There’s some conventional wisdom that says “Don’t compare yourself to anyone else; compare yourself to who you were yesterday.” For its intended purpose, I think that’s fine advice. Comparison is the thief of joy, after all, and trying to measure yourself against others (or, in truth, your inaccurate perception of others) is a sure way to make yourself miserable.

But like all things, be careful about turning good advice into an unshakable mantra that consumes your whole life. You shouldn’t always be comparing yourself to… well, yourself. Because sometimes you’re simply going to dislike even that comparison.

Despite being in my 40s, I’m in much better shape than I was in my 30s. I eat better, I work out more, and I’ve eliminated some bad habits. When I see old pictures of myself, I should say things like: “Wow, I’m pleased with all the progress I’ve made and happy that I no longer carry around all that unhealthy weight.”

Instead, I often think something like: “Gee, look at all the hair I used to have.”

I chase that thought out of my head pretty quickly, but it still pops up. And if my hair was still as thick and luscious as it was ten years ago, I’d find something else unpleasant in that comparison.

Just as you can always find some aspect of another person’s life to be jealous of, even if you wouldn’t actually trade lives with them if you could, you can always find something in your own past that you wish you could carry forward. Even if (as in my case) I wouldn’t trade lives with my 30-year-old self even if I could.

I enjoy marching forward through time. I have fun, and I certainly think I gain more than I lose. A few strands of hair here and there (and a bit more grey in the remaining ones) are well worth the wisdom and joy I collect in the process. It’s well worth a few wrinkles to watch my children barrel madly through the fun of their childhoods, explore the fun applications of my professional skills, and be able to engage more deeply with lifelong friends and communities.

The real advice isn’t to only make comparisons to your prior self. It’s to not make comparisons at all. Make goals and work toward them, but who you were yesterday has no bearing on whether you have it in you to be happy – as you – today.

Disappointment is a necessary condition of a happy life.

In order to achieve things, you must sometimes climb beyond your comfort zone. In order to have the will to do that, you must expect some chance of a positive result. If you aren’t sometimes failing, that means you’re not climbing far enough out of your comfort zone to do anything important. And that all means that sometimes, inevitably, you will expect something positive but not get it.

The sting is still real though. And when it happens to people you love, it’s worse. You want to tell them that the world is wrong and should have shifted around their expectations, but you know that isn’t true. Growing through the disappointment is just something you have to deal with.

The nature of life creates the conditions for these heartaches. It can’t be any other way – our happiness must grow from struggle.

But I’ll hold your hand, anyway.

Beginning in 1961, the Bathi rebel group began systematically targeting American and Western European tourists traveling in northern Africa. Though leadership has changed several times, the same overall mission has been at the heart of the extremist group: to visit unspeakable horrors on members of specific Western countries that dare to cross into what the Bathi consider to be their territory.

In the past six decades, over two hundred Western tourists have been kidnapped, tortured, and assaulted. Thousands of locals have been massacred as well from among those who opposed Bathi rule. In 1997, a six-year-old girl was taken from her family while on a trip by the Bathis. For the next three weeks, the Bathis publicized pictures every day of the horrors they were visiting upon Stephanie Gillentino. The family had to witness what was done to their little girl for twenty days and never saw her alive again. The Bathi rebels were never captured.

The Bathis are still active to this day. In fact, a current ambassador to the US is actively and publicly a member of the group and spends most of his time in Washington D.C. lobbying for more money to be given to them. To date, more than $700 million has been given to the Bathi rebels by the United States alone. More has come from European countries; the same countries that have lost citizens in countless Bathi attacks.

That’s right – not one arrest has been made in the torture and murder of a little girl from Michigan, and not only have we given hundreds of millions of dollars to her killers, but one of the prime suspects is currently an ambassador to the US.

One of the people currently running for President of the United States has many ties to the Bathi group. Personal and financial connections through extended family and prior political actions.

Are you angry? You should be. What do you want done about this? What are you willing to do?

Consider carefully.

Now, one thing you should know: I made all that shit up. Every word. None of it is true, none of it is remotely based in truth, it is literally just fiction I made up and wrote down.

Why would I do this? To demonstrate that truth is not a requirement to get someone angry, or offended, or motivated. To remind you that anyone can tell you a horrific story and it doesn’t take much to make the story conform to your prior beliefs.

And most importantly: to just be careful in general about what you read this year.

You’ve never seen the back of your own head, and you never will. Maybe you’ve seen pictures of it, but maybe not – it’s not exactly common. Even if you’ve been in a house of mirrors and gotten up to some crazy angles, you’ve at best seen a reflection of a reflection.

Of course, other people have seen the back of your head plenty. Everyone who’s ever sat behind you in class or at the theater, stood behind you in line, or snuck up on you in laser tag. The back of your head isn’t exactly hidden, it’s just that you can’t see it.

The natural shape of our physical forms combined with where our sensory organs are located simply precludes an accurate self-observation. A recording of your voice doesn’t sound like your voice to you. You can’t tickle yourself. You’re the last to notice when you stink.

With our physical senses being that bad at self-perception, it boggles my mind that anyone thinks that they have good emotional or mental self-perception.

