager.

Except it isn’t, is it? Because unlike the info about your manager, you don’t like this information. You don’t want to believe you could be a jerk just because you needed a bite to eat, and you certainly don’t believe you’re ever an unwarranted jerk. Since your behavior is always justified, it doesn’t need to change – or even be acknowledged! The incredibly simple act of having a snack – perfectly fine for your boss – is demeaning to even suggest as a reaction to your mood.

People will go to years of therapy before they’ll eat a snack and go outside, you know?

From about the ages of 25-30, your brain and body are settling into more or less the configuration they’ll have for the next 50 years. So that’s a really great time to read the operating manual, so to speak. Observe your own behavior like you’d observe others’. Figure out the basic controls. Peruse the FAQ.

“When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” Doubly true when both parties are you.

What can you put in a barrel to make a barrel lighter?

(Answer at the end. It’s not helium.)

When you want something and then you get it, it can have a tendency to be bigger in your life than you anticipated. “When it rains, it pours” and all that. It’s not uncommon to get more than you bargained for, because we don’t often fully realize the conceptual space something is going to take up in our lives.

We need to poke some breathing holes, so to speak. If you get a dog and you’ve never owned one before, you can be in for a rude awakening. The pup takes up more physical space than you anticipated, costs more to take care of and replace what gets damaged, requires more of your time and energy than you thought, etc. It’s just bigger. If you don’t give yourself a little space it can overwhelm you – you need to poke some breathing holes in that box, so to speak. Maybe that’s a dog-walking service you hire. Maybe it’s splitting bulk food orders with fellow dog-owners. But somehow, you need to carve out space for the life you want to keep.

That’s what you can put in a barrel to make the barrel lighter – a hole.

Nothing is obvious. If you think the solution to some widespread problem is “obvious” and everyone else is simply foolish for missing it, then there’s only one fool in the room, I’m afraid.

People know things because they learn things, and they learn things through effort and challenge. Other than how to walk and eat, virtually no knowledge comes “naturally” to humans. But the brain is a funny thing, and loves to be confident where it shouldn’t be. So your brain will jump with great certainty to “obvious” answers, especially when the risk of being wrong is virtually zero.

(The above paragraph explains why almost all opinions are terrible.)

Experts can lie, and non-experts don’t know anything. So your only reasonable path is to become an expert yourself on things that actually matter, and ignore everything else. It’s hard, but it’s happier.

When you’re teaching someone how to do something, what’s important is that they learn how to do it, not that they understood how you taught them. If you’re teaching someone how to ride a bike, it doesn’t matter that they gain a deep appreciation of your pedagogy. What matters is that they can ride a bike at the end of the lesson.

Unless, of course, you’re teaching someone how to teach.

If you’re teaching anything in the vein of leadership skills, training methods, public speaking, etc. – in other words, if you’re teaching people how to do the very thing you’re currently doing – then be transparent with your methods! Anything that’s working for you could work for them, and it may give your audience a deeper connection with your content as well as your methods.

What’s important isn’t just that they learn; it’s that they teach. It’s a unique case, but often an easy one. If you’re good at it, all you have to do is explain why.

What appears bountiful today may disappear tomorrow. But hoarding serves no one – if a thing is valuable enough to be missed, it’s too valuable to let pass without enjoyment. The most valuable things are precious precisely because they cannot be preserved; you can’t save a beautiful day for a rainy one.

Sometimes you’re safe. You don’t need to guard against danger or scarcity. So let those feelings fade from your mind when you can, and let the others bloom.

The key to getting good at anything is just to start. But starting isn’t always easy.

For many people, just being bad at something is enough of a detriment that they never start at all, so of course they never get good. But that’s just the table stakes; you have to be willing to suck at something for a while first.

Assuming you get over that mental block (and you should!), the next thing is just this: stuff costs juice to even try.

