Morning Reading

Happy New Year.

Now stop reading emails, and do whatever it is you have the motivation for.

Do it tomorrow, too.

Do it until the motivation runs out.

Then come back here, and find it again.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The whole world can fit in the space between your ears—a brain only finite in abstract, as even your knowledge of the infinite nestles comfortably there.

Yet even in that space, is your mind so large that it can fit all of creativity? All possible knowledge about things made new?

Is this an observation about your limits, or rather is it an observation about the nature of creativity itself—that as soon as its limited, it becomes more, as if the spirit of creativity always creates another layer, a little deeper, always further up, always further in?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the glow of the early day—before the zenith strips the sun of its low warmth, slowly bringing the world up to a simmer, you won’t find golden hour. You won’t find much of anything, as the rest of cosmos rightfully sleeps in and you realize there’s still time before you would normally think to awaken.

Who knows what the productivity experts think about waking up early—this much is actually certain: waking up before the rest of the world feels like being let in on a secret, a few brief hours in some kind of hidden society, where you can read or make or even sit, because this time is hidden even from yourself—starting the day anew, unknowing of the few brief hours before, your right brain not even knowing what your left brain does.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re going to go to the work of building a road—

Chopping down trees, pulling up stumps, rounding corners, facing switchbacks, clearing a way through something previously never attempted—

Could you find the strength to make the road wide enough for someone else to walk it at the same time?

Well built enough for a future generation to take it on, too?

Or, if no new roads preset themselves to you, could you perhaps do the work or of carving a ew road, but expanding an old one

Is there a better way to make the world a better place?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Most advice comes down to this:

Here’s what they would do in this situation.

They’re smart. More capable than you. The have more experience, more confidence, and more wisdom.

But they’re not you. That’s a subject upon which only you can really speak with anything approaching authority.

So be careful taking advice, after all, you’re the only one who will have to live with it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Peace at any cost—money, embarrassment, leaving your foot in your mouth for so long it would be legally entitled to squatter’s rights.

Peace at any cost—the long stretches of time, keeping hope alive against all odds, holding on onto the bullets stop flying.

Peace at any cost—even when loving your neighbor means making a little more space for a few new ones.

Peace at any cost—except for the cost of peace itself, when ending the conflict only delays it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Whether you’re young and ambitious or old and ambitious, your ambition pushes you beyond your readiness.

Beyond your capacity, your capability, not just in the abstract, but probably embarrassing you along the way.

So if you have a better idea of how to become capable, do it.

Otherwise, there’s nothing to do but give embarrassment a try.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In one sense, the best life is advice is to not listen to life advice.

But seeing as were all still here, we might consider this instead: if you have made it to the point of life where you no longer check your bank account before buying gas, then money has already hit the point of diminishing happiness returns.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s doomed from the art: equ pars foolish and unfortunate, stirred over medium sadness, slowly shaking in bad news to taste.

Wisdom tells us to avoid them like the plague, to steer clear of the entire storm, no matter how clear and quiet the eye might be.

But as any seasoned cook could tell you, it’s not just the recipe that matters. It’s how you make it. So if you mess up a recipe for disaster, you might be left with a whole lot of things—but only disaster if you get it right.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the course of life, most of us don’t change how much we hate.

We treat it like the universe treats energy, as if it cannot be destroyed, only change.

Yes, we hate different things now. Things that deserve much more hatred. Things better ethically defended, as worthy of outrage as anything is.

And at the end of the day, it’s still just hatred.

Is it possible to ask: how could I decrease my hatred just a little without putting it somewhere else? What’s one thing I could give up being angry about?

How would the world be different if you did? How would you be differet?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

No one would but a journal that was already filled out, just as no one would buy an empty book.

No one would buy a book with blank pages—flipping first curiously, then angrily, as blank page reveals blank page.

Yet no one would be happy to open a journal and find someone had already written down all their thoughts and to-dos.

Each has its place, its use, its time.

So maybe the chaos of your soul is a harvest, a story that must be read before it can be put to rest?

Just as the emptiness of your heart may be nothing more than a winter of the soul, a blank page upon which something can be written?

Each in time, each with its purpose.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The problem with a reputation is that it’s based in what other people think. In that way, it can quickly become self contained—the person with a good reputation now worried not just about being good, but about making sure everyone knows it, too.

There’s a simple solution to this problem, one Marcus Aurelius describes in his journal—that to be a king is to earn a bad reputation by good deeds.

It’s foolish to think we can let go of the perception—but maybe we could take a teenager’s destructive glee, and do everything we can to earn a bad reputation, but only by doing good deeds.

Let the cards fall where they will. Our job is goodness, not its reputation.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When it comes to society, none of us can walk our tab. None of us can dine and dash. We are stuck together, both equally and unfortunately human.

On the subject of housing, healthcare, education, and anything else controversial and political, the question is not whether or not we are going to pay for it—the only question is how we will pay for it. The cost doesn’t disappear, the problems that arise are still paid, as we’re all forced to continue to interact with adults who never even got the education a child deserved.

The people don’t disappear. The problems don’t leave. The bill still remains, asking only how anyone can pay it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Goodness, grace, compassion.

Even for them.

Perspective, empathy, understanding.

Even for them.

Warm chocolate chip cookies, friendly pats on the shoulder, smiling and laughing at a joke that was funny in its conception, even if they messed up the delivery.

Even for them.

If the worst people you can imagine were willing to hear you out, put their weapons away long enough to actually listen, not allowing conflict to come between a shared humanity, would you be interested in speaking?

Could all of these things be afforded? Even to us?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re going to play tag with your emotions,

Do you best to not let it get to you.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Needs a rewrite, great idea but a lil messy

Here’s the thing about the feeling:

The big feeling, the one that’s been coming for a while, anger, grief, hatred, absolute and all-consuming rage.

Somewhere along the way, your feelings decided they needed to pick up some extra cash, and took a job as a salesfeeling, now going door-to-door in your heart, telling you: I am not just a feeling, I am reason to act. Taking me seriously means acting me out, right here, right now.

Instead, you’ve got to shape up to the feeling. Look at its shoes and smile. Tell it politely but firmly that you’re not interested in what its selling.

The feeling is here, it’s real, but it’s the only thing that’s real. The feeling is itself the thing you have to confront and manage.

Whatever you do, don’t let the feeling trick you into thinking whatever caused the feeling is responsible.

That’s for you to decide after you’ve dealt with the feeling.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You are going to feel insecure.

Hell, you might already.

You’re going to feel like you can’t make it, like you’re not qualified, like anyone and everyone else would do a better job.

You’re going to feel that way because at times, everyone feels that way. In that sense, insecurity is a red herring. A false lead.

Because you can be insecure and courageous, insecure and optimistic, insecure and empathetic.

The question isn’t whether or not you’re going to be insecure. The question is, what else are you going to be?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The question isn’t whether or not you’re going to pay attention to the details.

It’s which details you’re going to pay attention to.

Technical? Relational? Strategic? Emotional?

The choice is yours.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Mark Twain said he didn’t have time to write a short letter, so he wrote a long one instead.

This is not actually the reason Mark Twain didn’t write a short letter.

He didn’t write a short letter because Mark Twain is dead, and hasn’t written anything for a very long time.

Not even a long letter.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Chances are, if your life has progressed the way most do, you’ve steadily increased your capacity.

More people in your network, more knowledge in your head, more resources in your bank account and your career.

Things that once would set you back months can now be taken in stride—painful, sure, but blowing a tire is now more an annoyance than it is a catastrophic life event.

It’s now that you might take a step back and ask yourself: with these resources I have now, what’s a problem I’ve previously been unable to solve that I could put some investment behind?

Seeking out a guitar teacher, paying a personal trainer, blocking off time in your calendar just for you—luxuries you couldn’t once afford, now available, champagne solutions to ordinary problems.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Time steals everything—robbing us not only of people, places, and things, but of our memories of them, always losing details, going from three dimensions to two, once-real situations becoming singular stories we tell in a futile attempt to stave off their end.

It is cruel, but we also must consider: it is in time that all of these things were given to us.

Maybe time heals all the wounds it inflicts?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The ledge could be just inches from your feet, scraping your way across a narrow stretch, desperately trying to make it to the other side.

The ledge could also be miles away, rumors of a mountain, a place where stepping is a bad idea.

It’s obvious that we shouldn’t step off the ledge right in front of us.

A fact we often forget when the ledge is far off.

If there’s something you don’t want to do, it doesn’t matter how close it is—don’t walk towards it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You could become an expert butcher, slicing every organ, tanning the hide yourself, carefully polishing hooves in to tools and making sure every piece of the buffalo is put to good work.

Or you could teach the buffalo how to cook, and trust the buffalo’s work ethic, making it a much easier and more sustainable way to cook with the whole buffalo.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There’s a surprising amount of room back here—by the cupholders holding pens, an empty can in the door, important papers stuffed in the back of the passenger seat, the detritus of a life well lived, just waiting to be cleaned out.

We spend so much time driving our own minds that we’re caught up in the places we go—hands 10 and 12, eye to the rear view mirror, taking in the Tuesdays and Wednesdays that pass into places, people, things, screens, always too focused on the road to take in the vehicle.

It’s why every now and then we slide into the back seats of our mind—safely in park, with nowhere to be, looking around not so much with the intent of finding something to fix, but just taking in part of ourselves only other people normally enjoy—grateful not just for speed, but upholstery, independent air control, the comforting features of our own selves we lose in our focus on the outer world.

It’s always there, always ready for you, to step out of your own mind and get in on the other side.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The less obvious it is, the less apparent, the fewer “best practices’ anyone has written on the subject, the more mirky and loathsome the process, the more you ask yourself “what the hell am I supposed to do next?”

The less obvious it is, the more difficult. The higher the velocity your head uses against the brick wall. The longer the nights and the shorter the fuses and more easily and readily you find yourself thinking of doing something else, anything else.

The less obvious it is, the more difficult it is, the more interesting it becomes. Less obvious and less predictable. Higher upsides and new discoveries.

The less obvious, the more difficult, the more interesting, the more rewarding.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The devil may bargain, may make offers, may spread his wares at the crossroads, offering routes in life with price tags we know we can’t afford.

The offer stands to kick the problem further down the road, to take the deal that lets us out now, mortgaging our future selves, our confidence, our happiness, all for the immediate comfort of signing under the dotted line.

The devil bargains, but he doesn’t bargain with strangers.

So be careful whose hand you go out of your way to shake.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Everyone wants it—

Except the contrarian, who wants it in their own way.

Espousing not its virtues, but looking for its flaws. Earning a PhD in horse dentistry and opening practice not only on their own gift horses, but everyone else’s too. Contrarians have never met a bucket they didn’t turn into a seat, never read a set of instructions they couldn’t translate, never met a one way road they couldn’t turn into an all-way road, damn the horns of the normies.

But at the end of the day—after all the subversion, the antagonizing, the angry posts on the internet—

The contrarian wants it all the same as the rest of us. After all, with nothing to contradict, who would they be?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Is growing older nothing more complicated than having your fill of the consequences of your actions?

Kicking the rock down the road enough times for your foot to hurt?

And if that is the prerequisite of wisdom, and wisdom is a thing worth obtaining, than shouldn’t the goal of the young be to fuck around as quickly and efficiently as possible, for the express purpose of learning?

Have their fill of finding out?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Do something worth showing.

Put the time in. Make it right. Ditch the cardboard cut outs for the real thing. Put together enough compelling pieces to let the story make sense to you, to me, to anyone.

Then, show it. Share it. Press send. Put it out in the world.

And after you’re done looking at all the comments, all the shares, the lack of metrics, or the viral implications—

Well, then do it again.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Imperfect systems waste perfectly good leftovers.

Spend cents where you could have neat, easy dollars, perfectly arrayed in neat rows, ready for anyone and everyone to divide them by 10.

Create questions, weird one off issues, all sorts of odd, sideways things to look at, the illegitimate children of an otherwise respectable endeavor.

Imperfect systems leave margin.

Margin for kids to come along and see opportunity. Margin for someone to have a long lunch, enjoying a little more of your time than they expected. Margin for—well, anything the margin can be used for.

Margin that ends up not only creating the best parts of life, but also new life, entirely new playgrounds for all to enjoy.

So what’s so wrong with imperfect systems?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Whether it’s inches or miles, a question of scale or of a few scales off a lizard’s back, a question of tons or pounds or ounces or kilos—

The struggle is always coming.

Whether it’s a step or a thousand, or ten.

You don’t have to create more than already exists.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

On the subject of wars, the crimes of nations, the theft from the masses, the secret attacks, the public rebellions, all the horrible, awful, large things in the world:

The notion of who acted first comes down to where you want to start paying attention. All violence is a reaction, an eye for each and every eye, where it’s eyes all the way down.

The worst part is that it’s also true of the people in your life: take a broad enough perspective, and you’ll realize that even the person who cut you off in traffic is a part of a larger story, a sequence of events that isn’t entirely in their control. Isn’t even mostly in their control.

So if defending yourself requires changing yourself for the worse, is it worth it in the first place?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Whether it means to duck and cover—enemies beware, because justice is rolling in with the force and vigor of the father coming home to discover the window the baseball broke.

Whether it stands as true as iron, the measuring stick upon which less fortunate souls can discover the meaning of abstract words like honor or truth.

Whether it leaves the door unlocked, a warm soul like a gentle stove, the smell of food permeating a name, always ready to receive another person at a table that always has room for just one more…

No matter what it means, your job in life is to make your word mean something.

What it means is up to you.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The goal of life is to get lucky.

To have one single moment explode dramatically beyond its original intention.

The hit song, the bestseller, the viral clip or blog post, catapulting you into heights previously only imagined.

So much so obvious. Until you try and fail. you shoot your shot with luck and walk away dejected.

Then you feel a hand on your shoulder, a voice telling you it’s not so bad, it happens all the time. You meet lucks friend, who explains that luck is always in this mood, and only rarely hits it off with anyone. A friend who says they can introduce you to luck, a friend who introduces themselves by the name diligence.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If your soul is a horse, you must lead it to water.

Then you must have the patience to wait.

The perspective to keep a good attitude

And the fortitude to do the same thing tomorrow, whether it chooses to drink or not.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The early stages of becoming an adult involve realizing there’s things the previous generation doesn’t realize.

Things they got wrong, ideas they didn’t explore, ways of doing and being they couldn’t stomach, a whole list of mishaps and fuckups, ripe for the redoing.

As you get older, you might look over your shoulder and realize there’s still work undone. You might grow a little and find ideas that made no previous sense to you now seem obvious. You might look at the course of your own life and see missed opportunities, a surprising number of mistakes, whole years you phoned it in.

This could be a source of anguish. Or you could take on the next stage of growth: realizing it is good and right to leave room for the kids to spread their rebellious wings.

What will you leave behind? Not just the work done, but the work undone, waiting, ready for someone with bright eyes?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The toilet in your house: creates a major issue any time it decides to call in sick.

The engine of your car, while stuck 30 miles north of basecamp with no cell service: Houston, we have a problem (not that Houston can hear you).

The lighter in your hand: doesn’t really matter if it only bats .500, it really doesn’t take long to flick, flick it again.

The little aching hope in your soul to find love: well, it’s spent its entire life trying and never succeeding, it really only needs to work out once.

The question with life isn’t whether you need it to work. The question life asks, in each domain, is how often you need it to work.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

At first, the task of the artist is to document all the ways in which the previous generations have failed to understand what it means to be human, kicking the ball of meaning a little bit further down the road.

They play this game until the accolades come in, and they bask for a moment in the warmth of progress.

Then, as the night begins to set in, the task of the artist becomes facing death, knowing they still don’t really have any idea what it means to be human—at least not fully.

A task we all must face eventually.

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If you dream a little—and you should—that dream starts to grow.

From seed to sprout to a great oak tree, spreading its arms across the sky of your mind, always there when your mind wanders, trickling serotonin down the window panes of your consciousness as you bask in its glory.

But over time, something changes. The tree goes through its seasons. But you find yourself forever thinking of something that never quite gets any closer.

This is an observation, and not a command. But you only have so much space for dreaming. Sometimes, the best gift you can give yourself is the gift of space—letting go of the old dream as a way to make space for something new, something unexpected, a new vision with new opportunities.

A new dream, one that fits this version of you better.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

All the knowledge of the world is somewhere.

All the skills, all the experience, all the learnings, teachings, best practices, and forbidden techniques.

Anything and everything you can imagine in this regard does exist.

In a book, in a video, and in rare cases, solely in someone’s head.

But it’s out there. Just waiting. Ready for you to pursue it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The nice thing about making your way back home is you don’t have to get there the same way you left.

You don’t have to choose the same paths, the same trials, the same issues.

Don’t have to face the same challenges, the same people.

You’re allowed to use your newfound knowledge and skill to get home. Or if that fails, just use your new perspective.

Or maybe it’s time to choose an even more difficult route? Either way, you don’t have to make it back the same way you made it in the first place.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the world we share—

Where great tubes of metal hurtle across the sky without any of the 524 passengers meeting an untimely demise—

Where twelve year olds outperform billion dollar conglomerates on internet apps—

Where you can buy a surprisingly great cheeseburger for $2—

The question isn’t what’s possible.

The question is which possibility you will create.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s hard for a deal to go bad if the deal wasn’t a deal in the first place.

A lot easier to redo the last round of revision when it comes with the check for overtime.

You’ll find fewer corners to cut when you’ve calculated the appropriate per-corner cost for the contractor.

After all, why cut corners you’re being paid for?

Most of all, no friendships have been ruined over being paid an extra $200, while a surprising number of million-dollar relationships end over far less.

There’s a time and place for everything. Getting a deal isn’t always the deal you might want it to be.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Your lease on life has no mileage fees.

No bonus deals or included maintenance.

No inspection at the end where they tell you there’s a $4,000 fee for smoking.

Your lease on life is simply yours to do with as you see fit.

The only catch is that this is the only one you get.

What will you do with it?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Love what you have.

Not what you could have.

Not who they could be or even who they should be, even though they keep leaving the lights on, even though they don’t put away the dishes, even though they snore like a motherfucker and won’t google a cure.

Love what you have even when the person or the career or the house you should have won’t appear. Refuses to move from the world of your dreams into the world of reality, existing only in negative space, the deep seated longings of your heart, a heart full of longings that you have—longings themselves you could learn to love, to appreciate, to see through misty-eyed pride as a kind of stubborn optimism that refuses to die.

Because if you love what you have, then what you really have is love.

Isn’t that enough?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Would you rather be known as the person who dug up treasure—

Your picture in a newspaper clipping, holding the shovel, dirt covering your otherwise perfect features.

Or would you rather be a map?

A series of scrawlings with one big, obvious X, the place you’re too afraid to dig, left for someone else to find the courage to discover?

The choice is yours.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Without all the budget—

Without all the production—

Without the teams, the structures, the best practices, the blog posts and the quarterly strategies—

Without all the tech, the hotlines, the per diems, the afterparties—

Well, without all of that, all you have to do is be spectacular.

Of course, with all of that, you still have to be spectacular.

It’s just a matter of how you want to get it done.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Your brain is a gift.

The chemicals giving you joy, the memory storing what you ask, the automatic reactions keeping you alive.

The personality, the MBTI, all pointing you in the unique direction of your own life, one you can only appreciate from the perspective of your brain.

Perpetually simplifying your life, ready to keep you safe at any moment, even running your favorite songs and movies in the background for your enjoyment.

