There’s a lot of money to be made telling losers what they want to hear. If you ever hear a public figure of any kind telling you something just oh so comforting about how the problems you’re currently facing aren’t your fault and you shouldn’t have to take responsibility for them… run.

Those people don’t want to help you. They want to drag you screaming into the rocks so they can loot your corpse. They want you to empty your vaults of money and attention, heaping it all onto them. They tell you that you you can’t solve your problems so you shouldn’t try, but that’s okay because they aren’t your fault anyway, and what you should do instead is just wallow and make the wallowing a little easier by voting/subscribing/buying in whatever patterns they tell you.

Look, I’m not trying to be deliberately brutal. Not every single bad thing in your life is your direct fault, obviously. But it’s all your responsibility, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to shake you down. It’s a grift. No one ever improved their lot in life by listening to people tell them that they have no agency, that they’re simply victims of forces they can’t possibly understand or control – only blindly and impotently hate.

Don’t fall for it. Keep your rudder straight and tie yourself to the mast if you have to. Only go toward hope and life, not despair and death.

The signal-to-noise ratio is real. If you want to hide information, the secret isn’t to… well, hide it. The secret is to bury it. Make the information you want to keep hidden part of a flood of information so banal and uninteresting that no human mind can penetrate it.

You can even do this by accident, that’s how effective it is. Want someone to miss an important update from you? Easy, just send them ten updates a day, and call all of them important. If The Boy Who Cried Wolf was around today, he’d mark every email “urgent.”

Planes are statistically the safest way to travel, by a really absurd margin. Despite this, I can find an example of a plane crash with ease. I can even find documentation of a really horrific plane crash, with gruesome pictures and stuff.

It shouldn’t really need to be said, but I’m going to say it here anyway (mostly for the purposes of linking to this later): responding to a claim of “X is very rare” with an example of X is not a good argument.

I might say “Flying is very safe,” and you might argue by showing me horrific pictures of a plane crash while smirking and saying “Oh, so this looks ‘safe’ to you?” If you do that, you’re wrong and not very bright.

Many people who argue this way are simply dumb, but some of them are manipulative. For example, they might know that flying is very safe, but maybe they run a bus company and they have strong incentive to trick people into shifting their travel miles from planes to buses as much as possible. That person absolutely loves it when a plane crashes, because they know that even though this argument is wrong, it sometimes works.

(I’m not saying everyone who works for a bus company relishes plane crashes, obviously. There are plenty of reasons to base your travel plans on things other than maximum safety, such as cost or convenience, so buses are fine. Just using that as an example.)

So whenever you make a statistical claim and someone responds with a single example of the statistical outlier, do a quick check: are they just dumb, or are they trying to push an agenda?

People who are correct don’t always make good arguments (and it’s a shame when they don’t). But people who are incorrect almost always make bad arguments, because there are precious few good arguments for incorrect positions.

If you want to be right more often, one of the first steps you can take is not to use bad arguments for any position. If you refuse to use bad arguments and force yourself to only use good ones, you’ll automatically exclude a lot of incorrect positions from your life.

I learned of a really fantastic concept from a running coach I was speaking to recently – the idea of a “comfort lap.” The concept is this: if you’re running laps, you can alternate between laps where you really push yourself to as hard as you can and laps where you take a leisurely jog.

You’ve probably heard the concept of your “comfort zone,” a metaphor for the situations and lifestyles where you aren’t challenging yourself. If you’re in your “comfort zone” then you’re in very familiar territory, taking no risks, etc. When you “step out of your comfort zone,” you’re doing something more dangerous, something less familiar. You’re taking those risks in order to grow.

As evidenced by that language, we tend to think of “comfort” as also stationary. Your “comfort zone” is a place, a location – a static location. If you’re in your comfort zone, you aren’t doing anything, or so the thinking goes.