And different things require different amounts of juice, which is the thrust of my post today. If you want to take up “walking” as a hobby, that’s not very costly. You need some comfortable shoes, and that’s about it. But if you want to try out yachting, that’s a bit more of an investment up front.

As I think about most of my hobbies, they fall into one of two categories: either they’re low-barrier-to-entry hobbies that I got into myself, or they’re high-barrier-to-entry hobbies that a friend was already into.

See, unless you have a lot of excess resources or you’re very unusual, you probably don’t just decide one day to buy a yacht when you’ve never been on one. It’s more likely that someone in your peer group has one, and you go on it frequently until you decide “Yeah, this is something I want to do.”

High-barrier-to-entry hobbies become exceedingly easier if they’re part of a peer group experience. So the real lesson is this: have a varied peer group! Make new friends and say “yes” to stuff they want to do.

I’m always amazed when a friend (or even casual acquaintance) asks me if I want to participate in their niche hobby and is surprised when I say yes. The default experience for so many people seems to be to ask someone to try a new thing and receive rejection after rejection. What a terrible way to live! I want to try stuff. I won’t like all of it, but if I don’t try then I won’t find the stuff I do like. I’ve tried lots of stuff I only did once, but I’ve also ended up with fantastic hobbies that I’d never have discovered otherwise.

So to bring this full circle – even the hobby of “trying stuff” can be something you have to suck at in order to get good at. So to ever get good, you first need to just start. The next time someone asks you to do a weird thing, say yes!

Imagine you walk into a movie theater with the intention of buying a ticket to see a show. You discover that the theater now has two different pricing tiers for seats: seats near the front or back are 20 dollars, and seats in the middle of the theater are 25.

The theater could present this pricing differential to you in a few different ways. Here are two possibilities – read them both and tell me which one made you feel generally better:

1. “Ticket Price: $25. Get five dollars off if you sit near the front!”
2. “Ticket Price: $20. Additional $5 fee if you want the good seats.”

I’m guessing that Option #1 made you feel generally happy and Option #2 kind of angered you, if you’re like most people. This is true even though they’re saying the same thing!

When credit cards first became a big thing in the United States, local merchants used to charge a little extra to use them, on account of that merchant having to pay an additional fee to the credit card companies for processing. The credit card companies lobbied to make this illegal; they wanted there to be no difference in pricing to the consumer so people wouldn’t be opposed to using the cards. This got struck down, because business owners are allowed to charge what they want, generally. But the credit card companies had an immediate Plan B lined up; they said if merchants were allowed to charge different prices, they wanted it mandatory that the difference be listed as a “cash discount” not a “credit penalty.”

They understood perfectly well.

Whenever there is a difference between two prices, humans are generally fine if the higher price is the standard and the other is a “discount” for (X). They are generally NOT okay if the lower price is the standard and the other is a “penalty” for (Y). That makes them mad.

Remember that any time you need to present two options to someone. Whichever one is the “more expensive” option should be the default – then offer discounts. Whichever option they pick, they’ll be happier.

When you have to deal with something difficult, there’s a school of thought that says it’s better to have it happen unexpectedly. The idea is that thinking about an unpleasant experience for three days before it happens makes it far worse; after all, would you rather experience something negative and three days of anxiety, or just the negative event?

I get the logic, but there are problems. For one, this method requires someone else to both administer the event and lie to you about it. If you have to take your child in to get a shot, it’s definitely easier to not tell them that’s where you’re going until you get there – but you’re also destroying your child’s trust. It’s not worth it.

Three days of anxiety is better than months, years, or a lifetime of damaged trust, fear, and resentment.

All this is to say – bad news sucks. You don’t want to give it. But when you have to, you have to. Don’t spring it on people. The trust is better.

Everything somebody tells you tells you something. It tells you what they thought was important to tell you, if nothing else. Nothing is unimportant, it’s just that the grappling hook might miss. But that’s all it is, looking for a purchase, something to anchor your lifeline to.