Your brain is a gift.

But it’s not who you are.

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Before you can be accountable,

Before you can hoist the trophy of success over your head, naming the teammates that got you there, or the high school teachers who tried to stop you,

Before you can write the book detailing the five-step process that helped you accomplish it,

Before you go on all the podcasts to announce all the best practices you observed for the accomplishment,

Well, before all of that happened, you had to clarify exactly what it was you were trying to accomplish.

Clarity and simplicity proceed accountability and accomplishment.

What do you want to do today?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Fear gets a bad wrap—always talked about as something to overcome, to beat out, or if necessary, to completely avoid.

Yet what job has fear ever turned down? What role has it ever refused to take? Fear will gladly do the work of reason—shortcut all the effort of figuring out what’s really happening. Fear won’t even blink if you asked it to run your career, your household, your relationship. It never says no. Never says enough. It, strangely enough, is never itself afraid, always ready to take over for any of the other virtues.

Unfortunately, after all these years, for all its willingness, fear is still only really good at one thing: telling you what to pay attention to.

Other than that, well, despite its willingness, you may find yourself happier turning down fear’s offer to run your life.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Does it really matter what color the herring is? Would it be less distracting if it was gray? Green? All the colors of the rainbow, enough to make Fox news upset about herrings?

Or would a herring by any other name be just as much of a distraction—just as relevant to the conversation?

Unless, of course, you’re making herring soup.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Spend enough time trying to get it right—

Working long hours, doing your own research, paying for courses, teachers, countless one on ones, coaching sessions, and performance improvement plans.

The endless reviews, shifting goals, the target always changing, as if someone keeps replacing Sisyphus’s boulder with a thousand different bowling balls, rumbling down the hill despite his best efforts.

You may be tempted to try a little harder. Dig a little deeper. Invest a little more. But if you run out of mores to give, you may try this instead:

Look them squarely in the eyes, smile, and embrace the art of kindly and firmly disappointing people.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The question is always there, if you dare to ask it.

In the eye of the storm and in the outside periphery, still fucking over every roof in the neighborhood.

You can always know. Always find out. All it takes is the courage to ask:

What classroom am I in right now? What is the lesson I am supposed to learn?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When the art asks for your opinion—

When there’s room in the business plan for an unnamed idea, when the song lets you decide who the “I” is or the “they” is referring to, when the background of the painting is blank, ready for reinterpretation—

When the second act of the book has space for an as of yet unmet character, or the screenplay gives you room to weave in a new theme—

Well, take a deep breath, and choose confidently.

Because most of the time the art already is what it is, without any space for new decision, something you must simply live in light of, until occasionally, it lets you choose.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you want a smoking gun, all you have to do is pull the trigger.

Or light it a cigarette.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There’s no such thing as too many socks. Wool socks, long socks, running socks, no-show socks, socks with little pictures of corgis on them, or separate from the different types, simple redundancy—a whole box of the same simple white socks, where it seems like you can never have too many.

Plenty of things in our life operate on sock principles: guitar picks, hairbands, and bags of beef jerky come to mind as things you simply cannot overstock.

But there’s a second class that operates on a completely different principle—things like careers, book ideas, homes, lovers, and fuzz pedals—where the more of them you have, the less likely you really have any of them.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The question isn’t just “what is the lesson”—

The thing the universe is trying to teach you right now, through circumstances beautiful and terrifying—

The question is what classroom you are in?

Is it standing up for yourself 101? Discovering the inner artist 201? Remedial empathy? A crash course on being a good partner? Or a dissertation defense on being alone?

Each one a door, available for you to walk through, available to anyone with the courage to raise their eyes, look around, and ask: which class is next?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the game we call life—with all of its stupid rules and impossibly high stakes—each opportunity comes along, something like a pitch thrown over the plate, ready for us to take our swing.

The key point is this: life gives you more than enough opportunities for you to swing and miss, to strike out, to set a record for the longest and worst hitting slump anyone has ever seen. Thousands of swings and misses, with another pitch along the way.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking life gives you enough opportunities to ignore them.

We all only get so many chances. We’re all given limited possessions, a limited number of times the ball is in our hand, asking what now? What next?

We can’t fret about how many. We just have to worry about giving our all to the next one.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Your routine was made for you. No matter how simple or complex, no matter how long its been since you did it.

You didn’t plan your morning for the purpose of making yourself feel bad for not following through on your plan.

You did it as a gift, something good you did for yourself you are now turning into something evil.

Don’t repay your own goodness with evil. Smile, and remind yourself that your routine is here to serve you, not the other way around.

Then get back after it tomorrow.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

From the standpoint of beings who must experience each new year one at a time—without the luxury of knowing it from the future as an event in the past—then each and every 365 days brings with it whole truckloads of new.

And yes, we might have made this one 366 days for good measure.

But told from the perspective of the person living it, is there any year which isn’t a leap year?

A massive spike in the knowledge and existence of all things being human?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The problem with the problem is its consistency.

Like trying to explain the sound to your mechanic because you’re car will only whisper its problems into your ears, never on time, never when anyone else is around.

In that way, the first problem to solve is to identify what the problem is. Which oftentimes means recreating the problem consistently.

Which is a long winded way of saying that the first step in solving the problem is to often make the same mistake enough times to know which mistake your making.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Somewhere deep in your head is a conference room, full of big, spinning chairs, whiteboards, and a view of the suburbs of your brain.

In that conference room, you might sit down with your strongest emotions. Anger, dispair, rage, hatred, greed, lust, envy, all the feelings that end up in HR most often.

You might say, thank you for coming today. We’re making some changes.

From now on, there’s going to be an open door policy. You can walk in any time you want. 24/7, night or day, there will be no more attempt to control or mitigate the strength of everything you feel.

But that open door policy goes both ways. You don’t get to stay.

Anger, rage, vitriol, hatred, walking in, having their say—and then walking out.

And if they need to come back? Well, the doors always open.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If it’s possible to misunderstand your dog—

Look at them with your head tilted sideways, at complete loss for what they want—

Well, you might step back and say, there’s a very limited number of inputs and outputs. Need to pee, want to be fed, want attention, want to go on a walk, want you to leave the room so they can finally have a go at your favorite pair of slippers.

Yet with only a handful of options, we often don’t know which it is.

How could we fool ourselves into thinking we understand the people around us when we don’t even understand the dogs we love?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In all our attempts to avoid it—

The counseling, the books, the medications, the self medicating—

Would our loves be different if instead of avoiding stress, we made space for it?

Not all of the space. Not all of the time. An appointment on the calendar, booked for a small corner of our mind, where we get up and take out the trash, have a cup of coffee, and at the appropriate time, we take a deep breath, open the door, and invite in the stress of the day, like a troubled sibling we love without being able to understand them.

Inviting them in, and then, at the right time, promptly kicking them out.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Put your worst foot forward.

Then put your best foot forward.

Try to only put your best foot forward, and you’ll find you only ever spin in a circle.

Want to get anywhere in life? You’ve got to use both feet.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

On the internet, everyone wants to be tall.

When the bullets start flying, everyone wants to be short.

What are you optimizing for?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Insiders have conventional wisdom.

They know the way things are supposed to get done. The best practices. The standard operating procedures. They turn the center of the bell curve into a tent, taking out a mortgage on their own little chunk, never leaving for either the right or the left.

It’s that conventional wisdom that delivers results—albeit conventional results. Exactly within the range of what’s expected.

So if you what you want is something extraordinary, well, you’ve got to risk two things: first, you’ve got to offend the conventional crowd by ignoring their wisdom.

Second, you’ve got to be willing to accept the fact you might end up on the wrong side of the bell curve.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the grand scheme of things—

When you come to the realization the Eiffel tower is real, and was built before anyone had even thought of a computer…

When you realize Beethoven gave Nirvana a run for their money for aggressive song openers, and that you share the same world and history as them…

When you see not just the art, but the horror, the wars, the death, the cultures eradicated, people devoting their lives to the destruction of others and impossibly efficient rates…

Well, from that perspective, it seems easier to believe in aliens than to believe in humanity.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You might need coaching.

You might need a teacher, a master, the wise counsel of the ages, the secret, forbidden techniques that grant you the ability to play guitar as fast as any kid on Instagram, to bake a cake like Julia Childs, to lead like Alexander the Great and speak like Abraham Lincoln while looking like Don Juan—

You may need that.

But given the impossibility of having that, you may instead just try doing it more often.

After all, it wasn’t like Abraham Lincoln had an older Abraham Lincoln to show him the ropes.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Here’s the secret of understanding the establishment:

Of coming to grips with the great conversation, the progression of science, the overarching question of how we got here and what the hell we’re supposed to do about it.

It’s easy an outsider to look for what makes sense about the group of insiders we want to understand. To ask: what does everyone else understand about songwriting that I don’t? What are the research practices I never would have invented myself? What do all those bestselling authors have in common?

The better question to ask is: what is the inconvenient truth the establishment doesn’t want to acknowledge? What is it that no one wants to solve or recognize?

That’s where the potential lies.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re going to go through the motions, you might as well put some music on and call it dancing.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s not enough to be human.

To take the falls, the highs, the lows, the stories, the songs, the afternoons in the DMV when the entirety of your emotional capacity is spent planning the precise place to punch a hole in the drywall of the universe.

Good, necessary, and right—but enough?

You can’t just be human. You have to feel human too.

The whole range of it all. The roller coaster launching terror into beauty, the pain, the joy, the love, the whole 9 course meal of rubbery insides and stiff upper lips.

Be, and feel it, too.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When you rebel—

Why you turn your hat back, stay up past your bedtime, click all the wrong boxes of the Captcha, scan in your organic honeycrisps into the self checkout as if they were celery, drawing graffiti and chewing with your mouth open and talking without raising your hand—

You’ve got to remember that there’s a generation of kids coming behind you.

A generation that is going to look to you and your rebellion as a template for self expression, for becoming, for growing into adults, adults who are capable of being rebelled against.

So rebel, but make sure you leave something unrebelled against—after all, the kids need something to do.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re going to shoot us, shoot us straight.

Tell us the truth, hard, fast, and precisely.

But given the options, we’d much rather you didn’t shoot us at all.

Is there a way to turn the sword of the truth into a plowshare of the truth?

Do you have the strength not only to do what is necessary—but to do it gently?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

To become a great person, you must avoid making small mistakes.

But the greater the person, the greater the failure of those mistakes.

Which means no matter how great or not great you aspire to be, you never get to let your guard down. You’re now fully capable—of avoiding your previous mistakes. Now you have to look for the new ones.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Hesitation is a virtue when that little voice in the back of your head mutters something unexpected under its breath—maybe things aren’t quite so simple? Maybe the way you’ve always done it won’t quite work this time? Maybe it’s time to reconsider an old consideration?

When the situation gives you a lot of choices, hesitation can be your friend, allowing you to look, and look again.

But when the situation has no choices—when your hand has only one card, a card that must be played right now, only one right way to do one right thing—

Well, when you only have one choice, hesitation is just cowardice wearing a fancy hat.

Whatever you need to do, do it quickly.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You might ask yourself:

Is it possible to live your life without ever having any bad days?

If the answer is no, as it likely is, then you might think of your bad days as taking a shift at the bad day factory. A simple necessity of a good life.

That doesn’t mean you can’t try to have good days. Try to stave off the wrong side of the bed. But you might have to ask yourself this question: in the process of trying to avoid bad days, how many bad days are you creating for other people?

Is this a problem to be avoided or owned?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Your emotions are simply your emotions. They are true like the color green, as factual as stubbing your toe, simple and uncomplicated like a windstorm, not bothering to ask before knocking a tree through your fucking roof.

It feels wrong to even say your emotions are valid—as if they could be invalid. As if any force on the planet could stop one plus one from being two.

But then a little voice creeps in: not the emotions, but a reaction to the emotions. You find yourself angry at yourself for being sad. Or sad that you still love someone. And you find yourself not identifying with your emotions—taking them on as an old friend—but instead trusting your secondhand emotions, the things you feel about the things you feel.

And those, my friend? Those secondhand emotions? They’re worthless.

Stick to the real thing. What you feel, unadulterated by what you feel about what you feel.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It might be the microwave that kills you. It might be the frozen foods. It might be the pen ink or the dating apps or the aerosol of the wasp killer or the microplastics hurtling around your body at roughly 4 miles per hour.

History will almost certainly show us to be guilty of some crimes against ourselves—the asbestos of our generation, where we all look back and say we can’t believe we were such dumbasses.

Of course, while we might place our bets, we won’t know until we know. We don’t know which part of the unknown will kill us—which means we have to lay off the known. Don’t be an idiot. Take care of yourself, because you’ll need 100% of your resilience for what you’re not paying attention to.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you get lost while hiking, the best thing to do is to stop.

You don’t go wandering around, because the more you’re wandering, the harder it will be for anyone to find you. You’ll panic and end up miles away from anyone calling your name.

When artists say they need to “find their voice”, the best advice will be to stop.

Show up at the same time every morning. Clean your desk. Have a blank sheet of paper down, and clock in, with your coffee ready.

Because when your voice is ready, it will find you.

So make sure you’re easy to find.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Gravity works the exact same in a psychiatric ward as it does in the classroom.

But knowing how gravity works stops mattering depending on the location.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Whether it’s music, words, paint on a canvas, a business idea, a new way of dividing up the chores of the house, here is your job as a maker of things:

You must take your idea and grow it until you can share it without qualifying anything.

You may not preamble. You may not tell us you plan on filling out the 5th chapter or redoing the drums on the bridge. You may not ask us to imagine the details colored in or tweaked or changed.

Your job is to get the art to the point where you have nothing left to preamble—where you’ve done all you can and are now ready to let us do the rest. You’ve had your time. Now let what you made speak for itself.

Who knows, some of us may even listen.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If it’s going to happen anyway—

Despite the puffery, the long nights agonizing, the careful thought and reflection, and the occasional curled fist—

If no force of heaven or earth is going to stop them from being like that, or stop you from doing it—

Well, then perhaps it’s time to stop barricading a door that is going to come down one way or another?

Brush yourself off, take a deep breath, and the next time fate comes knocking, open the door, as if to an old friend?

Idealistic, yes. But maybe if we don’t yet have the serenity to accept the things out of our control, we could start by accepting that as a fact about ourselves also outside of our control.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There’s a lot of great reasons to not work out.

A laundry list of arguments against going to bed early, cooking dinner, or doing just about any of the ordinary, mundane things that make our lives better in an ordinary, mundane way.

There are plenty of things in life worth worrying about. Plenty of great reasons not to work out.

The key is not listening to any of them.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You could pay for betrayal in silver.

Accept reimbursement in the form of freedom, a raise, getting someone off your back.

But ultimately, in this life in which every human being is more alike you than they are un-alike, the cost of betrayal is always flesh.

There’s nothing you can do to another that you do not also do to yourself. Nothing you can do to yourself that you also do not do to another.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When life brings failure—a breakup, being fired, the next project flopping—our default setting is to interpret in light of the worst things we think about ourself.

We think: they broke up with me because I’m ugly, I was fired because I’m not smart enough, and then we look for evidence to support our conclusion.

Evidence that is almost certainly there for someone insecure enough to go looking for it.

We forget: reality is hard enough to comprehend on its own terms. It’s impossible to comprehend when we reduce it’s ability to be complicated to our most simple and basic fears.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The open road never closes shop.

Never turns off the neon sign and locks the front doors to make a half-assed attempt at cleaning the bathroom.

It never turns the lights low to check inventory, never bitches about who closed last night, never fails to update it’s location hours for holidays.

Because the dirty rotten secret of the open road is that it doesn’t go anywhere.

It’s just there, always ready, always open.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Preaching to the choir,

For all its ready faults,

For all the hypocrisy, the easy money, taking the road more traveled—

Well, it’s still preferable to singing to the choir.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Homer wrote in the Iliad of the wine-dark seas—a beautiful turn of phrase that likely comes from the fact that at the time, no one had named the color blue. In the Greek of antiquity, the one used to pass stories from father to son, the word simply didn’t exist.

Should we learn a lesson from this? How clearly the world looks the way we think it looks—because it was not just that the word blue did not exist: the color itself was undefined, with a whole nation staring at the deep of the ocean and seeing, thinking, and feeling “wine”.

Could there yet be a color our children will know, one for which they will have to invent a word, that they will see us lovingly backwater bums who didn’t know how far the spectrum of light travels?

Or does the color blue exist even when no one is seeing it—always there, always available, always perfectly ready in it’s perfect blueness?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If people get fired for having an attitude problem—

Passed over for the promotion, despite their clear superiority of skill, talent, and experience, because everyone hates working with them—

Can’t that force work for us in the positive?

Is it really as simple as enjoying the ride, and making sure everyone else around you enjoys it too?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

As a kid, we grow up hearing stories about how if we do the right thing, the right thing will come around. Liars always get caught, cheats always end up regretting it.

As an adult, we’re lucky if all we have to do is read stories of liars and cheats and all manner of crooks getting away with it—lucky if it isn’t us on the receiving end of the world’s maliciousness.

Here’s the real lesson history offers: wars aren’t any less bloody if you’re on the right side of them.

Which is a good argument for avoiding war, and a bad argument for not doing the right thing.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Most of our discipline goes towards our disciplines: practicing scales, drinking celery juice, hitting the same machines at the same gym the same days, cursing the moments we deviate in the slightest.

We tell ourselves: if only I could keep this going—stich together enough sameness to see the change. And that’s good. Right, even.

But don’t forget: it wasn’t discipline that lead you to your disciplines—you didn’t discover your craft or your hobby doing the same thing every day.

Which means, if we want to be disciplined, at least some of that discipline has to be to randomness.

To something new, something unexpected, something untried. Who knows? It might be the new thing you beat yourself up for not doing more often.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Whether it’s been a thousand days since you tried it last,

Or a thousand days since you missed a day,

Discipline always asks the same question:

Again?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Right here, right now, the device in your hand has a literal limitless number of answers, powered by search engines and chatbots. You have more access to the secrets of the universe than Merlin himself ever did—just waiting for you to ask.

It makes it easy to forget that asking questions isn’t just about getting answers. You might need to know how to fix a leaking faucet, and the internet might supply you an answer, but you may actually build a better friendship if you ask a friend—or your parents. Questions are an invitation, bringing someone into the four walls of your mind, asking them to stay a while, take off your shoes, can I get you anything to drink?

There’s a second benefit, one a little less cozy—and that is that asking a person your question can reveal that you don’t actually know which question to ask. The internet might give you the answer, but a loving expert can shake their head in quiet exasperation, which may be the actual answer you needed.

So ask away. But don’t forget the hidden power of asking a person instead.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

No matter the accolades, no matter the paycheck, no matter how proud it makes your parents, don’t become the GOAT at something you don’t want to spend the rest of your life doing.

After all, the reward of work is more work. You are what you spend your life doing.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Baby steps are so small you could in one sense barely call them steps at all—barely carrying the baby more than a few precious inches before toterring over.

The world is full of functional adults who are adult stepping about their business everywhere, lapping babies left and right.

And yet—baby steps are the only steps we bother filming. Because deep down, we know they’re the only steps that really matter.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Best practices represent the center of the bell curve: they’ll get you roughly what everyone else has.

But if what you want is something exceptional, you’ll find that best practices are just as a limiting as they are protecting: you get roughly the same result as everyone else.

