Life is all about trade-offs and choices. Most of life is about bit by bit finding better replacements for one tiny piece of your life at a time – straight upgrades, with no drawbacks. They exist, they just have costs. Often the cost is the time of discovery; sometimes it’s the effort to earn the upgrade. But one way or another, we pay juice to improve our existence.

But then there are the other kinds of choices. Not easy choices between a good and a bad option where the only cost is figuring out which is which. But the genuinely challenging choices between two bad or – often more difficult – two great choices.

My middle child faced a serious dilemma tonight. Having cleaned her plate during dinner, she (by family law and custom) was entitled to one desert. But alas, there were two delicious options! Two treats were available and she had to pick one. She was nearly paralyzed. I even suggested that she could take a half portion of each, but even the sub-decision of “do I trade half of this for half of that” was agonizing.

Both because I don’t want her to over-indulge in sweets and because this was a good lesson, I held her feet to the fire on the choice and didn’t let her cheat. We may be able, with sufficient moxie, to have anything – but never everything. Learning to choose between equivalent options is surprisingly difficult. But eternally necessary.

In the end, she found the greatest solution – time. She can take half of each tonight, and save the other half of each for tomorrow. If the horizons stretch long enough, we can make all the choices we like.

Medicine for really little kids usually comes in liquid form. You can do the classic spoonful, but these days the meds come with little plastic syringes so you can just squirt it into their mouths. Despite whatever they try to flavor it with, medicine still tastes like medicine and many kids don’t love it.

When a kid is feverish, that’s not really the time to impose discipline if you don’t need to – it’s the time to get the medicine into the kid however you can. I learned that if I took the dose of medicine and just shook it up in a few ounces of juice, my son would gulp it down and all would be well.

We’ve all done something like that. Parents mash pills into applesauce. Pet owners wrap bits of bacon around the pills so their dog will swallow them. Caretakers of the elderly mix medicine into tea.

But it isn’t just medicine, and the wisdom is helpful all around. Any time you have to do something you’d find unpleasant on its own, there’s almost always a way to mash it into a larger volume of something you find enjoyable to the point where you barely notice. Have to write a term paper? Crank up music, grab a cocktail, and write it a paragraph at a time during the loading screens between levels of your favorite video game.

Mash it up in the applesauce if that’s what it takes to get it done.

If you eat too much chocolate and not enough protein, get chocolate-covered almonds. It’s not as good as just almonds, but it’s way better than just chocolate!

The point is this – we don’t have to grit our teeth and endure unpleasant things just because they’re good for us or necessary. We’re allowed to make them pleasant. We’re allowed to coat them with sugar or drown them in music or cover them with glitter to make them fit into our lives – especially if they alternative is avoiding them entirely.

When you can’t say no to something, don’t expect it to be good.

It never hurts to remember that most basic lesson, and today is as good a day as any.

There are few ways to conjure wonder and joy like pushing the envelope of what books you will read to a child.

Is this book too “mature” for them? Too scary? Are the words too big? Is the subject matter too complex?

Oh, then what a ride you’re in for!

This is how they mature. They grab your hand and then they tell you how brave they are. They ask you what the words mean, and they learn. Their minds grow more complex to match the subject matter.

One thing that is true of most people and all children – they will rise to whatever is presented to them. Protecting them from things you think are beyond them is like building a wall separating them from their potential.

I finished reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches to my children tonight (my two youngest, just as I did with my oldest some years ago). It was all they could talk about. Well, except for when we would start the next book.

Throw everything you can at them, and never stop. They’ll outgrow you anyway, but send them off with wonder in their hearts and curiosity in their brains, and you’ll have done a wonderful job.

If you try to do something quickly, you will do it poorly. If you try to do something well, you will do it quickly.

This is the Paradox of the Wire. When you’re in a desperate time crunch, you can’t focus on that. You can’t even think about that. You have to go full Zen and focus entirely on quality of execution, because haste makes mistakes. Cut one corner and you’ll collapse the whole thing.

If you’re late, focus on driving well – because one accident or getting pulled over one time will lose you more time than you could possibly gain from speeding. That principle applies to everything – quality is the only road to speed.

I just received a small but incredibly kind and meaningful gesture from someone who knows me very well.

When you really need this sort of thing, you don’t always know what to do with it when you get it. That’s one of the signs of needing it, I suppose.

I am not always great at showing it. But I am very, very grateful for the smallest kindness.