There is a particular kind of mistake that is very easy to make, and results in you not only thinking that the world is terrible, but also – crucially – thinking that you cannot make it better. I would like to help you correct that mistake, because chances are good that you’re making some version of it right now.

Imagine that you are in a dark room. It’s very dark, such that it’s almost impossible to see. This is very inconvenient and makes life pretty difficult in that room. There are a few other people in the room, and life is equally difficult for them. They complain loudly, so you’re aware of their discomfort and the fact that it matches your own. Now imagine you take all this in and conclude: “Life is an inescapable hellscape of darkness, and we’re all brutally oppressed by the lack of light!”

See the mistake? It seems obvious from, you know, outside the room.

But some people inside the room don’t find it obvious at all. They truly believe that their particular set of negative circumstances represent something that (A) is universal and (B) cannot be changed, except by something capable of changing universal circumstances. It does not occur to them at all that they are merely witnessing the circumstances of a very small group of people who could change those circumstances quite easily.

If you never talk to anyone outside of that room, it’s pretty understandable! If you talk to some people and 100% of them all claim the same circumstances, it’s quite easy to extrapolate. But birds of a feather and all that. The people around you are also like you. You have to put in a lot of effort to make it otherwise.

People make all sorts of broad statements as if they were universally true. When you hear one, just add the following to the end “…according to the very small group of people just like me that I exclusively exchange information with.”

If you hear someone say “Nobody wants to work anymore,” add the caveat. Same with “We live in a capitalist dystopia,” or “Women always date jerks but never nice guys,” or “The American dream is dead,” or whatever point of view you hear. Remember that this person isn’t describing reality, they’re describing a very small and specific room that they could easily leave.

They don’t, because they haven’t yet realized they can.

Two people with opposing viewpoints have a beef on Twitter, and both are convinced that they’re representatives of the only two viewpoints in the entire human population and that their struggle is a battle in the Great War Between Good and Evil, instead of being an online argument that only 0.0001% of people could even understand, let alone care about. It’s the same tiny group of people in the dark room, except now they’ve chosen to fight over whose fault it is that it’s dark in there.

Most of the problems that you perceive to be “the world’s problems” are actually just your problems. They belong to you and a small group of similar people. They’re quite easy to solve, in most cases – just leave the room.

I notice that there’s a small group of people, for example, who are convinced that economically things are worse now in the United States than they were in the 1950s. (They aren’t. They are, in fact, so much better that it’s almost mind-boggling.) Here’s what I notice about this group of people though: they almost all live in very high-cost-of-living cities and are themselves low-income or low-wealth compared to their contemporary peers. So their personal economic circumstances are rough, and of course birds of a feather – so their peers are in similar straights. Then they look at comparisons to average income earners in average cost-of-living cities from the 1950s and think “See! Things are worse for everyone now!”

They’ve taken their own dark room and assumed everyone is in it. Sure, if you have a low-wage job and you live in Manhattan, things are tough. But the person who makes an average wage and lives in Cleveland is doing much better than their counterpart from the 1950s.

(And the low-wage person from Manhattan is also doing much better than their counterpart from the 1950s, by the way. In fact, they’re doing better than the 1950s average person too, but it’s easy to see what you want to see.)

Of course, this type of person can’t see that they can just open the door and walk out of the dark room. It’s dark, so it might be a little tricky to find the door at first. But they can do it – and they can even shout the directions back into the room to help the others still stuck in there when they do.

Some people do that! They leave the room and try to help others do it too. But our personal failings are often sticky, and complaining about the room – useless as it is – is easier than leaving it. Some part of us thinks that our complaints should carry weight; surely since everyone is in these same circumstances, the revolution is right around the corner! The reason it never comes is because the pain is actually so localized and so minor, but you don’t see that yet.

So the next time you think that there’s some great and terrible flaw with the way of the entire world, pause. Consider that you’re just in a very dark but very small room, and that the door isn’t far away.