I love making lists of lessons. Sometimes I do them on my birthday, sometimes the new year. This year’s is (comparatively) short, but some big ones in here! Happy New Year!
1. Stillness is power.
- You don’t have to correct the record all the time, or even most of the time. Just… let people be wrong about stuff.
- Time slows way down when you do one thing at a time, at about 60% effort.
- If you want to have a whole bunch of daffodils in the spring, you have to plant a whole bunch of bulbs in the fall and then wait all winter long.
- The effort required to get the house from 80% clean to 90% clean is 10x greater than the effort it takes to get it from 70% clean to 80% clean.
- The reason it takes forever to clean out your closet or your junk drawer isn’t that it objectively takes a lot of time (it doesn’t), it’s that you spend most of the time freaking out about how all of this stuff got in here in the first place and what it means and what it says about you and what’s going to happen next and OH MY GOD IS THAT FROM JR HIGH? If you just… don’t play that game, you can get it done in an hour (closet) or 15 minutes (junk drawer.) For real.
- The junk drawer is (and I can’t emphasize this highly enough) not for junk. Everything in there should solve a tiny problem. Everything in the junk drawer needs to 1. Apply to work there. 2. Have their job performance reviewed often.
- Names and labels have power. Let’s use the previous “junk drawer” as an example. Just call it the essentials drawer and watch it change automatically. What else changes when you give it a new name?
- Buy parchment paper in the precut, pre-folded sheets and all of your parchment paper problems will be solved. I mean all of them.
- If your AI is off the rails it’s 💯 you. Related: if it’s magic, that’s also you.
- If you get a notice in the mail from the insurance company that has drone photos of your roof and references coverage, do not (I repeat, do not) scan it and think to yourself “blah blah blah, will look at this in more detail when I have time.” The time is now. Every minute counts.
- Thick cut bacon is the one you should be buying, forever and ever, amen.
- Transplanting plants into new pots is a very big deal (for them).
- If you have two teenage boys, you might think you’re doing yourself a favor by preparing 20 burritos for the week ahead, to cut down on the cooking. Instead, you’ll learn the invaluable lesson that two teenage boys can easily down 20 burritos in less than a week.
- Related: sometimes it’s best just to feed them dinner after school and a snack at dinner time.
- There’s nothing wrong with going to a lot of museums one time during the year, but there’s something really special about going to the same museum many times. Narrow and deep.