I’ve found that when I’m deciding what to do, my mind makes a prediction about how fun an activity will be. Practicing piano: boring; watching TV: exciting.

Yet, my brain at least, is really bad at this. When I do get sit down at the piano bench, it’s not extremely boring like I forecasted.

I have a theory that’s definitely not correct, yet helps me spend my time more fruitfully. The theory is that the brain, in its appraisal of an activity, only sees your experience for the first 15 seconds. That tends to be the hard part, when you’re just getting started and you have to re-calibrate.

Realize that when you get past that, you might enjoy whatever it is.

Things can seem like a lot sometimes. We have to handle 101 different fires and often we can feel out of our depth.

Slow down, breathe. Take things one at a time.

You got this.

You’re not going to get everything you wanted to done everyday. You’re not going to handle your emotions perfectly all the time. You’re going to mess up.

But obsessing over your mistakes and the undone tasks, beating yourself up for dropping one of the balls you’re juggling, is only going to make it worse.

Yes, you messed up.

Maybe that’s ok.

Try naming every emotion you experienced today. If you’re anything like me, your day was probably full of ups-and-downs. One moment you were feeling pessimistic and down, and 30 minutes later you were excited and confident.

When you’re in a mood though, it may seem like that is what you will feel for the foreseeable future. Your mind’s projection for the day’s emotions are going to be based off what you feel in the moment.

With this in mind, I find it helpful to remember how volatile our emotions are. Yes, you might feel anxious, but who knows what you’ll feel in a few hours.

The point I’m trying to make is that emotions aren’t set in stone. If you don’t want to feel gloomy all day, force yourself to do something that cheers you up. It might not seem like it’ll do anything, but in my experience, it does the trick.

People are often much more open to talking than you might think.

What do you have to lose from starting up the conversation?

People always want to say what they mean perfectly. Often, a fear that the message will be garbled or they won’t come out looking cool keeps them from putting their thought out at all.

This can happen when we have opinions we want to share, need to stand up for ourselves, or feel a need to tell someone how we’re feeling.

This doesn’t make sense, if you have something important to say, say it. Don’t get in your own way because of a compulsion to say the perfect thing.

Not a lot of people can seem to agree on definitions for pleasure and happiness. Here’s how I think of them.

Happiness is distinct from pleasure. Happy people aren’t always feeling very pleasant. And people who feel pleasure aren’t necessarily happy.

I think of pleasure as an enjoyable state that certain activities put us in. The feeling you get when you watch a tv show you like is pleasure. Happiness occurs when a person is satisfied with their life overall, and is in a good mood much of the time.

I’ve found this distinction important to make, as it’s not always in the best interest of happiness to pursue pleasure at all costs.

You can’t be perfect. And you shouldn’t try.

Perfectionism in a project either leads to procrastination or the project never coming to completion.

It’s the same story with standards in other areas of life. Lofty goals are good, but perfectionism is harmful.

Yes, have high standards, push yourself. If you make a mistake and mess up, don’t sugarcoat it, acknowledge it. But don’t beat yourself up to the point where it’s only hurting you.

Everyone has irrational fears. Some people are scared of planes, others get nervous around cats. For me, I get anxious right before phone calls.

When something we have to do sets off one of our fears, we’ll often put off the task, still planning to do it, but not today. In these situations, I’ve found that cutting back on perfectionism and just starting is a good approach.

Lowering your standards for the task takes some pressure off. You recognize that something is scary, so instead of setting your sights on something amazing, completion is your goal. This helps with the second part, stopping the overanalyzing in your head and just starting the task.

When something is scary, don’t aim for perfection and just do it.

I started learning a new skill recently, React Native, a library to create Native apps with JavaScript. It has a steep learning curve. I spent hours trying to figure out how to do something that would take a few minutes with vanilla JS. I often felt like I was wasting my time.

Yet, as I’m starting to finally grasp the basics, I can say with confidence that it is worth it. And this isn’t limited to React Native, or programming technologies, it covers plenty of skills.

Writing. Sales. Cooking. A musical instrument.

These are all examples of skills with a steep learning curve that are worth every ounce of effort you put in.

When you’re learning a new skill correctly, you’ll probably feel horrible at it. Take that as a positive sign and soldier on.

Life is composed of a multitude of complex systems that we have to constantly monitor, put effort into, and solve problems for. It’s analogous to juggling. Each system, each part of your life, whether it’s your social group or your diet, is a ball in the air.

When you juggle, you can only catch and throw one (well, technically two) ball at a time. If you try to do more, you’ll invariably mess up and drop a few. The best strategy is to only focus on the ball you’re about to catch, ignoring the others for the moment.

This juggling analogy is getting little confusing, so I’m going to drop it. What I’m trying to say is, we have to do a lot of things in life. It can be overwhelming. But, it’s a little less overwhelming when we take the time to step back and look at how we’re handling things. And, just like in juggling, it makes sense to tackle issues one at a time.

Sure, there might be a hundred balls about to hit the ground, but dealing with one quickly so you can move on to another is preferable to catching none.

Have you ever noticed that, when creating something, staring at a blank page can be the hardest part? Whether you’re designing or writing or drawing, sitting down to start is often the scariest part.