But it doesn’t have to be! You can be making forward progress and engaging in something meaningful even if you aren’t pushing yourself to the limit. That’s why I love the concept of the “comfort lap.” You aren’t stopping. You’re just changing your pace to emphasize comfort and sustainability over high-cost growth. It’s good to alternate between those, and it’s even better if you can do it without always needing to stop entirely.

Your life shouldn’t be a series of jerking transitions between maximum energy expenditure and total sloth. That even pace should be a large percentage, even the majority. Some times of total sloth are fine, just as some times of enormous effort are healthy. If you run as fast as you can for as long as you can before collapsing, then stay collapsed on the ground until you can get back up and immediately run as fast as you can for as long as you can again on repeat, you won’t go nearly as far as you will if most of the time, you jog.

If you can deliver bad news effectively, it’s a superpower. It can command respect, advance careers, and solidify friendships. Very few people do it well, which is why it’s such an awesome skill when developed and deployed correctly.

Here are the keys:

1. Bad news needs to be blameless. The point of giving the bad news is to get people to change their behavior, not just to bum them out. They’re less likely to change their behavior if they’re on the defensive right away. So keep the bad news to the facts of the present, not who caused the current situation. Don’t lead with, “The bad news is that because Jim botched the sales meeting, our main client is canceling their contract.” Even if it’s true, it isn’t helpful.
2. Always have a preliminary “either/or” solution to suggest. If you’re telling people the building is on fire, then you also want to package it with “Either we do X to put the fire out now, or we do Y to begin the building evacuation.” Remember, you’re trying to avert disaster, not just predict it. If you’re identifying problems just because “someone should do something about it,” remember that the superpower here is being the someone.
3. Treat the bad news as a project to be worked on together. Lead the team. Step up. If you treat it like it won’t be a disaster for you personally, then other people will respond with the same attitude and help solve it. If you treat the bad news like you’re giving it away and then washing your hands of the whole affair, then everyone else will treat the problem like a hot potato and it won’t get solved before it actually is a disaster.
4. Coming to the table with a solution is about being proactive and confident; it doesn’t mean you have to dig your heels in and demand that your specific plan be followed. The table is presumably full of smart people, and this process is about getting those people to engage their talents with you. If it works, then other people will contribute a lot. Thank them!

If you nail those steps, then you won’t just be the messenger who gets the blame for being the one to call out the obvious. You’ll be respected for your ability to solve problems and your candor in approaching them. Most people are very hesitant to do this, for a whole host of reasons. And anything most people won’t do is a gold mine if you will.

Most of the best stuff in your life will happen when you’re not safe. No one ever felt completely in control of their life the first time they had a child, or visited a totally unexplored location, or built the best invention of their life.

All the best stuff is over that line on the map. Make sure you’re stepping over it with some regularity. That also means making it a point to regularly prepare for danger – be sharp, be in shape, be equipped. Conduct your life in such a way that you’re okay with a little danger. Or a lot.

I’m an optimist about my abilities, not the universe. I don’t expect the universe (by which I simply mean “everything that isn’t me”) to dish out the fates I want – if anything, I expect the universe to throw nothing but curve balls. But I’m very optimistic about my ability to hit them, so I remain an optimist overall.

Sometimes people, when deciding on a course of action, fall victim to the fallacy of imagining their ideal preferred result of that action. Then they’ve tricked themselves; they find themselves answering “do I want that result” instead of “should I take this action,” and those are very different questions.

Be careful about assumptions you make about the universe. You can control what you do, but rarely the universe’s response. Be prepared for curve balls.

Don’t be the person who treats you the worst. Being overly self-indulgent isn’t good for you, but most people swing too hard in the other direction. No one will drive you like you’ll drive yourself, this is true – and good! But if you drove someone else as hard as you drove yourself, you’d also recognize that you had to reward that person for their efforts or the efforts would cease and they’d grow to resent you.

So don’t let that happen in your relationship with yourself. Work hard and stay diligent, but do something nice for yourself, too.