If you want what everyone else has, do what everyone else does. If you want something more—well, then you’ll have to decide what kind of crazy is right for you.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Every great person, every great thing, every great album, restaurant, and book, every great bit of writing or great piece of bread or, for that matter, every great Gatsby—

They’re all critically flawed in at least one way.

And that still hasn’t stopped nations from loving them. It might even be why we love them.

If you can afford that kind of oversight for something made by a person you’ve never met, maybe you could extend it to the people in your life, too?

Maybe you could even extend it to yourself?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Given all we know about time—

Which, as of writing this, is basically that we haven’t figured it out in the 5,000 some years we’ve been paying attention—

We may look to uncertainty as a gift.

Where science often gives us strict answers that result in telephones and automobiles and ruining the planet, on the subject of time, it offers us nothing but the unknown.

Which means you can think about it in any way you like: short, long, here, later, past, present, future, dreams incarnate or forever in the realm of fantasy.

However you want to think about time, free from the constraints of that thought being correct or incorrect.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Taken in the grand scheme of things, you might consider your whole life has one never ending multi-course meal: each dinner not an isolated event, but one in a sequence.

In that sense, yesterday’s dry chicken is just a blip in an otherwise brilliant experience. You wouldn’t toss the whole meal over one poor course, would you?

That invitation, always there—to see it as just one episode of a larger season, a larger story, a larger collection of stories. Yours for the telling.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Only winners dig graves.

So if you’re digging a grave, either you’re winning, or you have better things to worry about.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The crotchety old geezer sharing the same tired political posts to a Facebook page no one watches, the old woman turned ugly not by age but by temperament demanding to see the manager, the conspiracy theorists and fundamentalists and all manner of true believers who refuse to set down a belief even for a second—

Well, it’s easy to see them and learn the wrong lesson, like the pharisee who prayed to thank god for not making him like “one of them”.

Because the truth of the matter is that all those backwards people were once just like us. And we have a sacred mission: to guard our hearts, because if we don’t, it one day will be us that out of touch with reality, that out of touch with the youth, putting hate into the world out of a sincere belief that it’s the right thing to do.

It can happen here. And if it can happen to other people, it can happen to us.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the way you treat other people, you assume they’re innocent until proven guilty.

In the way you treat yourself, you are guilty until proven innocent.

Which is not to say other people are always innocent and you are always guilty. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Instead, it’s to say both you and other people deserve a careful a thorough investigation when it comes to judgment.

And by assuming that most errors are user error—specifically the you part of user error—you avoid the worse mistake of trying to foist your problems off on other people.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

After all the self-help—the books, the sessions, the workouts, the home improvement of the body you call home—

After all the discipline, all the early mornings, all the late nights, all the hundred times you mustered up enough courage to say no, thank you to something you would once welcome—

After it all—well, the opportunity for growth grows as you grow. More growth just shows the places you need to grow even more.

So get after every part of it. But remember: your needs you will have with you always.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Blessed are the foolish,

For they are the only people on earth guaranteed to get what they deserve.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There are two ways to visit jail.

The first is to pull up a map. Look up protocol online and fill out the right form. Show up in time for visitation, put your keys and phone in a tray, walk through a metal detector, and stay within the painted lines.

The second is to commit a crime.

Both are easier in their own way.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Necessity is the motherfucker of invention.

Always staring down the double barrels of the shotgun digging under your rib cage—the pressing need of the moment an invitation delivered at gunpoint, an opportunity to do things differently, yes, but only because all other options are moot.

You might spend your days courting wants and dreams, wandering the pleasant gardens with your hopes and mild-mannered convictions, but necessity doesn’t come knocking: she kicks the door down without so much as a please or thank you.

And despite years of her coming calling, despite countless generations of innovation, we’ve yet to find the one that makes necessity any less necessary.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Cities don’t die when something breaks.

When the storm tears out the boards over windows, when trees fall through fences, when roofs succumb to the third round of hail.

Cities die when people stop rebuilding them.

People, too.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Past the obvious feelings—always hungry, horny, and sleepy, even if we don’t feel them now, we know they’ll be back soon.

Past the obvious thoughts—what we’re doing today, our plans for the weekend, our boss messaging us unexpectedly out of the blue—

Past the obvious dreams—an often unnamed dream house, partner, always flirting with the edges of our consciousness, pushing us into trouble like an older sibling daring the younger to try something dumb—

Past everything obvious and large, the mainstays of our life, weaving through them like a small creek, always diverted but never stopped, comes something else.

Something small, something daring in it’s complete non-obviousness.

What does it say?

Only you can answer.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If optimism is the belief the future will be a better place, then virtue is the embodiment of optimism.

Virtue says: I will conduct myself in a certain manner, regardless of how other people act or what they do to me.

In other words, the world my go to hell in a handbasket, but here and now—in the part of the world that I interact with—I will choose actions that make the world work the way I think the world should work.

Faith in a bright future, brought into reality by virtue.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

A couple thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius asked himself: is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?

And if you live your life constantly thinking: this time I will get it right. Constantly second guessing your past self, constantly embarrassed by who you used to be—then at what point will you stop second guessing yourself and ask if maybe the second guessing itself is the problem?

Maybe it’s time to start acting in such a way that you smile when you look in the rear view mirror?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

All truth is true at the same time.

And in the nasty habit of being the truth, it doesn’t seem too bothered by contradicting itself, doesn’t seem too bothered by not making sense, doesn’t seem bothered at all.

Because the truth doesn’t do anything. It simply is. Always there, just waiting for a toe to stub when we forget.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Here’s the thing about the moment: you can spend your entire life missing.

Like a GPS that’s always saying: now arriving. The present, ready for you, ready for us, begging us to tap in.

Maybe that’s why wisdom yells on corner of the street—not trying to get us to pay attention to her, just begging us to pay attention, period.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You could list all the benefits, bring all the skepticism, talk about how just sitting and doing nothing for 20 minutes a day solved your life, but at the end of the day, meditation is simple:

A love affair with the present moment.

This one, the one that’s happening right now, always there, just waiting for you to tap in.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the grand scheme of life—

The day in, day out grind of taking care of ourselves, and others, and on occasion, when we’re feeling up for it, trying things.

In the grand scheme of taking on new endeavors and old challenges, knowing the best laid plans of the smartest mice and hardest working men still have a tendency to fall apart—

How do we find ourselves so small, so shallow, so out of touch with reality that we allow someone else’s success to bother us?

Isn’t life strange and random enough without us contributing ill-will to it?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You’re not as good as some.

There’s kids on Instagram who play guitar better than you, write better jokes than you, run their business more efficiently, and in general, are more successful.

Maybe it’s the internet, maybe it’s always been this way, but we’re surrounded by the reminder: you’re not as good as some.

And you forget, you’re still better than most.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The problem with giving 100%—really putting your all into something—is that you spend every percentage that you have, without so much as a dollar of energy left. And with no margin, even a minor inconvenience becomes a truly unsolvable problem.

Not giving 100% feels like a copout. Until you realize that margin creates space—a little leftover 5% here, an extra 10% there, little pieces around the edge that let you handle a flat tire or a draining phone call—or be there for a friend.

You can’t take time to stop and smell the roses if you give 100% to something that isn’t smelling roses.

In the words of Socrates, an optimized life isn’t worth living. Or something like that.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Reminder to self:

You can gather a group of very intelligent, very attractive, very highly paid people in a room or video call and politely discuss a project, do a lot of agreeing and nodding, crack a couple of jokes, high five each other, and end up making something very shitty and very expensive.

It’s the hidden problem of getting a group of people together to get something done: that you can engage the normal social muscle of trying to make sure everyone has a good time.

Do not be a jerk, do not be an asshole, do not change something for the sake of changing it, do not speak to hear your own voice. But equally do not forget: if there’s a job to be done, your job is to do that job—even if it comes at the cost of the group feeling good.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The roads to heaven and hell are equally narrow.

And you’ll wear out a hundred pairs of boots walking either.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In a world where there’s no such thing as free lunch,

Have you ever thought about just giving away lunch for free?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

As far as the true believers are concerned, the world is presently going to hell in a handbasket—outraged, incensed, disbelieving at the proud boys, fighting back against “the gays”, sputtering at the mouth over critical race theory and woke idealogies.

And they’re right. The world is going to hell in a hand basket.

It’s just been going there for the last 5,000 years and shows no indication of arriving anytime soon.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Playing cards are designed in a specific order:

Two through ten, Jack, Queen, King, Ace, each in their own colors, arriving in the pack perfectly ordered, a couple of jokers thrown by the wayside.

You would think we would leave them like that—taking them out and admiring them, perfect in their unison. Instead we do violence: mashing them against one another, bending and twisting and riffling and cutting until they are all out of sorts.

Because it’s only when playing cards are out of sorts that they are useful, offering us something we need but cannot provide ourselves: randomness.

Perfect in order, yes, but useful in disorder.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re playing a game you don’t want to keep playing—

Be that corporate America, codependence, or just being the one who does the cooking—

Don’t win.

Because the only reward for winning a game is to keep playing it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Living life through a straw is very manageable.

Perfectly even slices of experience, sucked out from whichever layer you prefer.

Avoiding all the troubles and mishaps of the cup sloshing over, no risk of spilling any life on your shirt.

Perfect in it’s representation, perfect in it’s safety, perfect and perfectly wrong.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you play to the level of competition—not choosing your energy but matching lethargy with lethargy, turning it up to 11 when you get a great opponent—

Make sure and choose good competition.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Fewer obligations:

Saying yes less often, just listening to other people’s projects with a smile instead of offering to help, turning down the small voice inside you that thinks, “we could get a slice of this”, saying you’ve regrettably got to say no this time—and meaning it.

More commitment:

To the obligations you’ve already made, leaving enough space to go the extra mile, giving yourself enough time for a first and second draft, and a nap in between them, knowing that even your genius benefits from a little more time, a little more space, a little more love, a little more—well, everything, the everything you have from fewer obligations and more commitment.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Enough is enough.

The words of someone who isn’t putting up with it anymore.

But also a great reminder:

Friendship, money, success, opportunity, hours in a day, sex, promotions, calendar events—

Do you have enough? And if so, why are you still looking for more?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The thing about the how and the when and the where—the way they rolled their eyes when they said it, your boss playing Chief Bull Officer at the China factory, your partner bringing up a CVS-sized receipt of your shortcomings the first day of vacation—

Well, it’s easy to get lost in the how and the when and the where. Because we’re creatures who have Hows and Whens and Wheres.

But if you remember that truth is a precious thing, often rare to find, you might learn to start looking past the almighty circumstances, the how and the when and the where, and ask: is this a what that I need?

Are you resilient enough to look past bad circumstance to take on a good thing?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

God bless the deadlines—

The aching, fraying fractures of minutes counting down to an imaginary doomsday—

Where the skies will remain whole, the angel will not speak, and not a single trumpet will sound, but nevertheless, we shake in terror, checking over our shoulder, looking and seeing and speaking oh so quietly—please, can it wait? we’ve only got—how long now?

Because maybe the only thing worse than fearing the end of the world is the world actually ending.

Which, to be honest, way may dramatically prefer, because if the world ended, we wouldn’t have to meet our deadlines.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

With the benefit of 10 years of effort, 10 years of grind, 10 years of trying everything you can, you could probably go back in time and say, dear self today, here’s the 5 things that are actually important.

Unfortunately, that wisdom is only gained by doing all of the everythings to find out which of the things are the important things.

This leads us to two conclusions:

First, you’ve got to do your 10 years.

Second, you might want to look around and ask: who could benefit from my last 10 years experience?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You can fool the fans. Spin whatever story you want, rags to riches or riches to even more riches, telling them that they just wouldn’t understand, as outsiders, what it’s really like.

You can fool the news. Get the PR right, get your story out first, making sure they understand that people who don’t get it just don’t get art or writing or business in general.

You can fool your friends and family. Play for their support, because you worked awfully hard to be here.

But back in the locker room, surrounded by peers—those who know you—well, they know.

They know when you’re putting in the effort despite there being no result, and they sure as hell know when you’re bluffing. Because they have the same cards.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The question of the future isn’t when it’s going to be here. It’s already here. The question of the future is where?

Which garage startup is going to be the one to flip the paradigm? Which kid in which basement is going to record which song that brings you back to tears over and over and over again? Which of the countless ideas flying around the wee hours of the morning finds the person who can bring it into reality—not from the future, but into the present.

Maybe you?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You wouldn’t tell John Mayer how to play the guitar.

Wouldn’t instruct Picasso on how to hold a paint brush.

You likely would refrain from giving Jesus advice on the whole water-walking business.

There’s an impulse in your brain that sees a break in the pattern: someone doing something a way that you haven’t seen before. We learn early on to use that impulse to try to correct the other person—maybe because it helps them, but probably because it makes us feel good.

Instead, think: that might be the next John Mayer of whatever they’re doing, so maybe before I make a suggestion, I should start by paying attention.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Here’s the thing about snake oil:

It’s awfully hard to find a good one if what you actually need is to oil a snake.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When you’re young, raging against the system is a way to express distaste with the state of the world.

When you’re old, it can be the same thing—but it can also be a way to protect your place in that same broken system.

If you really believe you’ve earned your place here, why are you so afraid to earn it again with new friends?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

To tolerate something is not to endorse it.

Does not imply signing on the dotted line or buying into anything.

In fact, there’s a whole category of things in life we tolerate: it’s perfect word we use to describe the DMV, waiting in traffic, and managers with the bedside manner of a philistine. We bitch and moan and shake our fist at the skies but, despite all the rage, we remain, tolerating things we dislike but can’t or won’t change.

An attitude always available for us to extend to plenty of other things we didn’t make, don’t like, but can’t or won’t change.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There’s an art to packing what you need—folding and fitting and twisting and trimming until it all fits.

But the move of the expert is to leave a little extra space. To travel with the intention of finding something to fill that space—or at least to set out at the start of a trip with room to take on something unexpected.

Sometimes optimism looks like leaving a little part of something undone.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If, in the words of the psalmist, “your cup runneth over”—an abundance of things so great you cannot contain all of them—well, you have two choices.

You could get a bigger cup to make sure you never waste a drop, or you could invite your friends to place their cups below yours.

In one instance, you answer generosity with stinginess, because if you’re pouring wine, you certainly already know that the cup is full.

In the other, you answer generosity with generosity: who else could benefit?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the real world—one in which the problem you’re facing also lives in a space where you have to do things like do laundry and pay bills—you may find it’s dramatically easier to think inside of a different box than to think outside of boxes entirely.

Ask not what you would do without restrictions, but what you would do if the restrictions were different.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Here’s the real reason the pen is mightier than the sword:

Because people carry pepper spray, tasers, glock 19s, throwing stars, pocket sand, and machine guns on the outside chance that some other human is going to go out of their way to make the universe a worse place for you.

But if the pen is mightier than the sword, you might stash a journal right there next to your emergency concealed carry katana—because while there is a chance someone tries to have it out with you, there’s an even greater chance a great idea will strike. A melody, some words, a story premise, just waiting in the dark alleyway around the corner, ready to jump you and force you to fight for your fucking life.

In which case, you might be glad to have a pen.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You might keep the faith the same way you keep a whole lot of things: workout clothes stashed in a corner, always a little more beat up, or the guitar you keep telling yourself you’ll learn, or the knife set that never quite manifested a cooking phase.

You don’t get rid of the faith because you don’t need it right now—you get rid of it when you have something better to replace it with.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When you say you’ll help a friend move, you’re not signing up to move their couch.

You’re not signing up to move boxes, totes, or stuff couch cushions into the backseat of your car.

You are, in reality, making the oldest and rarest commitment of friendship. You are signing up to be frustrated.

You are saying: I know that some part of this will not go well, and I am ready and willing to endure your stupidity and lack of foresight on a complicated project. Yet for better or for worse, I care about you enough to throw my lot in the back of your uhaul.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If the wounds of a friend are faithful, should we not look to do a little more wounding?

A little less polite conversation, a little more truth telling, a little less worried about getting all the details right, a little more ready to cast ourselves onto our friendships with the faith of a climber trusting their lead line—

Loving, but not always in a careful way.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In a world full of debates—political, social, religious—it’s easy to get sucked in.

Easy to spend your time carefully choosing sides, or carefully defending the side you chose. And with good reason: there are plenty of places where ethics demand side-taking.

But then there’s places it does not. Things no one argues about, things no one debates.

In the words of Marcus Aurelius, waste no more time arguing what a good man is, be one.

Or, if you like, in the words of the Apostle Paul: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control—against such thing there are no laws.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Taken from the perspective of your whole life,

With the benefit of knowing a range of people: the famous by nature of the books they write, the infamous by the books written about them, and the ordinary older people who make up friends, our family, our neighbors—

You might find the very worst things in life are the ones you think you get away with.

So in that regard, we might say this, and mean it as a blessing:

May your sins catch up to you quickly.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

One benefit of having deadlines is that you actually get your work done.

The second benefit is that you might find that, facing an actual deadline for when something has to be done, you’ll gladly make time for all the lesser things you don’t really want to do but should do.

The laundry, working out, meal prepping, vacuuming—well, they’re not enjoyable, but they’re certainly better than having to get to work.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Turn the other cheek.

Just don’t turn the other other one, after all, then you’ll be out of cheeks.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Given the choice between the devil you know and the devil you don’t know, you might want to start shaking hands.

Asking questions. Where he’s from, his dog’s name, what he’s been streaming lately. How he got into the whole devil business in the first place.

Because it just might transform the choice from the devil you know to the devil you know better.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

That’s all it takes.

Step 1: commit to the process

Step 2: survive the process

Step 3: decide if you want to do it all again.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re going to climb the ladder—

The corporate ladder, the musician ladder, hell, even the fish ladder—

You should go for the top. Climb up as far as your arms, legs, and fear of heights allows.

But along the way, don’t forget to ask: how can I make the ladder better?

Is there opportunity to add rungs not just to the top, but to the bottom along the way—or, with enough power permitting, transforming the corporate ladder into some corporate stairs, a corporate escalator even?

Reaching just as high or higher, just easier for everyone along the way.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Here a few reasons to make high quality things:

High quality things require a high level of effort, which signals to the people making them that you’re really invested.

High quality work pushes the limits of your own capability. It demands more of your skill.

High quality work protects you from imposter syndrome. People might hate it, but you’ll forever know how much time, energy, and money it took.

High quality work almost always includes some kind of story of how the work was made.

High quality work earns the respect of your peers who know how hard it is, even if they don’t personally like it

High quality work is usually what gets people interested in a new skill or medium. You’re showing up for the culture.

High quality work is a good excuse to own and use high quality tools.

What else?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Here are reasons to make something low quality:

Low quality work can be made quickly, which means you can make a lot of it. Higher volume of low quality things increases your chances of accidentally making something high quality.

Low quality work usually only has room for one thing—one idea, one bit, one joke. It’s easy to figure out what is working about something low quality.

Low quality work doesn’t require very much effort. You can probably find time for one low quality thing in the middle of the day

Low quality work is still work. You still did something.

Low quality work doesn’t require a ton of skill, which means you can make something low quality even if it’s a skill you’re really new to.

What else?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Needing to understand something is a personal need.

It might be something practical, a new skill, new trend, a new tool or a new book, something to help you out in your work.

It may be something personal, a difficult situation, complicated relationship, a hard circumstance or strange happenstance you need to wrap your brain around.

