Go and love someone exactly as they are

Go and love someone exactly as they are. And then watch how quickly they transform into the greatest, truest version of themselves. When one feels seen and appreciated in their own essence, one is instantly empowered.

The obligation of the honest skeptic

Objections are helpful. We object by holding back action or support because we question one or more pieces of data. But the other half of this is the obligation: if the data ends up meeting the standard of proof we set for it, we have to change our minds and spend as much energy supporting the idea as we did to oppose it.

How many good days?

Decisions and crises and moments of significant effort and risk can be stressful. But the challenge of a stressful day is rarely directly related to today, it’s about tomorrow or years from now. This means that pushing your way through some critical choices now will probably pay off in far more good days later. How many good days later does hard decision work today earn us?

Some problems lend themselves to reexamination

Some problems lend themselves to reexamination. A second, third, or even fourth thought is productive because our initial impulses might not reflect our best effort at understanding the nuances of the situation. But many problems simply create more thoughts, without productive output. As we confront something that is unlikely to have a simple or productive way forward, it’s easy to go into a mental tizzy imagining solutions. The art is understanding which sort of problem we’re facing. And devoting the right amount of thought (not less and definitely not more) to the situation we’re in. Spending cycles on categorizing the problem is probably more productive than wasting time on problems that don’t deserve our effort.

People don’t know what we know, and don’t believe what we believe

How is it possible, we wonder, that people like us don’t believe what we believe or do what we do? Not just people we don’t know, but the people we do know. Simply asking the question helps us find a way forward. Realizing that people don’t know what we know, and don’t believe what we believe. And most of all, they have a noise in their head, just as we do.

Compared to what

Satisfaction is often driven by the story we tell ourselves. How does this rank compare to what I expected? Compared to what I used to have? Compared to the person sitting next to me? The richest person in the world used to sleep on the floor and eat moldy food but still felt great because it was more than the person in the next cave. The good news is that our perception of comparison is up to us.

If you try to do way too much exercise

If you try to do way too much exercise or move way too much weight you will injure yourself. This injury will lead to chronic pain that is outside of your control and will prevent you from having any agency with that part of your body. Similarly, if you experience psychological struggles that overwhelm you, you’ll be traumatized and you will experience chronic psychological pain and feel debilitated in that area (or in many areas) of your life.