Sometimes, the ship has no captain. Sometimes it doesn’t even have a rudder. There’s a storm all about and nothing seems to make sense. You’re pretty sure this ship you’ve found yourself on isn’t going to reach its destination, at least not in one piece. In that situation, what should you do?

Well, the obvious answer is “abandon ship,” but just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s correct. In fact, even in the situation I described, it still might be better to be on the rudderless, captainless ship than on no ship at all in the middle of the ocean.

Most of the time, you’re not going to literally be on a ship. But the analogy tracks for a lot of dysfunctional organizations. When you join a new company, team, school, or other organization, you join it with certain expectations of leadership. You expect your organization to be… well, organized. We picture a natural process of learning the ropes and acclimating to the new structure, then being able to contribute and produce valuable work thanks to that structure and the people in charge of it.

And then sometimes – maybe even often – what we get instead is chaos.

It’s a fact of life that not all organizations are run well. They don’t all have effective leaders. They aren’t all in periods of stability. Some of them are very much like rudderless, captainless ships. The people will create factions and cliques as they scramble to protect what they have – or even what they perceive to have. Some people are opportunists and want to turn that chaos into personal benefit at the cost of organizational harm. No one seems to be in charge, or at least you can’t be certain that who’s in charge today will be in charge tomorrow. It’s hard to do productive work because opinions around you all seem to differ on what “productive work” looks like – opinions that are guided primarily by those individuals’ own plans and schemes, and not what’s best for you.

In the best of times, you should always retain a healthy helping of agency over your own work, since outsourcing all decisions in your career is a great way to tank it. But when the chaos rises, you have to be even stronger. That doesn’t mean you should be like the vultures – opportunists who damage everything around them for short-term personal gain. You should strive for personal gain, yes. But in a way that helps those around you, for as long as they’ll accept it.

Remember: the ship will sink or it won’t. But for most people, the end result of their organization collapsing is the same as if they quit – they’ve lost their own position, and that’s it. If you join a company and it turns out that it’s a disaster, you can quit if you want. But until the paychecks stop cashing, it might be better to stay on and try to both provide and extract some value, the better to position yourself for the next stage.

So okay, practical advice time. You’ve joined an organization and it isn’t what it seemed. Chaos reigns. What should you do?

1. First, create boundaries. You’re going to want to avoid investing all of your time and energy into this new organization, because you need to have enough “you” left over in the week to plan your next steps, network, job hunt a little, etc. So first and foremost, make sure that you’re setting firm boundaries about availability, energy, and so on. Don’t work late, don’t take on extra projects, and definitely don’t let anyone pull you into their personal slice of the political pie.
2. Next, take an hour or so to get calm and ask yourself: “If this was a well-run organization, what would my job look like? What would I be doing to contribute, and what would success look like?” If you have trouble answering that, seek out assistance – network with other people in your position at other companies, or people who lead & manage that position. There are plenty of them, and networking with them is a great idea now, anyway. But stick with this exercise until you have a solid idea of what your role would look like if it was at a better org. Make it ideal – not just neutral. Don’t just picture an “okay” job, craft one you’d be really excited about.
3. Now, do that job. In the absence of anyone filling the void with actual certainty and saying “This is what you can do to contribute, be successful, and be recognized & rewarded,” just act as if someone handed you the role from Step 2. Whenever you don’t know something, make the best guess. Whenever you need approval for something, give it to yourself. Don’t wait for anyone to give you permission to do anything, because you won’t get it. Every day, do this job as if it were exactly what you were hired or recruited to do. But as you do it, pay special attention to Steps 4 and 5.
4. You’ve created the job you’ll do by default, but you aren’t going to die on any hills. The point of this is that 95% of the time, whatever you’re doing will be correct. But occasionally, someone will actually pop up and give you a real reason not to do something you’re doing. Occasionally, some vestige of real leadership will manifest and you’ll get actual feedback and direction. When that happens, be thrilled. Be extremely receptive, be grateful, and as quickly as you can pivot to include that new direction in your work. After all, that’s what you were hoping would happen in the first place! So don’t forget that some level of direction is what you’re seeking, even as you’re acting as if you’ll never get it.
5. You need to make at least 20% of your new job communicating about what you’re doing. This is a good idea anyway even in a well-functioning organization, but in this case, it’s serving two vital purposes: it’s building the value that you intend to take with you, and it’s covering your ass. In terms of building value – you want public visibility for the good work you’re doing because there’s no guarantee that it’s going to get used effectively once you hand it off. And there might not be anyone left to write you a letter or recommendation someday, so the more you communicate, the more your work becomes its own letter of recommendation for the future. And in terms of covering your ass – this should be obvious, but remember the vultures I mentioned earlier? Don’t give them anything. Don’t let them take credit for your work, don’t let them misconstrue your actions, and don’t let them drag you into their politicking. Stay in the sunlight, do everything publicly. Create email chains instead of phone calls, with multiple people on them. Do your work in publicly accessible file-sharing systems. Document frequently. Save things to your own computer. Stay above reproach by always keeping your door open, so to speak.