Then there’s needing someone else to understand something—saying, “well what you need to understand is…”

When the reality is, needing someone else to understand something is just as much of a personal need as needing to understand it yourself.

You may find one to be a whole lot easier to do than the other.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There’s only so many ways to slice 12 notes, playing hopscotch up and down the piano in various patterns, twisting your fingers over like some kind of clumsy octopus, your intention always just beyond reach.

Playing your scales is boring. Doesn’t impress anyone who doesn’t know themselves. The worst part is, playing your scales every now and then is no better than never playing them at all. You’ve got to stick to it regularly to see any kind of return on investment.

It may very well be that someone will invent something better than scales. Find a new thing to replace the small, boring, repetitive path to excellence.

But until we find that thing, well, it’s just you and your scales.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

We often tell ourselves: well, everyone is doing it. Everyone is bending the rules just a little.

And rules are often meant to be bent a little. Or broken outright. But the justification can’t be as simple as everyone else is doing it.

In fact, “everyone is doing it” is the right argument, but it’s upside down. Somehow flipped internally. Here’s the question we have to ask to get it right:

If everyone behaved this way, would the world be a better place?

And if the answer is no—which it often is—how could we bring ourselves to act that way?

How could we develop the moral strength to stop?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

“It’s all going to be ok” is a different statement than “it’s all going to be ok right now.”

In fact, most people get themselves in the worst trouble of their lives not out of a desire for things to go well, but from the need for those things to go well on a specific timeline.

It’s reasonable to say that everything is going to be ok.

It’s just probably going to be very not ok for a while first.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Ideas don’t count.

Calculators do, and computers do, and accountants apparently do it a lot, though knowing that for certain would require talking to an accountant.

Kids learn to count and then promptly go very willy-nilly with it all, trying to compete with each other to see who can do it the most: a million plus one? No! A million plus a million!

But ideas—even the best ideas—even YOUR ideas—don’t count.

They don’t know how. Because they’re just ideas, getting dunked on in the counting department by people who were very recently literal babies.

The idea itself doesn’t count. Unless you make it count, by dragging it from the realm of ideas into this one.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Heaven doesn’t have a TSA.

Doesn’t have long roped-off walkways where you have to take off your shoes, standing where thousands of strangers have recently rubbed their socks, or in some cases, their bare feet.

Doesn’t have a lady in a blue button down shirt telling you to take your laptop out of your bag, or leave your laptop in your bag, or possibly put it in a bin? And definitely don’t mess it up.

Which is not to say you can take your laptop to heaven. Or your shoes. Or your backpack or your cell phone or any of the pictures of your kids you keep in your wallet for when you’re tired of staring at your cell phone.

Wherever you go, all the stuff has to stay here.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In real life, we imagine the answer to the problem as the important piece, separate from whatever details went into it.

After all, the real reason none of us want to know how the sausage is made isn’t because it’s gross, it’s because it’s exhausting. Our brains are already full to overflowing of things we need to know, and frankly, making sausage doesn’t make the cut.

But in those few domains where we are professionals, we want the recipe. We want behind the scenes. We want to see any and every little blip and detail that goes into making great work.

So please, on behalf of us all, show you work.

Just don’t expect everyone to be interested in it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The best compliment you can give to someone is to be like them. To imitate them in some way, big or small.

The best compliment you can give to yourself is to keep living the way that you live. Keep drawing on those best features of yourself. Keep affirming their existence, not just as necessary, but as something that you like.

Can you feel it? That low, leathered smile, radiating heat from deep within, that part of you looking at the other part of you and saying, “well done.”

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Thank you for your service, but we already have reality keeping and remaining very much real.

We don’t need your help.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you know what is good, what is right, maybe not in a total across the board sense, but in a specific sense, the way that people should be living their lives in this era—

If you know it, then why is it so hard to explain? Why is it so easy to poke holes in? Why is it so quickly debated and argued? And why is it so hard to walk away from those arguments with anything resembling certainty?

You could take this as either an observation of your particular shortcoming or an observation about the difficulty of naming what is good.

But at its depth, maybe some things in life can cannot be explained and can only be done—can only be lived?

In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “waste no more time arguing what a good man is, be one.”

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You’re going to need a bigger boat. The biggest one of all. A lot of TNT, a crew, and for some inexplicable reason, rope—we don’t really know what the rope is for, but it feels very professional, like we know what this business is about.

You’re going to need a plan. Consult with scientists in an underground government bunker who can point at a 3D rendering of the sky, drawing up weaknesses and showing a risky strategy that might just work with a little luck.

You’re going to need a steel will. Iron insides. The kind of impossible bravery-in-the-face-of-fire that cements mortal men in the pages of the history books, sparking debates of the greatests-of-all-time.

Or you could avoid all that work, because the sky isn’t something you can really fight in any meaningful sense, and you’re going to lose anyway.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s starting to run a little ragged around the edges—not just grimy, mind you, but fraying, slowly transforming from a permanent object into tiny pieces of string.

Yes, it was once shiny and new, wrapped around your shoulders, not only a source of pride but warm too, comforting.

Now you’ve outgrown that old blanket, but its still your favorite. It’s not as sightly, not even as warm, but the very idea of going anywhere without it fills you with a slight sense of terror.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all held onto something for longer than we should, because we’re human and we find meaning where we have to.

But maybe it’s time your emotional support belief retired to a new life? As part of quilt, or framed lovingly on the wall, and called, without the slightest judgment, “something you used to think but no longer do.”

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You’re not what you want.

All the little tiny fancy expensive things that fill the ever unfolding hallways of your dreams.

You’re not what you think.

The thoughts feeding back through your head on a never ending loop, like two people joined a meeting in the same room with their mics on.

You are not what you feel, what you know, or what you did. The detritus of the present and the past projecting themselves into the future.

You are, in reality, what you tolerate.

What you put up with.

What you allow to take hold of your life, running you ragged. Or what you allow to grow, like a great tree spreading its leaves above your head.

For good, for ill. Not what you want. What you put up with.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Second guess every assumption, including this one.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Every moment, every story, every plotline of every character—

Every side of every person, every mountain between here and Everst, every biome, biosphere, biological relation—

Every breath you take, every move you make, every guitar riff from every song by every band named for every branch of the emergency services—

Every piece of yourself, even—

You don’t have to love it all. You just have to love more of it than you don’t.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If we tell ourselves we’re willing to be brave for our dreams—fix our pens like fucking bayonets and write our way uphill under fire—

If we tell ourselves we’re willing to experience great loss for our dreams—selling each and every last one of our precious, cherished, sacred objects to bet the farm—

If we tell ourselves we’re willing to undergo trials for our dreams—stepping into the fire of our own free will for no reason other than finding out what remains on the other side—

Then shouldn’t we be willing to risk people thinking we’re a little silly?

A little daft, a little out of touch, a little dated, not up to date with the trends or the stratagems?

Is that so great a cost that we’re not willing to pay it?

Ready to lay down our lives, but not our egos?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Dear Muse, mother of lights,

Thank you for not giving us success before now. We’d have thought we had the golden touch and probably ended up in the tabloids for all the wrong reasons.

Thank you for withholding the bigger royalty checks. We’d have gotten too comfortable too quickly and wouldn’t have had given the ordinary things of life enough focus.

Thank you for letting us play at starving artist without actually having to starve. Even when we had to cut corners, we didn’t have to cut all of them.

And even though we’d like all those things now—well, thank you the gift of patience, for always leaving meat on the bone for our future selves.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Glory be to God for hotel lobby coffee—fumbling, cursing as a comically out of shape lid refuses to snap onto the styrofoam cup.

For the last cheese stick, buried in the back of a fridge, forgotten for a week but now found, home, in the hand of someone almost absurdly delighted .

For a little cash crumpled up, stacking dimes on top of quarters, counting, recounting, the anguish turned to joy at the foot of the parking meter that won’t take a card.

For water, clear and cool and forgotten until sleep had you spitting cotton, your mouth doing its best impression of the Sahara desert until the tsunami came.

For big things to be grateful for, and little things too. All the things we overlook until you bring them into their moment, shining light on otherwise ordinary things, places, objects, now supercharged with emotion and gratitude.

Not just things, but people, too, all in their time.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Dear reader,

We’re sorry. We really are.

What constitutes our dreams in the grand scheme of things becomes a regretful particular—visions of becoming a writer unfortunately resulting in having to actually write.

We may complain about these dreams, about the agony of writer’s block, the calluses on our fingers from playing scales, the hundreds of drafts of pitch decks. But reader, at the end of the night, we’re nowhere to be seen, leaving you to pick up the tab.

Because we can write whatever shit we can drag out of our heart, but you’re the one who has to read it.

For that, we say first, we’re sorry. And second, thank you.

We hope to someday return the favor.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the grand scheme of things, we prefer it when people shoot us straight. No beating around the bush, but just telling it as it is.

In the grander scheme of things, we’d probably prefer to not be shot at all.

Does the truth have to kick down the door armed?

Surely it must at times, but could it try knocking first?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

“How do you feel about it” is a great question, but one we almost always ask when we really mean “what do you feel about it?”

But given the choice between who, what, when, where, and why you feel about something, how is by far the most interesting question.

Because truthfully, we don’t know how feel. We don’t know the mechanisms that rule it all, the illogical-but-logical, predictably-unpredictable nature of the feeling mechanism within each of us.

We just know that we do feel, that we don’t get to choose what we feel, and that despite the danger of the game of feeling, it’s a far worse bargain to ignore our feelings.

So how do we feel?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The internet is forever—whatever you post is signed, shipped, and sealed into the court of public opinion, with no mechanism to claw it back into the form of a draft.

But for that exact same reason the internet is overwhelming. Full of other people also posting stuff, also shipping their own thoughts and ideas and work into the ether. The insane majority of which we couldn’t pay attention to even if we wanted to.

But there’s another sense in which the internet is forever—the sense in which it’s still here when your work flops. Still here when your idea fails. Still growing and changing.

Still ready for you to give it another go.

So yes, the internet is forever, but usually only when your famous, and even then only when you screw up.

For the rest of us, there’s nothing stopping us from deleting it and trying again.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

We don’t fight our way through a two hour traffic jam to discover it was caused by someone getting a promotion.

Don’t sit and wait because everyone a mile up is gawking at a marriage, or a new child, or an A on an algebra test.

We don’t fight the urge to stare at a new deadlift PR. Don’t get caught up in the scenery of a recipe perfected.

Does it say something about humanity that we only cause pileups when there’s a pileup? That we make bad situations worse because we’re so invested in gawking at the bad situation?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Mistakes were made—the almighty line of every press release, the perfectly crafted set of syllables to let you know someone screwed up without indicating that it was actually anyone’s fault.

We’re all so wired to avoid making mistakes that we’ve built entire industries around making it look like you never made one.

Maybe the more we’re ready to shrug our shoulders, say my bad, and move on, the less likely we are to double down?

Pushing our chips all in instead of just admitting we misplayed our cards?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you have the strength to put yourself in the game—to keep your money firmly planted where your mouth is, demonstrating the toughness and ingenuity you hope to find in the people around you—

Then you should also have the strength to pull yourself out of the game. To hand yourself the water bottle, slap your own butt, and say: we need you in the 4th quarter. Which means we need you to sit this one out.

Both require courage. Both require strength. One requires the willingness to endure scrutiny.

Are you willing to do the right thing—even at the cost of other people’s negative opinions?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The most important thing you write may be a best seller.

It may be an epic 2700 page history or a collection of poems.

It may be prosy and wild, channeling deep emotion or simple, to the point, truthful in a blue-collar way.

It could be read by millions. It could be a blog post read by three people. It could be an email to a loved one or an email to a stranger or a single line of encouragement written for no one’s eyes but yours.

Whether it’s writing, art, work, any creative act—none of us know which is going to be the most important one.

So we’ve got to write them all. Write them all as if they all might be the most important thing.

Because they actually might.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Buy a lunch pail. Even if you only walk it the 15 feet from your fridge to your kitchen table.

Wear a hard hat. Find work boots and gloves. Lace them on, even if they’re your indoor pair.

Think gruff thoughts to yourself. Squint your eyes and spit out of the corner of your mouth, cussing the boss who keeps you at work, day in, day out.

And when the whistle finally blows and everyone else calls it quits, stretch your shoulders, adjust your neck, pull off the gloves, and stop thinking about work.

We might not work at a factory, but if we get the luxury of choosing how we think about our art, let’s think of ourselves as blue collar.

Professional, skilled, tough, helpful, diligent, and more than anything else, not overly identifying with our jobs.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You are an enigma to the rest of us, and nothing can change that.

All the workshops in the world, ten years of psychoanalysis, they’d help us, sure—but they’d only begin to scratch the surface of the wonderful, contradictory depths of you.

Hell, we have a hard enough time trying to map our own internal unknowns, all the things, kind and cold, that poke their unexpected heads into the attics of our brains, dropping by without so much a a hello.

It’s why your work cannot simply be your work. If you want to have any hope of navigating a world of people you don’t understand, you must begin by clearing out the garage of your own head—doing the complicated work of uncomplicating yourself.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

All the videos on the internet,

All the cutest kittens in impossible situations, the adopted dogs in hand-knit sweaters, the parakeets who know all the words to All Star (and sing kind of in tune)—

All the impossibly talented kids, the 4 year olds who can outdrum Ringo, the teenagers breaking every speed limit known to the guitar—

All the professionally attractive people, the full-time beauty DIYers, the people who get paid simply for the honor of being arousing—

All the tutorials, the lessons, the impossible wealth of knowledge someone a thousand years ago would have given an actual mountain of gold for—

They’ll all be here tomorrow. And the tomorrow after that.

Just as deep, just as interesting, just as impossible to get to the bottom of.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the game of chess both players start with the same pieces. They start with them in the same position, with the same number of open squares on each side of the board. An almost perfectly level field.

Life offers us no such luxury. Hits us with the full force of randomness, can often operate like a game no one would play, much less buy, where the winners keep on winning and the losers don’t even stand a chance.

The winners often have an interest in keeping it this way. Because in the short term, what could be more important than winning?

Life only offers an even playing field in two places:

First, in games. And second, where we level it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you could go back in time and give advice to yourself at sixteen, it should probably be something like this:

Dear self,

You’re sixteen (though you probably already knew that).

Don’t trust any adult who thinks they’re better at being sixteen than you.

They’re not. You’ve got this.

Love,

You.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Given an unlimited amount of time, everything that is possible will eventually happen.

That might sound like bad philosophical ramblings, because that’s almost exactly what it is: a bad ramble with a great punchline.

We spend most of our lives trying to stop the things that are possible from happening. For individual lives, that’s a great idea: you don’t have to beat cancer, depression, or bad breath forever, you’ve just got to give it the run around for the next 60 years or so.

The same thing is true for our systems. Democracy, banking, the plumbing in your house, more fragile than anyone wants to let on.

All bound to fail eventually. Just not on our watch.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When it comes to your pursuit, your art, your calling:

Flexibility in means. The way of doing thing changes over time, and despite the clamoring of fundamentalists, almost always for the better. If you want to do something great you’ve got to do it for the long term, and doing it for the long term means you’ll have to change along the way.

Flexibility in goals. You may have set out to do one thing, but you’re smarter than you were then. Trust your current self to steward the dreams of your past.

Flexibility in timeline. Almost always to be much more difficult, tedious, and expensive than you realized.

Flexibility in everything—everything except the damn thing itself.

Because no matter the change in timeline, means, or even goal, you’ll still refuse to stop.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If none of us own this land—

(and who could own her? Still strong, still fierce, still sending her middle finger hurtling through the window at gusts of 70 mph, tossing her hair back and taking your house with it, sweeping the front porch of towns and roads when she’s angry?)

Then all of us our strangers, foreigners in the land. The beneficiaries of a place that does not belong to us.

In that regard, we owe each other a debt. The kind that in the old days came with a threat, where Zeus himself would come knocking if we didn’t play according to the rules.

We are here as guests. We are far from whatever our home is. And we must think of our fellow journeyers as our responsibility. Because how can one foreigner turn to the other and say they’re not welcome here?

We’ve got to take care of this place we live, and we must take care of each other eachother.

Welcome to America.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Rooting for the underdog isn’t just a time-honored American tradition: it’s emotionally intelligent.

When you root for the obvious winner, you gain very little when you win. Of course you were right, you went for the obvious choice.

But when David slays Goliath, you find yourself with a massive negative event, one ten times worse than a win was better.

Root for the underdog and—well, at least you did a noble thing when they lose.

But when the underdog wins, we get to celebrate not just victory, but impossible victory, steeling within ourselves the knowledge, once again, that no matter the odds, everything is possible.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

John F. Kennedy is quoted as saying, “the Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.”

If you look up the actual phrase, it’s quite a few more than two brush strokes. But the point is probably well taken: we spend our lives fighting the status quo. It’s not a glass house, it’s clear crystal ice, and we spend our years smacking our foreheads against the ceiling, trying to break through, to build a better system, to make the world a better place, for ourselves and for everyone else.

We call it a crisis because it threatens our way of doing things. Has the opportunity to take us down and put us under, ruining this utopia we’ve made.

But within that change is opportunity: a brief moment when the ice is broken—painfully, yes, with shards, threatening the structural integrity of the house—but with the opportunity to reshape how it freezes this time, adding on a new room, a new layer, replace a wall with a window and a window with a door.

Crisis must be met with response. But part of that response can mean building it better.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You’re not alone.

This is great news for your mental health but bad news for your career. You are very good at somethings, but there are other people who are also very good at some of those same things, and frankly, some people who are probably better.

This creates an interesting scenario:

Either one, you have a whole host of witnesses around you, people who have gone before, mapped the realm, forged a path, a path not well worn but not hard to find, showing you the way to do something that was once impossible.

Or, if no one has gone before—well then, there’s a host of witnesses behind you, looking to you for a way forward in a world with the bar set impossibly low.

So either do it for those who have gone before, or do it for the people who will follow after.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There’s a lot of ways to skin a cat—

The best one is to choose a less violent, less antiquated metaphor.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The saying goes, do not let your right hand know what your left is doing.

But hands don’t really know things. They do things, sure. Great things. Big things. Small things and loving things and angry things and normal things. They hit keyboards and carry grocery bags and gesticulate wildly as you tell a story about swim lessons in the 6th grade.

Hands built the building you’re sitting in. Hands wrote the email you’re reading. Hands went to space and explored the moon and fought in Normandy and Vietnam.

But even the best hands of the brightest people still don’t know anything. Because they’re hands. Hands that do. And you have a brain, a brain that knows.

So maybe the question isn’t really about knowing, it’s about doing:

What should your right hand do? What should your left? To what will you turn your knowing brain?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

No matter what you do, the worst possible mistake you can make is the next one.

Deep breath in, deep breath out, what’s the move?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The reward of being smarter than the crowd is, well, feeling smarter than the crowd.

And then probably feeling pretty lonely.

Can you find a way to put yourself up without having to put a whole lot of other people down?

Not being smarter than the crowd, but making the crowd smarter?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Much has been made about the grand design of the universe, as beautiful in its intricate details as in its grand vistas.

But who in their right mind could go through their life, meeting the other people with whom they share the globe and say: this is finished work?

Yes, every now and then we meet someone who seems to have found the way to full, complete being—but the rest of us, rough edges and all, prototypes of something—of what?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Don’t leave fish for more fish.

Good advice if you’re going fishing.