I think it’s because we want the creation to be good and at the beginning, we don’t have a clear path of how to do that. It’s often much easier to modify something bad than to create something totally new.

When you’re staring at a blank page, a little scared about starting, just pick up your pen, put your hand on your mouse, reach for that brush, and start. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.

Everyone knows someone who takes everything deadly seriously. But everyone also has that laidback friend.

Who do you think is more resilient when something goes wrong? Who’s able to take it in their stride when they fail?

Don’t take life too seriously. It’s no fun that way.

Sometimes we don’t know what the best path forward is. In these cases, it’s important to stop and think, but after some point, even if you’re not wholly confident in your choice, you just have to make it.

If you pick an option and stick with it, you’ll figure out if it was the right choice along the way.

Make decisions faster.

It’s possible to be surrounded by people all day and still feel lonely.

When our interactions are shallow and never go past superficial topics, we only connect with others to a limited extent.

Yet, it’s hard to express emotions or have real conversations. It’s scary.

What if what we have to say or how we feel isn’t deemed acceptable? What if people don’t care?

This is the crux of vulnerability. It’s terrifying and sometimes painful, but is needed in order to form real relationships.

It’s around the time of year when everyone thinks up goals they’d like to accomplish. Most people, however, give them up within a few weeks.

I’m not going to say that I know exactly why this is or how to fix it, but here’s is an idea that I’m finding helpful to stay productive this year.

Remove the bad choice.

When the choice is between the ice cream in your freezer and spending 45 minutes to cook a meal, most nights you’ll opt for the ice cream. But, when the closest ice cream is 10 minutes of effort away, cooking a dinner is much more appealing.

When you make it significantly harder or impossible to choose the bad option, you’ll naturally drift toward the good one.

Sure, you could try to rely on discipline all the time, but that will inevitably fail you.

Besides, why can’t it be fun to make the good decision?

If you’ve ever read a nonfiction book that’s trying to teach you something, like Atomic Habits or Spark, you’ve probably realized that you can communicate almost all of the essential information contained within the book in just a few pages.

Yet, I don’t think this necessitates spurning the reading of long-form nonfiction. There’s value in repetition and approaching topics from different angles.

And that’s what good books do, they present the important information with stories and explanations, taking time to cover the nuanced pieces. This lets you grasp the material well, retaining the information solidly.

Yes, you can read a summary and get the main points in fifteen minutes, and you should, this helps you to see if you’re interested in the book. But you shouldn’t always stop there. If you find a topic that interests you, something you’d like to delve deeper with, read the whole book.

It’s worth it.

I often don’t feel like hanging out with friends. It sounds too energy-intensive.

Yet, besides the obvious point that it’s often more fun than I’d think, I’ve found that when I don’t get enough interactions in, I feel a low sense of loneliness.

Being social isn’t just fun in the moment, it fulfills a basic need and can serve as a preventative measure against sadness.

Oftentimes I’ll feel discouraged. Things don’t go my way, I fail to accomplish what I set out to, or I feel doubt that a plan I set in motion will come to fruition.

The best way to combat this feeling, and the potential problem it might be alluding to, is to take action. Doing something, even if it’s small, reestablishes a sense of confidence and optimism. Plus it might actually solve the problem.

Emotions are built into us to get us to take action. It’s a good idea to at least hear them out.

Our brains are complex. Billions of neurons using different electrochemical reactions to enable us to think, feel, remember, and reason.

Yet as miraculous as our brains are, they often don’t operate the way we prefer, or even expect, them to. One doesn’t need to look farther than Wikipedia’s list of mental fallacies to realize that.

Knowing this, here’re a few points that I try to keep in mind when making decisions and evaluating emotions and thoughts my mind gives me.

1. We evolved in a different environment than the one we live in today. Our brains and bodies aren’t designed to handle today’s world.

Everything around you, from your phones to the food you buy, is designed to take advantage of your outdated mental machinery.

2. Our brains suck at certain activities that we engage in everyday. One of these is the mental gauging of how pleasurable something will be, how “happy,” it will make us.

I often feel a lot of resistance to engaging in a hobby of mine, when my brain projects the future where I practice piano, it foresees it as being boring and leaving me unhappy. Yet, in my experience that’s not the whole story. When I do sit down to play piano, I find that, yes, it is boring, and sometimes I get frustrated, but I completely missed the feelings of pride and accomplishment that make the whole experience worth it.

One potential explanation for why our brains do this goes back to #1, our brains didn’t evolve to make us happy, rather, they use happiness as a carrot on the end of stick to guide us into behavior that would’ve be evolutionarily beneficial 100,000 years ago.(i.e. eating that entire carton of ice cream)

3. We don’t have to listen to everything our brain tells us. One of the tenets of mindfulness is that our brain is constantly slamming us with thoughts and emotions and impulses. But, we don’t have to take every thought as an order. It’s possible to decide that, while you don’t feel like working out right now, you’re going to do it anyway.

This can seem obvious to some, but realizing that you don’t have to do everything your brain says can free you from following the same old bad habits.

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Try going through these points the next time you’re frustrated with something you did. You’ll find that understanding our brain’s machinery lets us make better decisions.