If you follow that action plan, it won’t fix the organization. But it won’t damage it either – and while you’re there, you’ll actually be contributing to both the org and your own development. In the best-case scenario, the organization gets the leadership it needs, and that leadership has plenty of evidence that you’ve been an awesome team player even during chaotic times. In the worst-case scenario, the organization tanks anyway, but you’ve still got a body of valuable work you’ve contributed and your own personal time wasn’t wasted. You’ll be able to show your next leader what you were capable of as if you were working in a well-functioning organization all along.

There’s a fun little group activity I’ve seen used in a lot of settings. I used to think it was dumb and bad, but I’ve come around on it significantly, and I’ll explain why.

Here’s the exercise: at everyone’s seat is a face-down piece of paper. The facilitator will tell everyone to flip over the paper and then follow the directions on it. The paper will have a big list of directions, maybe 30 or so, and they’ll all be silly things like “stand up and clap three times” and “loudly proclaim your favorite color so the room can hear,” etc. The facilitator also (crucially) has to put a narrow time limit on it, something like: “You’ll only have three minutes total to complete all directions. Do as many as you can. Aaaand… go!”

But here’s the gimmick: The list is structured a certain way and has some specific instructions for numbers one, two, and thirty. Here’s what the list looks like:

What do you think happens? If you guessed “a bunch of people make fools of themselves,” you’re right!

A number of people in every group will basically ignore number 2 and will just start following the silly directions in numbers 3 through 29. They’ll see the big list and the time limit and just start rushing through, shouting to the room and spinning around and all that stuff.

Meanwhile, there will also be a certain number of people who scan the page like they should, see number 30, and smile smugly as their peers botch it. By the end, you’ll have made some people feel very smart and some people feel very foolish.

I used to hate this – I’d been a part of it several times in several different contexts (which of course, ruins it – if the trick works at all, it only works once) and I always felt like it was poorly used. As an arrogant young man, I thought, “If they’re not immediately firing everyone who messed this up, what’s the point? Those people just showed that they’re idiots.”

Now, I realize differently.

Being able to follow directions, especially complex directions in a time-pressured situation, is a skill. It’s a very valuable skill, but it’s not the only marker of intelligence. And because it’s a difficult skill, most people don’t naturally have it – they have to learn it.

This exercise really helped to hit home how important that skill is – and shattered the assumption that people were automatically good at it. If you messed that up, you were embarrassed but not harmed. That’s a good position to create the humility needed for learning.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as I’ve aged is that almost every ability I thought was just “basic intelligence” was, in fact, a highly specific skill that I happened to possess and therefore I arrogantly judged people who didn’t. That doesn’t mean those skills aren’t very helpful and worth learning! It just means you shouldn’t judge someone for not having them yet.

The corollary, of course, is that there are plenty of those kinds of skills that I don’t possess. It keeps me humble and looking for them. Hopefully, you’ll do the same.