Even better advice if you’re married to a fish.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you have a job, or a business, or an opportunity, sit down and make a list of everything you need to do to not get fired.

Not a list of everything you could do, not the stuff you know would annoy people (but they’d put up with it), but a list of the stuff that you know will get you shown the door or have you shutting down shop.

You have two jobs:

Job number one is to not get fired. To keep the lights on. To do the minimum effort of things that will let you keep playing the game.

Job number two is to take all the leftover resources you have and invest them into the highest return.

You do the first job so that you don’t lose the game. So that you don’t get benched. So that you get to keep playing.

You do the second job to win the game.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You pay the bill on your phone, or at least make sure someone else does. It would be worthless to you without it.

You pay for your car. Maybe monthly, maybe just with every oil change, every sparkplug swapped, every time you fill it up with gasoline.

You pay your rent, or your mortgage, and understand how dire the consequences would be if you did not.

So how do we convince ourselves we don’t have to pay our keep on the planet?

Simply because it never sends us letters in the mail letting us know we’re overdue?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s ok to be young. To sit down at the table for the first time. To live completely free of knowledge of the past.

It’s ok to be dumb. To be a little naive. All of humanity starts that way, and we haven’t figured out a better system yet.

It’s ok to be young and dumb. There’s a lot of firsts. A lot of newness. A lot you don’t know.

It’s not ok to be young and dumb and mean.

In fact, it’s not ok to be mean period. But meanness compounded by youngness and dumbness? Who could endure such a thing?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Raise your hand and repeat:

“I do not have the right to get things right the first time I try them.

I do not have the right to expect myself to get things right the first time that I try them.

Life requires that I try new things, but nowhere does it require that I try them all at once, or come close to trying them correctly the first time around.”

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

To-do lists are marching orders from your past self, written for the benefit of your future self.

This should spark at least two observations.

First, that you should listen to your past self. After all, they’re you without the luxury of a few more hours experience.

Second, that you should be kind to your future self in two ways. Way one, by doing the things that your past self recommended, and way two, but not giving your future self too many things to do in the form of a to-do list.

After all, your present self deserves some time too.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Given the impossibility of taking on hell—

Both because we haven’t found it in the literal sense and because it’s an impossible thing to take on in a metaphorical sense—

You could actually make a decent argument that the squirt gun is the perfect choice of weapon.

Because if all strategies, tactics, and techniques are equally hopeless, you may as well choose one that makes for the most interesting story.

If you can’t optimize for victory, you could at least optimize for fun.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

One of life’s lessons comes from trail mix—once known affectionately as GORP, good old raisins and peanuts, named so by a generation that had yet to discover M&Ms.

The lesson goes something like this: the more you pluck the good parts out of the trail mix, the less enjoyable the mix is, and frankly, the more likely you are to make enemies with anyone unfortunate enough to be sharing a snack with you.

The more you pick out the good parts, the more intense the bad parts become, until you’ve gotten to the point where you don’t even want to consider eating it any more.

On the other hand, take it by the handful, and you’ll find the whole thing isn’t just tolerable, it’s enjoyable.

It’s a lot easier to stomach life’s raisins if you don’t leave them until there’s no chocolate left.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Hitting paydirt sounds like a great idea, until you think about having to actually hit dirt, and then consider how much ordinary, not-at-all-pay dirt you’ll have to hit just to get to the good dirt.

Given the choice, wouldn’t we want to pursue payideas, or paybooks, or paycalls? And just cut dirt out of the whole equation?

Because if you enjoy the thing you’ve got to take on every day, the pay part of it is just a bonus.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The words of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor:

“To the world, Your harmony is mine. Whatever time you choose is the right time. Not late, not early.”

Harmony. In tune with something else—not singing the main line, but finding a melody that is as different as it is complimentary.

Whatever time you choose—Trust. Humility. Deference to nature not only on the subject of power, but of wisdom. Even if we could shift nature in one direction for one second, we wouldn’t.

The right time. In agreement. Awaiting something we both want. Harmonizing along the way.

Beautiful words for an emperor to extend towards the world—

Words we could extend towards the world, too.

Maybe even words we could extend to each other?

Harmony not only with what is, but with when it is, too.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone.

Tucked away in their critical bed, laying next to their critical spouse, dreaming critical dreams of waking up and scrambling critical eggs.

Tomorrow morning, if they’re good at their job, the critic will be clearing their head. Trying to reset the palate. Thinking carefully on what they’ve said the last 24 hours, then letting it go. If they’re bad, well, they’ll just be gearing up to wreck some other poor soul’s day.

Either way, come tomorrow morning, the critic won’t be here anymore.

But you will be. Packing your lunch, putting on your workboots, and heading to another day of work.

So how much weight will you give to the words of the critic? Because they’re not the ones who have to go to work tomorrow—you are.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you agree it’s time—

Time to open things back up to possibility, to admit they didn’t shake out the way you wanted them to, to finally and for once clear the air—

Well, what is it exactly that you’ll do to make the air more clear?

Will you spray it down with windex? Try to wipe the spots away? Or kindly ask the air to step into your washing machine for a quick run through the spin cycle? Would you run around the neighborhood, vacuum cleaner in hand, gesticulating wildly, spinning around and around, scaring the neighbors for the 3rd time this week as you attempt to mightily and permanently clear the air?

Clearing the air is a great thing—a great thing that is usually done by waiting. Because the air seems very capable of clearing itself.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

This is a simple piece of advice:

Don’t ask the people to help you with something because it’s an easy task or because you’ll do something else for them in exchange, or because there’s a reason you deserve the help.

Just ask them to help you.

Because if the task they were helping with was easy, you could probably do it yourself. If you deserved the help, you’d already have it. And if they needed your help in exchange, well, they’d probably ask.

And when they do help you, remember: it’s not because it was easy, or because of what they got, or to get something. It’s because they love you.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The internal enemy—the mean one, the one you’ve been fighting all your life—well, they’re plenty strong.

Have a whole dictionary of words and string them together in the most impossibly negative sentences, worming their way into your subconscious and self talk.

Have a nasty bag of dirty tricks, punching down at precisely the right moment, letting hope set in then doing everything they can to rip it away.

Let them get strong enough and they’ll go to full blown guerilla warfare, sabotaging moments, sometimes taking over for whole hours, making sure to leave a mess for your better self to clean up.

It’s enough of a daily challenge to face up to our internal enemy—enough that we don’t have to let the external enemies send reinforcements.

We’re self antagonistic enough. Don’t let the scale tip further.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The way is simple.

The first step is to seek out knowledge.

A person, a class, a book, a podcast, a phone call, a rambling drunk at a bus stop, an oracle from delphi, and in the direst of circumstances, a meeting.

The second step is to listen with both ears.

Really tune the suckers in. Point them, if you can, to get the point across.

The way is simple, but it’s not easy.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you wear a lot of hats—

For your job, for you life, for anything—

Please remember to let your hair down every now and then.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Good life, bad day.

As a form of processing, or keeping perspective, in the “so you had a bad day” sense of the phrase.

Good life, bad day.

As a way of showing mercy to someone who really doesn’t deserve it, someone who just did something morally wrong or at the very least ethically dubious, giving them the opportunity to not make it their whole personality.

Good life, bad day.

Something you could say after a string of bad days. A whole year of them, 365 awful 24 hour periods strung around your neck like chains.

And yet you keep that vision, held tight in the center of the locket, that even bad days can build good lives.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Medieval people thought burying people face down was a great offense. Reserved for outsiders. Possibly as a way to prevent them from crawling out of their graves, possibly just as a way to really stick it to them.

We know these facts from researchers, because all the actual medieval people are dead, buried long ago, and to be honest, none of them are presently in a position to care which direction their face is.

In the words of Flannery O’Connor, the dead don’t care much about particulars.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If there’s a car crash, the first thing you do isn’t helping the people who crashed.

It’s making sure that you don’t also crash.

You have a moral obligation to help your fellow humans out—but you have to have a self to help them out before you can be of any assistance.

The first step in making a situation better is to avoid becoming a victim of it.

The second step is up to you.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If we could find an impossible perspective—as if someone could throw our lives into a zip file and compress them into one single, understandable thing—how would it read?

If we could make it through the ups and the downs, turn our limited strength and limited attention to things worthy of them, and carve a little space in the world for ourself, whether by long, slow repetition, like water, or overnight, like dynamite?

If we could do it all without letting it go to our heads. The ups, the downs, the oh-so-many sidewayses, all fighting to get us to think too highly or too little of ourselves and others, slipping little jaded, bitter notes into our jacket pockets—

Well, if we managed to do all of that, one might think of their life as a love letter to difficulty—a note of affection for the people and circumstances otherwise hard to love.

But worth it anyway.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When the wind is at your back—and no wrong can be done, the words fly from your hands, the pitch deck almost makes itself, any and every creative blessing seems as if it was touched by the muse—well, it’s easy to keep working.

But when it feels like each and every syllable of even a text message has to be hauled out of your soul with an F350 and a winch, dragged out like a bad tooth, blood and sweat giving birth to less than half of the normal creative haul—

Well, it’s a lot harder to keep working then.

There’s a good thought, if obvious, which is that this is when you earn it. Everyone works when the work is easy. The pro separates themselves by showing up no matter what.

There’s an additional thought, though. Which is that everyone creates when creating feels good. And if the emotions of the work contribute at least a little bit to the work, then you may find that the work you make when you don’t want to make work is a lot more interesting precisely because it hasn’t really been done before.

Either way, hard hats on.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Given the option between doing something today and doing something tomorrow, you should do it today.

The argument has nothing to do with procrastination, really. It’s simply this: you already know precisely how shitty today is, precisely how much you really don’t want to have to work.

You have no idea what tomorrow is going to bring. All you know is that you have the capacity to do it today. So do it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The traditional wisdom is that trust is hard to build and easy to lose. The same is said for moral standards and reputation.

This is true, but only from the perspective of others. People who have to take you at your actions and not your thoughts.

This isn’t advice to go and break a lot of trust, but taken solely from your head, you’re allowed to experiment. You’re allowed to try things a different way. Not the self violence of doing something you hate, but the ability to try on other ways of doing things as if they were hats. You can try being a little more forgiving. Or being a little more disciplined.

The nice thing is that if you don’t like it, you can go right back to the way things were before. No one has to know. And if they do, well, that’s their problem to figure out.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Why would you keep playing a game you didn’t love?

Well, probably because there’s a reason you have to. Bills to pay. Confrontation to avoid. A life to live and a reputation to upkeep.

In each instance, behind the thing you don’t necessarily love, playing the game, is a thing you do love, or a person you love, a reason to keep it all going.

So even if you don’t love the game, you do love something the game enables you to love.

Which sure sounds like loving the game with extra steps.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s hokey. Easy to make fun of. Tender like a flower that looks like it would lose a fight with the breeze.

But people, circumstances, systems, emotions, mental wellbeing, work—kick back all the stress from that, the baggage, clearing one little corner of a room in your mind, and place in it the belief that things will get better.

Then step back and watch it grow.

It will.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Life is entirely non efficient, at least from the standpoint of the people living it. Things don’t work without plans but almost no plans work as planned. We spend our time running around like hamsters who can’t find their wheel, having misplaced it somewhere, or looking for the part to get it back to optimal treadmill performance.

In the brief moments of peace, the still, quiet, calm eyes of the storm, we might reflect on what a muck life is. How roundabout everything seems to go. The funny, funky ways people live out their days and find each other.

We might also think: well, death is the ultimate efficiency. The complete lack of wasted movement. Which makes you wonder whether life is inefficient, or if inefficiency is closer to actually being the definition of life.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The arms of the storm rip and tear—first at the lapel of your jacket, next knocking away your hat, finally having a go at your roof, the tree, stress-testing the limits of the world.

The legs of the storm sink deep into the earth, bringing frost, rain, mud, pulling out the rug of grass from underneath your feet.

The hands of the storm hurl great stones, dump buckets of water, point and cheer on Zeus as he keeps hucking bolts any and every direction.

The eyes of the storm—well, the eyes of the storm are blue. Kind, loving, calm. Weeping gentle droplets of rain, saying there now, this will all be over soon, singing a soft lullaby of gentle breezes, almost forgotten in the violence…

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The page you read today is one you won’t have to read tomorrow.

Gets you one step closer to the page that may make all the difference.

Yes, it’s only one page. Roughly 200 words depending on the size of the book. Less than the essays you wrote in middle school.

But it’s not just one page, it’s a flag, stuck next to the line in the sand, fluttering nouns and verbs in a calm breeze, boldly stating to the world: today I took the time to read.

Could we become so wise as to finally learn to never underestimate doing a little every day? No matter how little the little?

It may feel like a small defiance today, a childish step, but its one a whole host of tomorrows will thank you for.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

“You don’t know them like I do.”

You don’t understand their complexities. Their background. Their personality and their trauma.

You don’t understand the complications of the industry. The lay of the land. The distinct nature and history of the territory.

You don’t get the subtleties of the prose. The finesse of the brush. The sublimity of flavor the chef spent hours preparing.

You’re right. We don’t know them like you know them.

So teach us.

What else would be the point of knowing?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The saying goes—a bad carpenter complains about their hammer. Their saw. The hours and the pay and proximity of the nearest decent cup of coffee.

A bad writer complains about their keyboard. About their audience metrics and social media and how people’s attention spans just aren’t what they used to be.

Paradoxically, a great writer also complains about tools, just not their own. They can spin a great story about all the bad hammers carpenters are putting up with.

Maybe the saying isn’t quite right—because who doesn’t love complaining about their tools? Maybe it’s something more like this:

A good carpenter complains about their tools, then does the job well anyway.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There’s no prize for being early to a trend. If anything, there’s a curse: the ever-burning desire to inform everyone around you that you made it first, that you got there first, that you really were into it before anyone else does.

Unless, of course, the trend is something you love. The slept-on band is fronted by your friends. The little-known book helped you through a rough time. The person you knew had more than a little Cinderella in them.

In which case there is a prize for being first: getting a front row seat to watching it grow.

What really could be better?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Here’s a not-so-secret fact: the Muse likes seeing her work finished.

You could imagine those little moments of inspiration cracking their way into your world, the ones that spark riffs, poems, recipes, startups, all whizzing around our heads from on high, little origami paper planes, letters from the place creativity is born. Each and every one personally formed and sent just for you.

The Muse doesn’t care if it’s a bestseller. Doesn’t care if you sell out Madison Square Garden. Doesn’t care if a million people stream it or it earns you three Michelin stars.

The Muse doesn’t even care if one other person pays attention to it. But she does care that you pay attention to it—and most of all, that you do something with it. Bring her idea into some form of fruition.

This is all a little hokey and completely unprovable, but deep down, that might be why the Muse sends ideas: to experience the joy of seeing them made.

It’s only when you finish the ideas that more ideas come.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You know what? Babies may actually be onto something.

The way they forget things exist the second they’re out of sight.

No, this isn’t some pot-fueled monologue by a college freshman in philosophy 101. For all we believe about object permanence, the truth is that objects aren’t really permanent. They don’t stick around. They bend and break and warp and change and finally, at the right time, pass on from this existence to another.

Would we perhaps be better off if we let go of our own conceptions and did what we could to see each and everything anew every day?

To not see the knives and pans and tupperware and plates of the kitchen as permanent, but notice how they change a little, nicks and scratches and warps coming in like gray hairs, objects that are loved, yes, but not permanent. Anything but permanent.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The point of having insurance isn’t to get hurt.

It’s to have the opportunity to live your life in such a way that you can take on the potential risk of getting hurt.

It’s not a blank check from the universe—it’s more like the universe slipping you a $20 in a handshake, a grandfather’s wink in their eye as they tell you “don’t be too responsible with this one, kid. Live a little.”

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If emotion is a range—

Some obviously more related than others: joy and happiness related by their positivity, anger and excitement related by their intensity—

Then we might think of all of the emotions as a sort of palette of possible experience. The reds of anger, the blues of the sublime, the deep purple of sadness, the light yellow of optimism.

If these are the colors of our lives, who are we to limit them? To only allow paintings of green and blue and yellow but avoid anything remotely resembling gray?

Or to tell the artist we only believe in pastels—all the colors, yes, but only in the lightest touches of the brushstroke, avoiding any kind of intensity?

Does any artist want their palette limited? Then why would you limit yourself?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Drawing inspiration sounds about as impossible as painting happiness, or making joy into a sculpture. For who could get inspiration to wait long enough to be captured? What artist could convince it to sit for a portrait?

Yet which drawing could you say did not in some way draw inspiration? Hidden in every corner, lurking under every rock, just beyond the tablecloth, always present, always beyond our reach, always just outside of the range of being drawn—yet dancing on the head of the pencil, defying every medieval philosopher, and us, too.

Everywhere and nowhere. Just waiting to be drawn.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Without making too many assumptions, it is probably fair to say that most of us would prefer to not be shot with an arrow.

But most of us aren’t targets, bales of haye arranged in a line, striped with red paint, and waiting—waiting desperately, pulling all arrows, not just measuring marksmanship but demanding it, drawing each and every bolt into their loving embrace.

The target finds the arrow—so if you are not a target, what will you find?

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If you’ve got an important problem to solve, you should try everything. Every possible solution, each after the next, taken on and implemented with speed and efficiency.

If your situation is less urgent, you should still try everything. Make a list of ways to solve the problem, rank them in likelihood, and then try them all.

And if you find yourself without any problems to solve presently—well, you should still try everything. Try as many different everythings as you possibly can. Because experience is the best gift life has to offer, and can only be gotten the hard way.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The aspiring artist may lay out all of their pencils in perfect order—sorted by color, shape, size, and cut. Everything in perfect platonic order. The cables of the studio wrapped tightly. Every book in its exact place. Each file on the hard drive perfectly sorted.

The aspiring artist organizes things this way because it’s how the professional does it. Everything in its place. Ready for action, ready for the next day, ready for the moment inspiration stops by to borrow a cup of sugar.

But the pro’s organization is different—it’s hard won. It’s the consequence of making a mess of things time and time again, until eventually, a pattern emerged, a path forward, the appropriate kind of order.

The problem with starting out organized is you don’t yet know what organization you need. You have to let things breath—allowing the order to slip out of your hands, making a little chaos in the studio, until finally, you discover yourself enjoying the feeling of setting everything back after a long day of tearing it apart.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you take a shovel to your soul and, choosing an appropriate corner, dig out a little space, that gratitude starts to trickle in.

Nothing has changed. The circumstances still suck. Your boss isn’t any more empathetic, your partner hasn’t started vacuuming any more often, but slowly at first, that hole fills with water.

Then you might start scooping that water out and discover you can’t—it rushes in faster than you can drink it, faster than you can empty it, faster than a thousand pumps and buckets can try to drain it, calling in construction crews and backhoes to no avail.

Give gratitude an inch and it’ll give you a mile back.

The same is true for joy, hope, peace—but also anger, rage, and vitriol.

What will you make space for?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

No one asked us if we were interested in existing. No one gave us the opportunity to decide where we were born, to which parents, to how many siblings, in what country. No one let us vote on the color of our eyes, the size of our feet, which knee would pop and crackle more readily.

We’re all stuck living in light of a lot of facts we didn’t choose, trying to accept reality on its own terms—terms it has yet to reveal to any of us fully.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Ferraris spend more time in the shop than Camrys do. This is neither an insult to Ferraris nor a compliment to Camrys. It’s a factual observation that both Ferrari owners and Camry owners accept as a nonemotional reality.