We tend to look down on people taking “the easy way” through some dilemma, but why? Spending more resources than you must on a task is foolish. Perhaps we’re judging overall character – the kind of person who would take the easy way out must surely be a pitiable sloth!

But it depends on what you’re trading for.

Am I lazy because I have someone else mow my lawn when I could easily do it myself? Or am I being a faithful steward of scarce resources – namely, my time and energy – so I can spend those resources on going to the park with my children? I made that exact trade yesterday, and I can’t think of one person who isn’t better off because I did.

Your life isn’t measured by how hard it is. If there’s an easier way to joy, it’s worth looking.

There’s a saying, when you fail at something: that you need to “get back on the horse.” Even the most tenacious of us rarely do that, though. What we do is get on a different horse.

We “keep trying” in the general sense, but we try new things. If someone starts a bakery and it fails, that person might “try again” by starting a different business, but you rarely see them start a new bakery. We very often take failures as indicators that we might still have a lot of fight left in us, but we shouldn’t try that specific thing again.

But why? One data point is hardly sufficient to determine that we can’t start a bakery successfully. Just the most basic examination shows the opposite, in fact! If you were trying to decide between starting a bakery, a bar, and a gym, and you’d already started an unsuccessful bakery, then at minimum you know a lot more about that business than the other two!

Try this: think about something you really wanted to do, but didn’t go super well the first time. You didn’t give up on life, but you haven’t revisited that thing. Next, make a list of five ways your life is different now than it was when you did that thing.

Here’s an easy first item for that list: Since then, you have learned at least one way not to do that thing. You’re more experienced in that area than you were before – significantly so.

I’m not saying you should only attempt the same thing over and over again. But once is definitely not enough. The trials are tough, especially when you aren’t as successful the first time as you’d hoped. But the retrials fare much better – so give them a try.

Some people thrive when they get to be proactive, and others excel when they get to react. Often we force both kinds of people into the form of work they hate.

In a way, we don’t like to see people doing either kind of work exclusively. It’s silly, but it’s human nature. When we see someone being proactive too much, they’re “rocking the boat.” Or maybe they “have their head in the clouds.” They’re “a dreamer, not a doer.” Or if they are doing, they’re “reinventing the wheel.”

Meanwhile, when we see someone who’s excellent at putting out fires but there currently isn’t one, they’re “lazy.” They “lack initiative,” and are “followers, not leaders.” They spend all day “sitting around, waiting for something to do.”

The fact is, some people are really good at making plans, and other people are really good at putting out fires. Not only are they good at those things, but they prefer to do them! But for some reason, we all really seem to dislike letting people exclusively (or even mostly) do one or the other.

When someone is a firefighter and there are no fires, we all feel this itch to have that person “do something proactive.” We pay someone to be our network troubleshooter, but when there are no network issues, we want them to be coding or something. But that makes them worse at troubleshooting! We want our firefighters to be ready to fight fires, not exhausted and distracted.

Likewise, if someone is really good at building long-term plans, it’s a crime to pull them out of that to, you know, put out a fire. We’re making them worse at the thing they’re best at.

Ultimately, I think these are symptoms of a larger issue we humans tend to have – we don’t like seeing people being successful doing things they like doing. We feel as though in order for success to be “earned,” it has to be at least a little unpleasant. If you can be successful while also being happy, your fellow humans tend to think you’re somehow scamming someone.

Don’t fall for it. Do the things you like and you’re good at – and to the extent you possibly can, don’t force other people not to. Whenever you have the authority to let planners plan and troubleshooters shoot trouble – let them be active the way they want to be.

“Some people don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.”

We have tolerances for pain and tolerances for damage. Fire will inflict pain before it inflicts damage to most people, most of the time – and mostly, that’s how we want it. If fire did damage to you before it hurt you, we’d have all burned up long ago.

But pain is a powerful motivator. So powerful, in fact, that we sometimes need to shut it down (or at least, lessen it) to do something which will damage us – but which must be done. I don’t want to be a slave to my “pain/damage” index if my child is in a burning building. I need to be able to take some damage to accomplish a goal.

That’s a button that can break easily. If we push our pain down below our damage too often, we can permanently cross the wires. This is especially true for non-physical pain. Sometimes something hurts us emotionally very badly, but we push past it to accomplish something. Maybe we do that one too many times, and we lose the sense to come in out of the rain.

Pain of all kinds is an early warning system. We need to push past it sometimes, but honestly we should listen to it more often. You can be out in the pain so long that you forget how to come back out of it.