I’ve noticed a few ways we can get a little better, though – in the same way that we can look at the back of our own head with the aid of a few mirrors or a camera. If you’re in a heated emotional state and someone tells you to calm down, it’s pretty common to incorrectly identify yourself as perfectly calm already, thank you very much! But asking instead:

“What does a calm person do?”

can really help separate you from your emotional self-perception in the same way a picture of the back of your head can separate you from your physical self-perception.

What does a brave person do? What does a confident person do? What does a happy person do?

Now you’re not talking about yourself. You’re talking about a hypothetical outsider, but one that you can draw comparisons to. Like the photo of the back of your head, you can use it to help you make decisions – about your haircut or about your behavior.

It isn’t perfect. But I’ve found it helps considerably.

Today, my children wanted to do arts and crafts, then they wanted to exercise together, then they wanted to do a bunch of science experiments, and then they wanted to cook with me, and finally, they wanted to relax and watch a new cartoon with me.

My life is incredibly blessed because I could say “yes” to all of those things.

Putting yourself in a position to be able to say “yes” to all the things you love (or at least, as many as possible) is the purpose of life. If you want the meaning behind it all, this is it.

There’s no “shouting into the void.” There’s no void. Someone is always listening. Be careful what you shout.

There are many creators whose work I enjoy. Musicians, artists, actors, writers, bloggers, vloggers, even game designers. All of them have something that they believe in, talk about, or advocate for that I don’t agree with.

The same is true for my coworkers, neighbors, and dearest friends.

I’ve never met someone whose opinions on all things overlapped mine 100%. I’ve also never found it to be a reason to dismiss the friendship, the working relationship, or the art.

Sure, there’s an outer limit. No matter how much I like someone’s music, I won’t listen to it if the singer advocates for genocide – even if such views don’t make it into the music itself. But views that extreme are (thankfully) rare, despite the hysterics of those who like to claim otherwise.

All humans are tribal, and we can’t completely shake that instinct. But I try very hard not to limit the world I experience to solely people who fall into the category of “my tribe,” defined in ever more restrictive terms. That seems like a sad life.

When you ask more questions, you get more than answers. You get the rapport of having asked.

We live in an age where answers are easy to get, especially for things we’re “supposed” to remember. Facebook will remind you of all your loved ones’ birthdays. Video calls display names so you never forget. All the little things that you could once remember as a way of showing that you care have been outsourced, precisely because we care to remember them.

You can outsource the answers, but not the curiosity to seek them. The next time you want to show someone that you care, ask them something. It doesn’t matter what, as long as you genuinely care about what they have to say.

People say the essence of comedy is timing, but I think it’s dedication. Commitment to the bit. I’ve heard it said that 90% of people didn’t think Andy Kaufman was funny, but that 10% found him to be the funniest guy who ever lived. I’m definitely in that 10% – I think he was a genius.

It’s not just comedy that benefits from this, of course. Commitment to a stance can warp the very world around you.

There’s this psychology experiment about fairness. Here’s how it works: you have two people, Person A and Person B. Person A is given $100 and told to split it however they like with Person B. Person B then gets to accept or reject the offer; if B accepts, then they both get the money as it was split by A. If B rejects the offer, both parties get nothing.

The point of the experiment is to demonstrate that humans care more about fairness than personal benefit. Here’s why it appears to do just that: if Person A decides that the split they want to offer is 99 bucks for them and a dollar for Person B, then Person B will reject that offer every time. But look at what they’re rejecting – a free dollar! They’d rather take nothing than a dollar, because the offer was “unfair.” In practice, the offers have to be generally at least 60/40 before people will start accepting them. People will trash 20 bucks!

So this is supposed to show that people are irrational, but I posit that it doesn’t show that at all. First, consider: almost all of our social instincts evolved when you would interact with the same 20 or 30 people over and over again your whole life. In that context, being willing to burn it all down in the name of fairness actually made perfect sense, because it taught everyone around you that you wouldn’t tolerate being treated unfairly in the future, either. It taught people that if they didn’t split that elk fairly with you, you’d rather kick it into the river and both starve than take the lesser cut. That was a strong way of motivating people to be fair to you.

In a world with many strangers who you’ll never see again (and thus, can’t “train” in this way) it makes the most sense to just ignore fairness and take any money offered to you rather than die on a hill. But we commit to the bit anyway, because most of the time we’re interacting with people we’ve interacted with before and will interact with again. It makes sense to teach them things about ourselves that we want them to know.

You can get very far with people by watching what they’re consistent about. And you can get a lot of what you want out of life by consistently committing to the bits you find important.

If you know all the words to something and someone else doesn’t, then they don’t know if you mess up unless you tell them.

My father was (among many other things) a drummer. He once told me one of his ‘tricks’ and it was so utterly brilliant it changed my life. And I’m not a drummer. He told me that if he ever messed up while he was playing, he’d just deliberately repeat the mistake four measures later, and then it would just sound like part of the song and no one would know.

See, when you see your mistakes, you’re looking at them with deep, inside knowledge. You know exactly what was supposed to happen, but no one else does. Your mistakes are mostly invisible – it’s your reaction to them that people notice.

Whether you’re rocking your way through an epic drum solo or delivering the quarterly business report, you might make a mistake. Just roll through it. Repeat it, even – on purpose, and in the right spot. Make all the words yours, and none of them can be wrong.