No one buys a supercar expecting it to get great mileage or thinking they’ll drive it for three hundred thousand miles. No one buys a Camry expecting to turn any heads with their driving.

The higher the level of performance you expect, the more time, energy, and money you’re going to have to spend maintaining it. This is as true for cars as it is for people.

You’re allowed to expect Ferrari levels of performance from yourself, just don’t be surprised when you get the bill.

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Don’t tell.

Don’t speak.

Don’t lay out the five year plan.

Don’t tell your friend over dinner. Don’t tell your mom the next time she calls. Don’t even let yourself tell yourself.

The voice in your head says you need to be strategic about this. That you don’t want to get this wrong. That you should take some time to talk it through, think it through. And that voice in your head is the fucking devil.

Don’t tell us about it. Do it, and show us.

Only then will we pay attention.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The devil on your shoulder deserves a better seat.

After all, they’ve been with you through thick and thin. Put up with all the slander, all the dirty glares, all the hateful comments.

They’ve put up with all of our attempts to get rid of them. To tell them off. Had the courage to keep talking no matter how many times we asked them to shut up. And when we do, we’re so quick to forget the times he saved us—that internal trickster, always rebelling, always running their mouth, but more there for us than anyone else we know.

Isn’t time we invited them inside? Thanked them for everything they’ve put up with and gave them a seat at the table?

No, the devil on your shoulder doesn’t get to make all the decisions. But they’re a part of you, and they get the same privilege as any part of you—a voice in the debate, the opportunity to be heard, and when it comes time to deciding, one singular vote.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The problem with wearing a lot of hats is that one of those hats becomes hat-sorting.

You might have started with a business hat and a numbers hat and a sports guy hat but now you’ve got too many hats to keep playing this casual—so you go and get a hat sorting hat. A hat storage hat. An education hat to pick up your masters degree in hat management. A hat to stack all the boxes for all the hats you need to manage the hats you have.

Maybe the answer is a better analogy—or maybe all of us contain multitudes, not just in work, but in our lives, the many sides of us, good at many things, no hats required.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

No one wants to get scammed. To not see it coming. To have their generosity and goodwill turned into someone else’s opportunity.

But maybe in the grand scheme of things, we could look at the times people take advantage of us as part of an act of generosity towards the people who don’t—not letting the bad apples of the world ruin the good ones. Being vulnerable not out of naivety, but out of choice—the knowledge that being open to helping others comes with a cost, a cost we’re willing to pay.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Anyone opposed to speaking out of both sides of their mouth has never seen how weird they like trying to speak out of one of them.

So next time, instead of speaking out of both sides, just open your whole mouth, and hold the willingness to contradict yourself as an ordinary consequence of thinking.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you walk away, by choice, or by force, because of circumstance, because of mental health, or just because—

It will be here when you get back.

The things, the ideas, the career, the opportunity, the innovation, the chances—all still here.

The people, too.

Different, yes. But so are you.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You could start a club. The National Association for People with Eye Planks (NAPEP for short).

Alternatively, depending on the size of the plank, you could use it as an actual club.

You could take up golfing, developing a very unusual swing, bringing the plank down and whipping it around to send that sucker 310 yards down the fairway.

Or you could take up carpentry. Always have a 2x4 handy whenever you need one.

You could make a national holiday to raise awareness for people with planks in their eye.

Or you could, you know, take it out.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Some days you’re the baby, other days you’re the bathwater.

Either way, you’re flying.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The nice thing about having no one paying attention to what you’re doing is that you can do anything.

You can safely change your mind, then change your mind again, flip-flopping your tactics like a philosophical rotisserie chicken.

And once you get it right, once you find the thing you want to make, or believe, if people start to pay attention—well, now you have an audience to test it against.

Until then, your greatest challenge is your greatest advantage. No one is paying attention. Not even you, fully. Which means you can try whatever you want.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Jeans, couredory, slacks, pleats, boot cuts, taper trim, capris, leggings, and so many more—all options for varietals of pants, none of which come with any extra rules.

There’s question of how casual vs fancy, how in trend vs out.

It’s only the white pants we tag on some kind of extra seasonality.

So in the grand scheme of pants, why bother with the one option that comes with the legal footnote?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The traditional saying is to avoid casting your pearls before swine.

This is true, but a little rough around the edges. It’s unlikely that anyone was going to try that literally, and as far as analogies go, it’s a pretty insulting one.

Maybe you could update it: don’t cast your pearls before elephants.

Again, not advice anyone would take, but at least elephants are beautiful, intelligent, if very, very large. Majestic creatures who are simply incapable of appreciating something so delicate.

You could take the whole thing one step further and ask: why do you need to cast your pearls at all? What if you kept them in hand, showed them to people who could appreciate them, and if they ask, hand them over gently?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Holding a grudge takes at least one hand—unless you stick it under your elbow and pin it to your body, in which case it leaves you walking around with one chicken elbow.

Holding a grudge takes focus, even if only a little, the low level reminder in the back of your head that you need to keep your left hand free.

You may convince yourself to set the grudge down for just a bit. Stash it on your desk, or on a shelf, or in a corner of the garage. But even then it’s taking up space. Maybe not your hand, but still your mind.

Or maybe you could think of the grudge like a library book—a book that’s been placed on hold, by request, a hold that is now ready to be honored, and then returned.

Returned not because the grudge wasn’t warranted, but simply because you’d rather have empty hands and a clear mind.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Goliath gets all the headlines.

Has all the armor, the flatscreen TV, the luxury cars.

He has all the followers. All the endorsement deals. When he goes on the podcast, he sounds jovial and human, a big-if-misunderstood personality.

Goliath has the best insurance policy. A great 401k. He’s got mutual funds and stocks and even managed to stash a little crypto.

And at night, as Goliath tosses and turns on his luxury mattress, David sleeps without a care in the world, not knowing that tomorrow is the day he not only faces Goliath, but becomes him.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Expecting the world to get better only works if you work to make it better.

Otherwise you just get bitter instead.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Avoid it like the plague. Like a multi-level marketing scam. They come along like locusts, promising to duct tape all these magical components to your business, to your career, to your life.

The problem with synergies is they don’t ever sound bad. You already have customers shopping for auto parts, try to sell them a chocolate bar at the same time. You’re already going back to school, you may as well get your Masters.

But then you take a look around at your synergized world. You can’t pump gas without being advertised to. Can’t keep up with your friends without having your data sold. Can’t buy a plane ticket without clicking decline 37 times on the 39 upsell offers for various forms of insurance, upgrades, and liquor.

Instead, ask: what are the things I can’t live without. Then do those, or sell those, or keep those, and tell everything else to fuck off.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Ask no questions, you’ll hear no lies.

Hear no lies, you’ll play no games.

Play no games, you’ll win no prizes.

Win no prizes, you’ll lose your step.

Lose your step, lose your way, lose your will to keep on going in the first place.

All because you ask no questions, for fear of a few lies.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Read slow. Read fast. Read sideways. Read backwards. Read in the hot tub and in the rain and by the sauna and only on days ending in day. Read when no one’s watching or read at the coffee shop and, if necessary, get indicted so you can read in court.

Buy books online. Rent audiobooks. Go to the library and ask a stranger for a recommendation. Read the back of the menu and the side of the cereal box, read in a language you don’t understand, read the smuttiest thing you can find (and then the smuttiest thing you can find after that). If necessary, break into stranger’s houses and read the books off their shelf.

Because the worst imaginable form of reading is still better than the best version of not reading.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

We’re all rolling the dice on something.

A career, a business, a late night text to a potential lover—nothing in life can be accomplished without tempting fate a little.

But if you make everything a gamble, you’re gambling the worst possible thing: your ability to take risks in the first place.

Is it possible to live your life in such a way that you shoot your risky shot without risking your ability to pay the mortgage?

To make a bet with intention of being able to make a second and a third—even if they all fail?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Momentum is only a good thing if you’re going in the right direction.

Otherwise it’s just bad news waiting to happen.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If creativity comes from within you, you’ll have to get your pickaxe ready. Find a pile of ropes and some dynamite before hitting the gym to get a good pump going on your biceps. There’s work to do and that work is active—putting your neck on the line to see if you can drag something good out of yourself, really get in there and make it happen.

If creativity comes from outside of you, the game is a little different. You’re like a valet: no matter how hung over, no matter how late the bus is running, you’ve just got to show up.

You may be slammed from open or spend the whole day waiting for nothing. Either way, you’re on the clock. Waiting.

Not waiting for the creative thought to come, just waiting, because waiting is your job, and damn it, you’re a pro.

Holding the paintbrush or guitar or keyboard like a valet at their stand.

Because who heard of a valet getting mad over not having to work?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Don’t just love your life—love her slow.

Taking the time to smell the daisies, the rhododendrons, the fresh cut grass, the tire shop, and a thousand other scents you might have missed if you were only looking for the roses.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The writer’s hours are 24/7. Same for the painter and the musician, hauling themselves out of bed to get the guitar part tracked at 3am, playing impossibly soft to avoid waking up the neighbors again.

The muse loves regular hours, but we’re professionals. We take the midnight call, the random strike of inspiration, pissed off, cursing our boots, but swinging our feet out of bed anyway.

In the words of Troy Duffy from Boondock Saints, “we’re not always doing business, but we’re always open.”

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The best and worst part of happiness is its absolute unpredictability.

Plan the most lavish birthday party and, despite RSVPing, happiness doesn’t show up. But get down on your luck? Find yourself run out of town, away in a remote cabin, not a friend in the world? Happiness is knocking on the door with a six pack and a DVD of Die Hard.

You may find happiness crashes on the couch for months on end, becoming an integral part of your life before taking off without so much as leaving a note saying he’s going out for milk. But then he’s back, Irish Hello’ing as if nothing ever happened.

The worst part of happiness is that it’s not dependent on anything—which means nothing you do will guarantee its presence.

The best part of happiness is that it’s not dependent on anything. Which means it can show up anytime, anywhere, whistling a tune as if nothing bad had ever happened…

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Don’t dish it if you can’t take it.

Advice usually reserved for insults—biting remarks, snide comments, playful quips, life has a way of giving back as good as it gets, so think twice before putting on your boxing gloves: eventually someone is going to punch back.

What’s rarely observed is that it’s equally good advice for lasagna, pizza, and all sorts of other pastas and casseroles you might overload your plate with.

Given the choice between insults and carbs, which would you rather dish?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The rough thing about laundry is you pretty much always have to do it. You never get more than a couple of days off of thinking about it.

The good part about laundry is its just not that complicated. The machine works pretty much every time. Laundry almost always goes according to plan.

In that regard washing clothes is somewhat unique, because while laundry is needy in a predictable way, the rest of life refuses to behave by nearly the same rules, like a psycho ex, popping up at random times to ruin everything.

Life offers bountiful treasures, lofty goals, great honors, riches and prizes beyond imagination—but it does so at the cost of wrecking our plans, over and over again, seeing if we’ve got just one more go in us, then one more after that.

Because if everything went according to plan, the only reward would be clean towels.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Bring us your tired, your poor, your weak.

Your huddled masses of anecdotes yearning for better ears, better hearts, better minds.

Bring us your instincts. Your impulses. The first reactions of your better nature.

Bring us your blunders. Your bluffs. Your thinly veiled reactions to childhood trauma.

When you ask for opinions, you can’t expect results, can’t expect agreement, can’t expect compliments. Because when you ask for opinions, you have to take them as that—opinions, good and bad, all mixed together and jumbled, ready for somebody to have an opinion about them, too.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you have been given that great gift, the rarest thing for both kings and beggars to find, impossible to buy, that which cannot be taken but only given—The undivided attention of someone other than yourself—

Then do the right thing, and don’t try to divide it for them.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

As far as we can tell, not yet being able to decipher or speak the languages of dogs, squirrels, and other animals, humans are the only ones foolish enough to sit around telling stories.

The loudest songbird, the most verbose squirrel, the cricket who will serenade you well into the evening, they’ve all yet to discover the moral of the story they’re telling—yet to make it past single lines of dialogue, yet to find their own once upon a time, yet to worry about subtext and counterpoint and plot and subplot.

They are still awfully beautiful to listen to—without the moment when, with eyes beginning to glaze over, someone tries to explain a broader purpose behind the story they told, some simple lesson or takeaway, while the birds keep on singing, keep on singing, keep on singing…

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

We tell ourselves:

If only leadership got it. If only the client understood. If only we had the budget, or the team, or the time. If only the axioms were a little more flexible, if only the timeline had buffer, if only the policy had been written by someone who was a partial nincompoop instead of the full meal deal.

We start our lives with very little power, looking up to the people one step of the ladder as having autonomy—then we get there and find out they’re just servants to bigger fishes in bigger ponds.

Never being fully in charge is one of the consequences of doing work in the real world. Which means two things:

First, that when we’re in power, we should turn around and see how to make things better for the people who have to put up with us.

Second, we should get to work.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Every Monday, every new year, every couple of months, depending on our constitutions, we have a habit of kicking down the door of our own lives and asking “who the fuck is in charge around here?”

We flip tables, fire directors, doing forensic accounting on the piss-poor management of our days, our time, our money, our friendships, shaking our heads with a disgusted upper lip.

And then we settle down for a couple of weeks before the future version of ourselves decides to do it again, committing violence against self under the guise of self betterment.

We must learn to remember: if our present self is capable of improving our future self, it’s only courtesy of the work and dedication of our past self.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Do we chase being healthy the same way a dog chases a firetruck?

We do it with diligence, with resilience, with determination that is, for lack of a better word, dogged.

We get after it every day. Wake up from dreams of it to chase it in the real world. Will drop anything and everything when it rolls by, yelling and screaming as we charge after that mythical beast.

And like that poor dog, do we have any idea what we would do if we were healthy? If we finally had it? Or have we made it the pursuit to distract ourselves from our actual work?

Could we think more like a boxer—healing, yes, but just enough to do some un-healing in the form of getting back in the ring, the place we belong?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re in the business of making things—paintings, words, movies, little drawings on sticky notes, businesses, careers—

Or, at the very least, interested in making those things (and presently in the denial of the business element of it)—

Then you know there’s only one person qualified to judge your work, and that person is you.

What you might not know is that you’re not qualified today. It’s only the future version of yourself that is ready and able to pass judgment on what will work and what will not.

The you of today is too close to the work. To involved with it, stuck in the codependence we call creation. And everyone else is too far away from it, removed, not able to really understand it.

It’s only you that can judge your work—only the future you, the one who knows a little more, who can look on it with the loving eyes of knowledge and objectivity—eyes that smile more often than they do not.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The thing about the point of no return is that we’re all stuck living our lives forward.

We couldn’t go backward if we wanted to.

There’s time to change, time to shift, time to walk backwards and loop around and double back and change your mind and do all sorts of things but don’t ever, ever fool yourself into thinking you can go truly go backwards.

Every point is a point of no return. It asks: what now? What next?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You can get a lot of sneaking done under the cover of darkness.

Hide a thing or two—a body, a feeling, a treasure chest, painstakingly measured, engineered, and plotted to arrive precisely at the X of a map.

You can burn the midnight oil all the way to the next midnight, searching for secrets, a new enterprise, business, idea, book, eating away into otherwise unconscious hours while everyone else sleeps through it.

Or you could draw the covers of night up to your chin, roll back and forth to tuck the edges underneath, and embrace the quiet darkness brings—sneaking your way into the next morning, awake, refreshed, alive.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Learn to cook fast: to let the gas rip, your pan smoking, running close to the wire of burning your food but rewarded instead with char—the kind of flavor transformation that can only happen at brilliant, blistering temperatures, with close and exact attention.

Learn to cook slow. To let time be on your side. To be about your business, letting the food happen in the background, happy to wait anyone and everything out for any period of time, trusting the process and knowing that you’ve outwaited stomachs not currently hungry, letting the warmth gently transform the food over time.

Sometimes pedal to the floor, sometimes cruise control at 10 miles an hour.

Patient people who aren’t afraid to get in the occasional bar fight.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you leave your laptop in your backpack, and someone opens your backpack, pulls out your computer, and spills coffee on it, you would have every right to be angry at that person—for being not just foolish, but being aggressively so.

But if you leave your laptop on the floor, set casually on the side of the conference room, and someone walks in, doesn’t see it, and kicks your laptop into distinct pieces, well—they might actually have the right to be angry with you.

This is not just a truth about taking care of laptops—it’s about the courtesy you afford other people.

To take reasonable care of your stuff, your self, your emotions, in such a way that you don’t accidentally set traps for other people to walk into.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If death comes for us all—and it does—then much of the good and right things we spend our days doing are not really about solving problems, just delaying them.

Eating right, working out, getting sleep, not getting hooked on designer drugs, we know the path of destruction those things usher us down. We know it because it’s the path we all walk, we just want to walk it slowly.

So why aren’t we comfortable employing this same strategy with other problems in our lives?

The fight with your partner, the crippling self doubt, the knowledge of just how unlikely it is that you’ll succeed in whatever endeavor you’ve taken on—what’s wrong with just delaying it another day? Another week?

Isn’t that what it means to be alive?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other cheek.

If they decide to strike that one as well, you may realize: you’re out of cheeks to turn.

Turn the other cheek, but not the other other cheek.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Fool us once—

Fool us twice—

Fool us three, four, five times—

Fool us seven times seventy-seven times—

Even then, the wise one won’t invite shame to the party. No matter how many times they’re fooled.

They might stop believing you after the first time. But they wouldn’t bring down shame on their worst enemy, much less themselves.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

All kinds of criminals in the world.

All kinds of crimes for them to commit.

And even when there’s no honor among theives—because it only takes one rat to call the exterminator—you may be surprised to know there’s still all kinds of kindness.

Because if honor can be broken by only one weak link, kindness can be sustained by only one strong one.

One person, in one moment, even if only for once in their life, stopping, looking, letting their heart feel, then making things ever so slightly better for someone else.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Been there, done that.

Seen it, saw it.

Been to so many rodeos you don’t even remember your first.

Vici’d so hard you forgot that Caesar also vini’d and vidi’d.

And now, after all the conquering, after all the toasts and awards, after all the completing and the eye rolling and sarcastic laughs when people ask you if “you could….”

(Because you have, so many times)

The reward is this:

Go and do it again.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Here’s the shortest piece of advice on success anyone can give you:

It’s a lot easier to put the bat where the ball is than it is to convince someone else precisely where to throw the ball.

Easier to throw the ball through the basket then it is to move the basket.

Easier to take the corners of the track than it is to reroute the path.

It’s a lot easier to be in someone’s sweet spot than it is to convince someone to change what they like.

So if you get a choice, do something people love.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

We don’t want to humanize villains.

War criminals, despots, political leaders from opposing parties, we want to hate them with a want that borders on need.

Want to hold that high hatred for their actions high, like a torch or a beacon, uncomplicated in its destruction.

But it’s not really a question of humanizing them, whoever they are, because they’re already human.

If our villains weren’t human, what they did wouldn’t hurt the way it does.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s lonely at the top.

So come down.

The only reward for being one-of-a-kind is having no peers, no friends, no one else to shoulder the burden.

Plus, if you ever decide you’re sick of having friends, you can always climb back up.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Do you really want to be the one who saw it coming?

Who knew better than to trust that person, that friend, that lover, broke the knife of betrayal out of their hand with a spinning swan kick before it even got close to your back?

