Kipling had it right:

“If you can keep your head when all about you / are losing theirs,” it’s an enormous advantage — and, in many cases, a gift to those about you.

As in railroad crossing: stop, look, and listen.

We rush through a lot of l0w-probability, high-consequence decisions each day.

Heuristics still handle the majority of cognitive load, but it’s worth recognizing and responding to invitations to pause, assess, and make a conscious judgment before proceeding.

A rolling snowball tends to get bigger and heavier.

At some point, it grows out of all proportion to the two handfuls of snow that started it.

Unchecked, it can get big enough to run you over.

Lots of things are like this: commitments that start out small and don’t stay that way. That quick peek at social media feeds. All those itty-bitty self-perpetuating memberships that are only $9.99 a month.

Every so often, it’s worth zapping those snowballs and going back to the couple of handfuls of what was actually worthwhile.

As you may have noticed, the site will be a-changin’. (It’s not going anywhere; I’ve just changed the domain name and will be building it out.)

I’ve stayed stuck longer than I wanted to around some project scoping and sequencing lately — there are a handful of things I want to put together in the next few months, and I wanted to get the order and magnitude of operations correct.

As usual, smallest-viable wins: the smallest viable steps forward are the way out of stuck and into action. There was a way to do this that would have required the better part of a weekend and a pretty big chunk of change; as long as that felt like what was required, I could and would keep feeling stuck.

Once I saw a smaller, simpler way to proceed, I invested about an hour and an amount of money that felt small enough to risk. And, just like that, the way lies open to new creative challenges.

Time to get to work.

***

PS: About risking money — what’s really going on there? It’s really two risks, and the dollars aren’t the scary one. The first investment is a simple annual payment: X number of dollars are going to be working for me by keeping this domain for the coming year and not doing something else.

The second risk — the one that actually feels scary — is the work. Now that I’ve invested in a domain with my name on it, what am I going to do with it throughout the year I just paid for and beyond?

It’s tough to say no.

But it’s often tougher to let go.

Once you’ve said yes, there’s ego and expectation and all the rest wrapped up in it.

So, the next time you find yourself standing at the top of the slippery slope, how will you give an answer you’re actually prepared to live with?

This requirement: what is it actually for?

If it’s just a signaling mechanism, who’s the intended recipient?

Is that person or group actually seeing the signal you think you’re sending?

Even if they see it, does anyone care?

You can design a lot of requirements to satisfy your imagined external constituencies.

But before you bind your hands like that, it might be worth checking to see if anyone’s actually watching the performance as closely as you think.

What seems vital inside the boundaries of your own context rarely matters so much to the people whose opinions matter so much to you.

One response to complexity and uncertainty is to demand more expertise.

Sometimes studying a problem for 20 years is good preparation: for a delicate surgery, an expert, experienced surgeon with the right specialty is the way to go.

But other complex problems aren’t like that. In highly uncertain arenas — like the markets, or politics — yesterday’s expertise isn’t necessarily the best guide to solving today’s challenge.

It’s important to be up to date. But if you’re trying to turn pro as a problem-solver in an uncertain world, it’s worth learning fundamental principles rather than building expertise of the moment.

Whose permission do you need to feel free to create?

What would you create if you had that permission?

Now — do you really need permission?

The big shift from school to work (or so-called “real life”) is the question that determines value.

At all times, we’re asked what we can contribute.

But, often without warning, the form of the question shifts from “What do you know?” to “What can you do?”

To be clear, neither what you know nor what you can do determines your ultimate value as a person. That’s a question of metaphysics, not of markets.

But the ancient wisdom still holds true: no matter how much you learn in school, you will sooner or later be judged on how well you’ve learned to apply what you know.

Don’t hold your breath waiting to be taught that in school.

When I was working at Georgetown, I remember having a conversation once with an administrator at another Jesuit university who’d left the business world for academia.

“I was used to thinking in quarters,” she told me, “but these guys think in centuries.”

Both by nature and Georgetown’s nurture, I’m inclined to think on very long timelines. And I believe that’s an essential habit of mind to cultivate in order to consider ideas and actions in their fuller implications. The opportunity of the moment can often cause real harm over the long term.

But this year — quite by accident — I began to think in quarters (and even tighter timelines). And the advantages of this, it seems, are a bias toward action and an ability to adjust relatively quickly so long as I’m diligent about reflecting on my actions.

The long term is what really counts, so we have to keep our eyes fixed on the far horizon.

But, in order to get there, we’ve got to take steps, adjust, and take some more.