Yes, we may read stories from the past, hear the wounds of others, and think: it won’t be us. We’ll be ready for the betrayal, for the market change, we’ll stay vigilant at any cost. And those are good things.

But you might also ask: if all your heroes were betrayed, underwent the same catastrophes, do you really want to be so different than all of them?

Maybe the 4th law of thermodynamics is something to the effect that you can’t live your life and observe it, too.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Take the money and run.

Or better yet, run, then take the money, so that you’re certain everyone is happy with your running before you get paid for it.

Because there’s nothing wrong with being an amateur—we’re all amateurs at most things in our lives—there’s that one domain in which we must transcend our beginnings and become professionals. And professionals get paid for their work.

Maybe not at first, maybe not all the time.

But whether it’s running, painting, writing, founding, whatever-ing your heart just couldn’t live without-ing—

We show up every day. We clock in. We clock out. We take the money.

(running not always required).

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s tough to watch them fall—

The scandal breaks, the news is out, the new album is a total dud, they sold out to do ads for toothpaste that only run on cable.

When they say “only the good die young” they’re acknowledging that heroes always end up failing us one way or another—either by dying too soon or living long enough for the veneer to fall off, showing off the all-too-human interior.

There’s another way. One we can take as we grow older: to sacrifice our heroes early. To drive over to the hero store, ask to speak to the manager, and return the whole lot.

Trading in our heroes for people who look like us, talk like us, stink like us, fear like us, people we no longer revere but now know—as colleagues, as peers, and on occasion, as friends.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There are things that clearly seem to be working for just about everyone: there’s no news stories about people overdosing from meditation. No clickbait articles about the dangers of becoming a book addict. And no one ever accuses the gym of being a pyramid scheme, because everyone on every rung of the pyramid seems to be happier than before.

Then there’s things you ask: who is it really working for? Social media, liquor, working weekends, video games, smoking cigarettes, debating politic, pools we dip our toes in, or jump in outright fully clothed, not wholly bad, but you look around, and you wonder: who is this really working for?

And maybe most pressing of all, how many dangerous waters do you want to learn to chart?

If it’s not working for anyone, what makes you think it will work for you?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the grand scheme of metaphors—please remember that in the story, Achilles’ heel is actually his heel. His literal calf. And his figurative inability to see closer than the length of his sword once someone has upset him.

So if you find yourself in the business of heroics, there are at least two worthwhile observations:

First, none of us think less of Achilles for his heel. We’re willing to accept it. Doesn’t mean we want to live it, but we can still see him as a hero, thinking long on his strengths and his flaws.

Second, none of us would have thought any less about Achilles if he’d done some calisthenics, or gone to therapy. You can have your Achilles heel be a part of your story—but how much happier would you be if you just got into stretching instead?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re going to look for a silver bullet—

The perfect solution, the panacea, the miraculous cure-all oil of snakes that will finally solve all the issues—

Look with your hands and eyes, not with your face and chest.

You want to be the one firing the perfect solution, not the one taking it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

All gain is non monetary.

The things you buy with the lottery winnings—aren’t money. They’re things purchased with money.

The feeling of security from not worrying about your bills—just wait, it’ll turn into the insecurity of losing it all again.

The sense of success—well, feeling better than your neighbors isn’t actually monetary. It’s a feeling.

The money exists in an emotional trust account, trying to convince you its funding all your gains.

So if all gains are non monetary, what’s stopping you from choosing a couple of non monetary gains that aren’t related to money at all?

Could you live a life that is just as happy before and after making it?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Sit and shut down the senses, one by one, like a tired small business owner, lovingly walking around the shop, first flipping off the lights, then the eyes, then telling the nose to take over breathing, the mouth pleasantly stretching after a long day of jawing—

Take the assessment, the knee that creaks more than it did in your youth, feeling the ligaments sigh in pleasure as you lean into the long stretch of relaxation.

We might call it the simple pleasure of a day well lived, of a job well done.

But maybe all the doing is nothing more than a prerequisite to something that already existed—like a dog, well loved by its owners, who needs daily play to expend its energy stores before flopping down, stretching out, taking in the simple pleasure of existing.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Don’t repay good with evil, the saying goes.

Don’t do it to others, seeing generosity as something to be exploited for even more gain, or taking advantage of a blunder someone made while trying to do the right thing.

Don’t do it to yourself, allowing something you started with the best intentions to guilt you now—a routine, an endeavor, a commitment to brush your teeth more often, still there despite missing a couple of days.

Because the funny thing about repaying good with evil is that you can’t even repay good with good. You can’t actually repay good at all.

Good is simply given. Nothing any of us do can change that. There’s no chance to pay good back—only forward.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The funny thing about courage is—so long as you can keep the performance up to the end—there’s no difference between having courage and faking it.

In fact, as anyone who has been courageous before can likely attest, courage doesn’t really care why you do it. Doesn’t check your motives or ask for your intentions. Doesn’t look a gift virtue in the mouth.

All it does is offer you an opportunity: shoulders back, deep breath, do the thing every nerve ending in your body is telling you is a bad idea.

Maybe in one sense, you could argue: the less you feel it, the more courageous it is.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If it knocks on the door like a salesman, peers through the windows like the in-laws, dropping by unannounced, complains that the door is locked only once they’ve tried to open it…

If it moves into your mental spaces without an invite, drops off its baggage on the way in, and keeps on calling you, no matter how many times you hit decline…

If it refuses to turn off your check engine light, keeps on messing with the thermostat, setting off the battery beep of the fire detector every twenty-seven and a half seconds…

It might not threaten your life, but the cost is still too high if it takes your inner peace.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

History is, for once, unanimous: if you want to deal with your enemies, you have to see the job all the way through. You can’t just half beat your opponents—they’ll hate you all the more for it, spending even more night scheming your downfall.

But unlike history, real life offers few enemies. Few people we could call opponents beyond a few small, very specific circumstances.

So you might find that leaving a door open—whether it’s open wide, or just a crack—provides opportunity for people to walk back in.

Not to scheme their way to victory, but to join you on a new endeavor, recognizing the room you left for them to come back, wanting to build a world that looked like that for everyone—to take on the future as friends.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Once the scales have been played—the ax has been sharpened, the clean stacks of paper neatly arranged beside the pen, each and every socket of the socket set placed neatly in order of size—

Once the artist has gone through the paces only they know, shared with all others willing to shoulder the burden of being a professional, the warm up, the practice, the tribute paid to the muse—

Something changes. A change the artist knows well—the amateur, who we love, must try and strive and work and sweat to impose the tiniest fraction of will on their instrument, getting their hand to bend into an F chord, making the shape of a nose appear on the paper.

But now, with their dues paid, the artist does something more akin to watching.

Sitting back, completely in tune, letting the tools do what the tools know, playing the notes they want to play, working and shaping and honing and reducing until—well, until they’ve had their feel of bringing being into the world, and know it’s time to call it a day.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The easiest reason to thank the past is because we’re here.

Looking around, it’s also the easiest reason to be upset with the past. They’ve made a muck of it. Pitched centuries of issues over the fence into the modern day, leaving us on the hook to save the economy, the country, and the planet, not even to mention saving each other.

But in face of those issues the past has given us a great gift: armed with context of what has happened, graced with the full scope of human knowledge before, and still holding the steel of optimism close to their bellies.

The past has given us all of our problems, but it’s also gifted us with you.

What will we give the future?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’ll work until we have a more permanent solution.

It’ll stick around until we finally get the headcount, the budget, the VP hired.

We’ll just use it until we can afford a better one. Until we think of a better place. We’ll just put our coats in that closet because we can always choose a different spot later.

Temporary solutions are the cockroaches of thinking. No matter how hard you try to get rid of them, no matter how hard you splat them, they remain—

What does it say that our temporary solutions outlast our permanent ones? Does it say anything?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Your next performance review?

The next song you release? The next internal meeting? The next time you hit ‘send’ or ‘publish’ or ‘share’?

It’s just the next time.

The feedback comes—good, bad, or worse, nonexistent—and our brains are hardwired to take it at 1,000 miles an hour, amplifying whatever comes through, holding onto it for dear life.

But we don’t have to. We can just think: this is a test. It’s one of many. We’d like to do well on it, yes, but if we don’t, there’s always another test—and if there’s not, well, then there’s always another class, always another semester, always another school.

This one doesn’t have to be the final exam on your self worth.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Chimpanzee politics have been the subject of rigorous academic study.

It’s also the name of a less rigorous, more sensational book.

Chimpanzee politics have been documented. Been filmed and discussed categorized and thought about. They’ve been the subject of a lot of theories, the source of a lot of questions, the punch line of a lot of jokes.

And—most importantly of all—despite all their attention, we don’t have to engage in them. Don’t cast a single chimpanzee vote.

They may be part of our evolutionary ladder, but that doesn’t mean we have to take a step down to their level in the way we treat each other.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The only way out is through:

Taking on the all the things you promised yourself you wouldn’t have to, facing up to the only things on the planet left that scare you.

The only way through is out:

If you want to see the other side of this, you’ve got to pull the eject handle, get up and run, kick your way through the emergency exit door, no matter how many awkward stares you get.

The only way out is out.

This is the real world. You’re not fooling anyone else, why would you fool yourself into thinking you’re the exception?

The only way through is through.

You’ve got this. Just a little longer.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The expert is the favorite of all our inner kids—and we’re not afraid to let the others know it.

The expert does most of the driving. Says the smart thing. Actually, sincerely helps others.

But we’re not experts in every domain—so we do everything we can to keep ourselves inside the domains where we’re at the top. After all, where would we be without our right-hand self?

The problems arise with the problems: something goes wrong and we immediately go to the ace up both of our sleeves—the expert takes a crack at it, and fails. And we have no idea what to do.

This sounds very ethereal and story driven, but the point is as practical as they come: when expertise fails, don’t keep trying to solve the problem with expertise.

Ask: what other part of yourself can you activate? The learner? The feeler? The thinker, maybe?

What are the other tools on your toolbelt for when expertise fails?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

To bastardize the line from Tolstoy—

All undisciplined people are alike; each disciplined person is disciplined in their own way.

Each disciplined person has figured out the few things they can hold to, has found the things that work, has duct-taped them together into a semblance of a chain, daily action they keep going at any costs.

But they’re not all disciplined in the same way. The daily painter might be horrendously out of shape, the athlete in complete submission to their emotions, the academic who can’t stop chain smoking.

No one is perfectly disciplined. They pick the things the matter. But plenty of people are perfectly undisciplined.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Life without struggle presents three options:

First, you could be bored, with nothing to do, nothing to fight, nothing to consider.

Second, you could be arrogant, assuming you’ve figured it all out—what’s everyone else complaining about anyway?

Third, you could be dead.

Given the choices, what’s a little struggle between friends?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s what we’re up to.

Or at least what we should be up to.

Business, as usual is business as usual, you see.

The work you know you need to do—you can run from it. Cover it up with booze or video games or by throwing yourself at the ‘real’ job you use to pay the bills.

But the business remains. As it usually does. Ready, always patient, always waiting—for you to take it up, then put it down, then take it up again.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The blown tire, the thrown back, the in-laws rolling in en force unannounced and uninvited, the dog deciding 2 am is the perfect time to have a blowout, the unexpected release of a new season of True Detective—

Life provides the off days, free of charge, a la carte or bundled with more troubles.

Take your rest, yes—but you don’t have to plan off days. The universe has them in spades.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If all silence is alike—colored only by the not-silence we bring to it—then perhaps meditation is, in one sense, not just joining a collective consciousness, but a collective unconsciousness.

Willingly dipping our toes in whatever death provides, finding not peace, not clarity, not rest, but sheer absence.

The great reality we interrupt with our words, our work, our songs, our greatest achievements, all dwarfed by the perfect wholeness, the inseparable unity of silence.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Don’t cry in front of strangers.

Instead, take a deep a breath.

Focus on flexing your toes (to keep the circulation going through your legs). Steady yourself. Draw across the rainclouds of your brain to one single sun beam sticking through, and focus on that.

Now: take that focus, and introduce yourself to the people around you, then let loose.

Not crying in front of strangers, crying in front of friends.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s easy to love what you have when you’re having a great time—the wind gently kissing your sails, rocketing you forward into increasingly interesting days full of increasingly brilliant people.

It’s harder to love what you have when you check the bank and see zeroes on the wrong side of the decimal. When your battery hits empty at 10am. When the clock ticks anxiety and the whole world takes on an unpleasant tint, like somebody somewhere managed to sneak cayenne into every bite of emotion.

Maybe it’s the commitment that earns the prize—sticking it out through tough waters.

Maybe it’s a sign it’s time for something to change, to take on new haves to love.

Or maybe you could learn to love the bumps and bruises that cover you, the things you find it so easy to love in other people, casting a blanket of love over the whole mess of self, the good and the bad.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

First thing: we’ll need better marketing. Better PR spin, a new campaign, “visit the road more traveled” or “more traveled, not less loved” or “Robert Frost was a dumbass and probably an alcoholic, come see.”

Second, we’ll want to merchandise the whole line. I TOOK THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT or MORE TRAVELED USA or SOMETIMES MORE IS MORE. Don’t just pick up that precious revenue, but turn people into walking billboards.

Third, we’ll want to double down on our competitive advantage. Water coolers every quarter mile. Attractive people handing out ROAD MORE TRAVELED bumper stickers.

Finally, we’ll invest in poets of our own, writing about the only road worth taking. Plans are assured on the road to prevent them. The underdog may not always win—but until they do, they’re always the underdog.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When the work is done—the clock well past 5, the casuals already well on their way home, the sun already starting to yawn its way to an early bed—

Good heads out to to the bar to meetup with great.

Depending on the night, they might even see a visit from their friend perfect, a rare but welcome addition, catching up on the happenings in the realm of things we love.

It’s only in our realm that we convince ourselves good and great could ever be at odds. Because while they might bicker like siblings, they’ll forever love each other, knowing one couldn’t exist without the other.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you run sprints in bare feet, you shouldn’t be surprised if you stub your toe.

Which is not to say you’re not allowed to run sprints in bare feet.

Not to say the man is holding you down by telling you its a bad idea.

Or that the government, the culture, or the woke mob is coming after you when you stub your toe.

Run sprints however you want. But don’t blame anyone else for the consequences.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Much has been written about avoiding burnout—like the plague—taking all cautions to stay away from it.

But for those already stuck with it, burnout offers an opportunity. The perspective from which to ask: do you really want to keep doing this? Is it time to recover and set out again, or time to start a new game, or choose a new game, or give up playing games at all?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There are a thousand ways the world is shitty.

Chances are, you’ve already found half of them, could name a quarter of them off the top of your head, and have run into at least a baker’s dozen today alone.

That makes our job twofold:

First, to endure all one thousand ways in which the world fails us.

Second, to take up the sacred responsibility of not making it one thousand and one.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If it’s a question of tactics, of strategy, of getting overwhelmed with too many possibilities—

Take a deep breath, and solve one problem at a time, including solving the problem of cutting yourself some slack and taking a break every now and again.

If it’s a question of ethics, of entering action, of courage—

Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and jump. Take it all on at once.

You can always solve one problem at a time later.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Two sides to every coin. Each the literal opposite of the other, in eternal opposition, doomed to never see eye to eye.

Yet the two sides of the same coin ride shotgun in the same pant pocket. Get dumped out of the same purse. Get fondled and handed off and flipped into fountains or, if it’s luck enough, a pinball machine—cozying up to thousands of other quarters, gossiping about their other sides.

Can you really describe something so unified as opposite? Or is the mark of our brains development its ability to stack quarters—things, ideas, and people who could not be more contradictory, yet for all their lack of coherence, remain—immutable, unchangeable, the same tough old pennies with their same old two sides?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Yes, you can die by a thousand cuts.

You can also be incredibly annoyed by 7, mortally injured by 438, or just pissed off by one.

One tiny little prick, which in and of itself doesn’t do much—an annoyance—unless its the first of a thousand.

So in the grand scheme of the universe, don’t we all have a duty to each other to not take our anger and frustration out on one another?

After all, we don’t know which number of cuts this is for the other person.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Crossing the line is a great way to pick a fight.

Start a riot, incite an incident, make your big, bold statement in the universe.

But try to write a sentence without using the letter T and you’ll quickly find how difficult it is to get through a couple of words without having to cross a line somewhere.

Try to tie a knot without crossing a line and—well, that’s just holding rope with extra steps.

And maybe the next time you go to draw a line in the sand, you’re actually just halfway to X marking the spot—daring someone to cross over it, not to start a fight, but to find a treasure.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Teeth have silver linings, once the cavity has been filled. Pants can have silver linings, swishing and swooshing their way through the 90s. Even your smartphone has its own silver lining, tiny transistors and microchips and all sorts of impossible technology, all lined with silver.

Fort knox has a silver lining, around all the gold, and as those metal appreciate, so might your hair—a silver line like a halo gently ushering you into your next chapter. You may find silver lining the cheap jewelry you bought or given at a time that was all you could afford—valued now not by precious metal but by meaning.

So in a world full of silver linings, why would we give all the credit to clouds?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re still kicking at the end of it—

The client presentation was moved, there were no dinner plans with the in-laws, the dentist didn’t call at 7:05am asking where you were, the final exam isn’t actually until next week—

Well, it’s not like anyone ever wants to have a bad day.

But in a universe full of days, we can rationally recognize they all can’t be good, and could offer this prayer of thanks on the days that are bad: that there could be worse days to have bad days. And if we all have to experience a downer every now and again, maybe today was the best day for a bad one?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Every day:

In the morning, as the sun kisses your temple and says hello, or late at night, as the dreams begin to stretch, or in an unexpected moment, like a text from an old friend you haven’t seen in years—

Do something borderline wasteful—borderline extravagant. Borderline uncalled for, flirting with the edges and the boundaries of sense.

An ice cream sandwich all for yourself, buying the coffee of the stranger behind you, a luxurious nap, or a long afternoon writing for a project you’ve never thought of before and will never think of again.

A charitable donation, an act of kindness, a gift of care to yourself, all saying the same thing:

Screaming loud, from your inner voice, flipping your middle finger to the world as you say:

“I HAVE MORE THAN ENOUGH.”

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Do you want their applause? You’ve seen where those hands have been thrown, the punches that should have been pulled instead of doubled down.

Do you want their praise? You know who else they speak highly of, what other names are on their lips.

Do you want their attention? To be the brief intermission in a sea of bastards?

Do you want them to clap their hands around your shoulder and call you over to their friends, knowing the kind of company they keep?

Empathy and kindness for all people, building bridges everywhere they can, but their affection—if you hate the things they love, why would you try to earn their love?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If it’s obvious—the political party, the religion, which type of cake to order for your birthday—

Then why is it so hard to prove?

Why do we get so upset when people disagree with us?

So riled up over people not seeing something so obvious, so painfully clear, so apparent and so in the open and yet even the first sentence about it already rings hollow, already doesn’t connect.

Maybe it’s a reflection on things that are obvious—that they’re only obvious to us.

Or maybe the anger is at ourselves, for our inability to explain something, an opportunity to grow, to settle down, to try again, to show each other in simpler terms what first appeared so deceptively simple.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

That asshole—

The source of all our trouble, our consternation, our addictions and our fuckups and every single last one of our worst memories.

We live our lives under the tyranny of our past selves, stuck not only with their decisions and choices, but of their taste, the things they liked and loved, now stuck with our present selves.

If only we could go back, we could show them better. Or at least knock their head around until it sits on straight.

If our current self is stuck dealing with the problems of our past self—doing the best we can—then we might stop to utter this brief prayer:

With apologies to our future selves.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You can’t keep it all.

The money, the time, the relationships, the ideas.

The career opportunities, the projects, the gigs, the sit-ins.

If you create things, the impulses. The songs, the words, the dances, the paintings.

If you can’t keep them all, why not start giving them away?

Why bother patching holes in a bucket you’re going to tip over anyway?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Like a mansion full of dust—rooms cleared and neat, but still hundreds undiscovered, the eccentric uncle leaving you nothing but a key and an address.

Now you stumble room to room, the flashlight flickering, sometimes in awe at the treasure, others in fear, certain that at least part of this place is haunted. You can see some rooms have been lived in, others locked away for what seem to be centuries.

If this is how we all wake up, the proprietors of people we previously did not know or choose, can we find the strength to decorate? To explore? To demolish and rebuild and, when necessary, call a plumber for a hand?

What will we do with the inherited self?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The first draft of life has to be lived before it can be edited.

As if the creator themself has the foresight to kick us out of the nest the second we awake—no time to plan, just time to send it. Not allowing anyone to sit back and think it over.

So if now, with the wind under your wings, you find yourself no longer satisfied—no longer happy, no longer experiencing the rush of trying to figure it out for the first time—well, the opportunity is here to edit. To decide which bits and parts to keep, which to cut, and where to write more.

Or if that isn’t right, well, then there’s time to write a second draft. And a third, and a fourth, and as many as you can find the time to write after that.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The Greeks write about Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill.

Camus comes along and writes about how we must imagine Sisyphus happy, the brief moment of relief as he walks back down to his boulder.

And we must imagine people who think about Sisyphus to themselves be happy, still stuck back in high school English, where we must imagine the people outside to also be happy, because they’ve never had to hear about Sisyphus.

We could perhaps even imagine the boulder being happy—what better life than to be pushed up a hill?

Ultimately, we must imagine, in the aggregate, despite all evidence to the contrary, that everyone is happy. That life is being lived and spiraling, if it is, towards more life, not less.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The best time to invest in someone was ten years ago. When you could have the full benefit of seeing their gifts evolve before your eyes.

The best time to invest in someone is also today. Or tomorrow. Or any time.

Because even if you don’t get to see them grow—to experience the fruit of your investment—you do get to see something else come to fruition: your own growth, now mature, now big enough and strong enough to help someone else along their path, watching what someone else invested in you become greater than the sum of its parts.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

One reason reading gets recommended so often—

And here you could substitute reading with working out, meditating, practicing gratitude, going for a walk, putting down your phone, calling your grandma, or any countless other oft-recommended activities—

It isn’t just for the benefit. Those are obvious.

It’s because the vast majority of people who have taken that advice have discovered it to be true.

There’s plenty of people with plenty of opinions about why you shouldn’t dye your hair green and go keto.

Very few people who are in arms about stretching more often.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The pen—that almighty mightier-than-the-sword thing—has two ends.

It probably has a grip, for ergonomics, and a clip on the side, so that it fits into your pocket without sliding down into the territory of all the not-pen things.

It may even have a little button on the top you can click to deploy the pen part, or repeatedly slam to the annoyance of everyone else on the bus.

But despite hundreds of years in the advancement of the pen, from the long scrolling quill to now, the pen still lacks the main thing we need it for: an opinion.

That part is up to you.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you’re burning the candle at both ends—

The goal of the metaphor is basically this: the point of the candle isn’t just to burn, it’s most importantly of all to burn slowly.

There’s all sorts of other things that can burn fast and bright. Your house is built of most of them. The goal of the candle is to keep burning for a long, low time.

Burn the candle at both ends, double the light, halve the time it burns, and also, it’s a bitch to hold without burning yourself.

So maybe instead of burning the candle at both ends, you could use the candle to light a bonfire?

A bonfire you and your candle can enjoy, and still enjoy, long into the night, when you have enough light to read.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Sometimes life saves you from the disaster—tosses you straight into the eye of the storm, and lets you stay there until it blows over.

Sometimes life saves you from the villain, a miraculous turn of circumstances by which the cops show up on time, a stranger steps in, a bolt of lightning strikes your enemy down just before they pull the trigger.

And then sometimes life just gives you a quick kick to the nuts.

Which may just be a swift kick, nothing more than the accidental happenstance of an unconscious universe. But you have to remember this part too:

Sometimes life saves you from the thing you think you want. From accidental self-betrayal. From walking up to the cosmological craps table and putting all your meaning on red.

Sometimes life saves you from your self.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If the path was clear, you wouldn’t have to walk it.

Could document the twists and turns with drawings instead of your feet.

Could tell of the perils of the road with your words instead of your fears.

Could speak of high mountains and low valleys without feeling them in your knees.

So when you feel the frustration of uncertainty—the raging question, why can’t anyone tell me what’s next? Why can’t anyone explain the path forward?

It’s because the path forward can’t be explained. Only walked.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Any reasonably intelligent person recognizes that life is full of margins: there’s more space on the road than is strictly necessary for most cars. A wider gap between you and the train than is needed to avoid being whacked by a train. And there isn’t a sane, rational adult who doesn’t have at least the odd pop tart or jar of peanut butter floating around their fridge.

One could look at this system and note the inefficiency. All the wasted space off to the side. The minutes and the cents and the inches all going wasted.

But it’s just as easy to imagine what a disaster the system would be if it had no margin—how many accidents you would cause if the road was precisely the width of your car, or how many bills we’d miss if literally every dollar had to go to the exact line item of the budget.

Perfectly optimized systems offer no room for error—so perfectly optimizing yourself is something akin to optimizing for failure.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You should spend your entire life obsessed with it.

Constantly looking for more information, new opinions, differing perspectives, waking up every morning to press F5 and see if someone finally sorted it out.

There’s no important question than that of ethics. One we all have a responsibility to pursue.

And yet, if you do it right—take the information in—you might find that while the obsession never ends, you can never find it within yourself to bring final judgment, to draw a line in the sand of the cosmos between correct and incorrect.

Forever judging, forever withholding judgment.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If you can’t prove the meaning of life, you could start by disproving it:

Coming up with your best hypothesis as to what would make life worthwhile, then trying them, knowing full well they’ll fall short—eventually crumble.

But always one step closer, a little further up, a little further in.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

This letter has no poetic prose or hyperbole, just a question.

Imagine a world like this one without a postal service.

Then imagine how difficult it would be to create one.

The laughter in the face of venture capitalists as you propose servicing every house in every city, a connected web of impossible logistical issues?

You’d be insane to try it. And yet, we live in a world where it exists.

What other shoulders of giants do we miss out on? What other hundreds-of-years projects are coming to fruition?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

So is the road to heaven.

As is the road over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house, same as the road to wigan pier, same as the road that takes you to the nearest Buccee’s.

No one with bad intentions takes the time to pave roads for other people to walk on.

The question is: what will you do with all your good intentions? If you’re going to walk on someone else’s paved road, where will you go?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In a world where driving fast cars fast isn’t always an option—

Courtesy not only of budgets, but if speed bumps, traffic lights, and pedestrians—

Then you may discover an old truth: that driving a slow car fast is more enjoyable than driving a fast car slow.

Pushing the limits of something is more enjoyable than never testing them.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In Confessions, one of the all-time books people only pretend to read, Augustine writes of his youth, joining a band of fellow boys who decide to pluck all the pears from a pear-tree with no intention of eating them—just looking for destruction wherever they could find it.

This brings Augustine to tears, wondering at his own nature, that he could bring chaos to a stranger, throwing pears on the ground for no reason other than to see them fall.

You might face up to your own destructive impulse in the same way. The part of you that just wants to watch the world burn.

And one way you might do it is to find a place to plant a pear tree—a pear tree where one day, you might see some kids climbing in the limbs, gleefully wrecking all the fruit they can find, and you might look at them with a smile on your face, knowing the tree-planting futures that awaits them.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

We have buckets, we have shelves.

We have tiny plastic tupperwares for baby-sized meals and gargantuan interlocking plastic monstrosities we leave in the garage.

We have plates, bowls, bins, cups, mugs, saucers, and so many plastic grocery bags tucked away in a cupboard we only add to.

We have luggage, purses, backpacks, roller bags that only get used thrice a year.

And yet, despite all the options, someone decided to leave the proof in the pudding.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If a stranger were to walk up to us and say “this is going to hurt” we might rightfully find some distance from that stranger.

After all, there’s no reason to take on pain.

But faced with doctors who tell us there will be a slight pinch, or a prod, or a “little discomfort”, we’ll rightfully roll our eyes. We’re not 12 anymore.

So if something is going to hurt, we might as well acknowledge it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

You are allowed to want more mental toughness. Allowed to thank yourself for developing it. Allowed to take on hard circumstances, or think of those from the past, and reflect on how your emotional strength and willingness to endure got you through.

But you’re also allowed to thank your higher self for putting you in situations where you didn’t need to be tough. For navigating dangerous waters without taking the worst rapids.

Or thank god, or the universe, or some other force for not pushing you so hard as to develop callouses on your brain, on your heart, strength you might develop, sure, but grateful that you haven’t been as broken down as you could have.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The next time you see someone playing the lottery, think:

There’s no price you wouldn’t be willing to pay to experience some hope.

To put some upside into your life, even if your more rational self knew it was false.

Think: my life could have painted itself into a corner such that I felt stuck, and I would give anything to feel like there was a chance someone left the window open.

Feel that empathy, and then, don’t play the lottery.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It only takes one.

One song, one book, one job, one partner, one moment in time when the target meets the arrow and you hit the bullseye.

It only takes one win to have success.

The problem is you don’t know which one, which means you have to do all the other ones that don’t succeed to.

What if you were assured to write the hit song this year—but you don’t know which day?

You’d have to show up to all of them to find out.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It’s fun while it lasted.

And then it’s something else.

Something not fun, not giddy, the high of the moment fading away—into a story, a lesson, a wound, breaking the muscle down like a deadlift to grow back, or slashing a scar across your face, like a pirate.

We all know life offers more than fun, so why would we be so pressed when the fun stops lasting?

What will we make of these once-fun things, now resurrected into something else? Something more?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

When you pet a dog, don’t talk to them in a baby voice. The dog cannot understand English. But the dog understands a different language—channel that voice down into your fingers, letting them pluck gently, understanding that from the dogs perspective, the touch is the conversation.

We can be so obsessed with not stooping to other people’s level in a fight that we forget the first rule of communication: it’s not what we mean, it’s what they hear. Which means for dogs, we need to stoop to the level of touch to show our love.

Are the other people around us so different? What does it mean to match everyone’s level in communication?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Sometimes meaning is the thing we duct tape on to “the way things are”—cold reality that really isn’t so much cold as it is simply reality. Existing separate from all judgments, from all opinions, just things as they are.

Which route would you rather choose: to watch the meaning we try to attach to each and every new song, new project, new painting fall away? Or to usher each into the world on its own terms, allowing the meaning of it to surprise us the same way it catches everyone else off guard?

Always moving, always creating, not only allowing everything to be as it is, but rejoicing in reality on reality’s own terms?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It wouldn’t be the same without you.

Just as it wouldn’t be the same with you.

A statement true for each one of the 8 billion possible you’s running around this little shared corner of the galaxy, each full of potential, yes, but each also entirely mucking up what would have otherwise been.

We don’t get a choice about whether or not we change things. But on occasion, we get a choice about how we change them.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

People love your old stuff. Your first album, the early run of paintings, or sometimes, simply the person you used to be.

This causes many artists a great deal of consternation. After all, they’ve spent all this time, energy, and money making the new stuff, pouring their heart and soul into it, only to have the audience do the functional equivalent of screaming “freebird.”

But what else could they yell for? That’s what they know. The people they’ve seen and love, that exists in the real world, that they’ve had the time to interact with, to know, to understand, and finally, to identify with as their own.

Give it time. They’ve only just me the new you.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

As a kid—

The guitar fit in your hand just a little easier than the others around you.

Or you found that when it came to write an essay, the words in your head fell into order a little easier, marching out through your pen in a semi-straight line.

Maybe the paint brush was a little lighter in your hand, you were the benchmark for speed in your middle school, or you had a knack for hustling lemonade no four year old could ever match.

You found success by accident, a tiny little glimpse of who you are.

Now it’s time to do it on purpose.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Sometimes, the last thing a person needs to hear is that you understand.

Especially if you actually do understand.

Because in this moment they don’t need help, they don’t need a hand, they need the emotional equivalent of enough floor to thrash around until they exhaust themselves.

Sometimes, empathy itself demands that empathy be set aside—knowing enough of the situation to know that if you were in their shoes, you wouldn’t want someone to say they knew what you were going through.

Let them have their moment—maybe, at some point in the future, they’ll let you have yours, too.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

One of the first steps of growing as a person is learning to accept your emotions—like a long haul trucker who doesn’t get to choose their cargo, we get ourselves in trouble when we try to fend off another couple of pallets of anger, learning to cooly let them pass us by.

But then we can fall for a second trap, that of watching our emotions with too much pride, measuring the success of each interaction off of whatever feelings arise.

This gives us no more control over what emotions we feel, instead playing the cosmic slot machine, hoping we walk away from the day feeling good about it.

The writing of the day, the work that you’ve done, your interaction with your partner, your friends, your kids—you deserve a better judge than how you feel when you walk away from them.

Something kinder, more objective, more rational. The emotions will come, but that doesn’t mean you have to give them the power of summary judgment.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Dear other shore—

Across the river, the pond, the ocean—

Would it be too much trouble to come a little closer?

Lean in, so we don’t have to shout so loudly?

Could you find the time to scootch this way, just a little? To bring yourself towards your sibling, this present shore we stand on, so that we could come across without getting as wet, or build a bridge without extending so much effort?

Or will you turn a deaf ears on our prayers, remaining on your side of the water, staying there, waiting for us to get our feet wet?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The emerald doesn’t have a to-do list.

The color purple doesn’t wake up with an agenda.

Gold doesn’t worry about the gold standard, just as diamonds don’t review the marketing campaigns about being forever.

Everything we hold as valuable, all the precious things of the earth, they simply are.

If they worry, they only ever worry about being themselves. The color purple no less vivid under scrutiny. The diamond no less hard when tested. The emerald simply reflecting back the world’s light in its own green way.

In the same way, it’s our task to be no more or less than good, despite the circumstances, never diminished.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the grand scheme of life—

Context, conflict, resolution.

The set ups, the references, the rambling stories—

We get the opportunity to play the hero, the sidekick, the extra, and occasionally, the villain.

But every now and then life shows up with a different script, and we find ourselves the punchline of a joke—most likely one that isn’t even that funny.

Can we find it within ourselves to play the part? To smile, knowing everything will shake out a little differently tomorrow?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

The barber who cut Napoleon’s hair—

The person who tuned Mozart’s piano—

The boy who cleaned the horse shit out of Genghis Khan’s stables—

Einstein’s landlord, Sir Isaac Newton’s childhood nemesis, the haberdash who made sure Bach had as many ridiculous wigs as history could demand—

We don’t know any of their names. Yet they experienced the exact same fate as people they served.

Here for a moment, then gone.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

If most of life is about capture—

Making thoughts reality, sitting on the side of your brain with a net, or a spear, or hook, waiting for important ideas to come by, close enough to capture it—write it, capture it, make it—

Then it may be worth taking time to set the net down.

Taking a deep breath, and looking back into the stream of consciousness, not as fisher does, but as a poet, or a lover, or a child, waiting for nothing, wanting nothing, simply watching the thoughts float lazily by, without care, without interpretation, without bias.

After all, you can always go back to catching them in a minute, or an hour, or a day.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In a world full of millennial snowflakes—where no one steps, quiet quitting is invented, and “no one wants to work anymore”—

Do you want to be known as the generation that shoots the next generation down?

Points out the obvious flaws, even though they’re likely more true than untrue?

Or would you rather find something to esteem, something to love, some admirable quality of the next generation you yourself don’t possess?

Championing the next generation despite their flaws instead of tearing them down for them?

Who knows—love something enough, and they may actually have the motivation to become it.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Life will come to you.

Will do 90 in a 55, flying down the turnpike, drifting the corner—and flying right on by.

Always moving, always growing, always rounding every bend.

Always moving closer to us, always moving further away, expanding.

Life will come to you, but it will come to you with demands. Demands that make you leave where you are.

Will you meet them?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the immediate sense, the unexpected is the source of the interesting. It’s also the source of the pain, the unintended consequences that make up human experience, the wars, the betrayals, the layoffs, the shutdowns.

In the more abstract sense, the eternal perspective, all of those downfalls shift over to the realm of the expected. We know in abstract that not everything will go well, that life will dish it as much as it takes it.

Given the downside of having to experience all of this, we have at least one advantage in our corner:

We can take either perspective any time we want, alternately steeling ourselves against calamity, acknowledging it as inevitable, or allowing ourselves to be pleasantly surprised by something we probably could have seen coming.

The choice is yours.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

It may not be the darkest, coldest day of the year, but even if it is, we remember:

No amount of logic, thinking, cynicism, or argument makes the subjectivity of Christmas any less itself Christmas.

Whatever you celebrate, let it shine bright, then glow, in warm, rich hues, casting the gleam far enough for others to enjoy.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In the paradox of living, nature, unlike cake, can live in multiple states.

You can have it, and love it, and change it.

All at the same time, each not diminished for the illogical relationship to the next.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Take your steps.

Enjoy the path—the stops along the way, the fresh starts and exciting new beginnings, the respite, the rhythm of sabbath and new starts.

Catch the sites. Send postcards. Enjoy each and every new biome, the way the world shifts in the season, walking the trail in weather good and poor.

Read the maps, write reviews, hold your own opinion and counsel.

But, without it diminishing your enjoyment of it, never forget where the road of life ends.

All of this, and then?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

There’s no greater force in human nature than the snowball effect—the way good moments roll into good days, rolling into great weeks, rolling into that almighty, just-beyond-our-reach achievement.

A fact we all acknowledge, while all still absolutely failing in our ability to understand and live in light of.

In that regard, are our lives the ultimate form of judgment?

Being forced to live out our days under the consequences of what we’ve chosen, each and every great impulse, each and every day phoned in, all coming back not in some future day, but here and now—carried in your bones, marked in your DNA, the cumulative effects of the life you’ve lived.

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

In a world of shades of gray, we love a good villain—the few and rare chances to really let someone have it, sans the normal detritus of perspective, opinion, and nuance.

So if we love the rare moments life affords us a villain, why would we be so loathe to, on occasion, play one?

Something like taking our turn doing the social equivalent of taking out the trash?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

We could argue for a better place, the benefits of being here or there, the pros and cons of another time, list the benefits and negative of the present company, write a wishlist of upgrades for the current moment.

Then acknowledge that, wishes notwithstanding, this the here, the now, the when, the where, the what, and the who that we’re working with.

All of which we are equally a part.

And we could ask what amounts to the only logical question: what next?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.

Minus a few shifts of the earth’s axis, a slight change in the sunrise, the present axiom of an otherwise unobserved holiday, today is exactly the same as tomorrow—unless you think of tomorrow as being different.

In that regard, the energy the new year holds is always there—stored not in the warehouses of the heavens, but locked in your own heart, always available to you again, always ready to tap in, to start new, to ?

Thank you. Let's have a great day.