I spend a lot of time these days thinking and talking and writing about how to help people get where they’re trying to go — and, by extension, help get society where we need to go.

Naturally, this means dealing with change. And not just with theories of change, though those are certainly important. Most of all, it means dealing with all the fears and insecurities and individual quirks that get in the way of people learning and growing.

Over and over, the question is how to respond to someone who’s stretched as far as he or she feels capable of stretching. Simply pointing out that it looks different from where I’m sitting isn’t too valuable: that’s like yelling at the TV when the receiver drops the apparently unmissable catch.

The crux of it seems to be about what information to transmit and, especially, how.

In general, less is more: telling someone he’s not good at football isn’t nearly as useful as working on his running, then his quickness, then his catching. And it’s really important to distinguish between “That doesn’t work” and “That didn’t work for me.” All receivers must stay in bounds, but Bill Walsh’s receivers need different techniques from Bill Parcells’.

Most of all, it’s essential to walk the fine line between the bold invitation and chest-beating confrontation. “Level up already!” or “Level up — I dare you!” are much different interventions than “I think I see what you’re trying to do here. Have you tried thinking about it this way?”

We can’t browbeat our way to a better society. It’s sometimes tempting, but it’s worse than useless. The only viable alternative is to boldly, generously, humanely invite people to better themselves.

Where’s the best place to intervene in a system?

Do you respond to the person in need, or do you work in the office that might alleviate the crisis that’s creating the need?

The most efficacy — and satisfaction — is usually found by balancing the two. We can’t ever forget that we’re dealing with real people, and there’s a certain bond that comes from serving meals to the hungry.

But hunger is a symptom of something that’s broken in society, and it can’t be solved by serving meals. Sooner or later, we’ve got to get cooking in the policy shop.

It’s all in the name: the connection economy.

It used to be that you went to a good school, got good grades, made some good connections — and, if you did all that, you could be reasonably sure of a good job.

The upshot was that you could effectively focus on doing your thing, whatever that was.

In my case, it was (and, in a different way, still is) public service. And, when I started college a little more than a decade ago, I thought that meant it was OK for me to say that I didn’t do commerce and I didn’t do creativity and — except for in-person networking — I didn’t really do connection, either.

So I missed a whole bunch of important things about how life works now. I didn’t understand the internet business models that now dominate the economy. The first time I heard of Twitter was in a Washington Post op-ed I was reading (in a print copy of the newspaper!) over breakfast in the cafeteria. Et cetera.

Most of all, I kept following the old logic model: go to class, learn what worked, find a job and try to repeat more of what worked than what didn’t. History is extremely important, but it’s also important to have some sense of what’s going on now.

That’s what I missed, and that’s what I’ve been slowly trying to make up for, largely on my own time and almost entirely outside the classroom, since I finally began to see it.

We’re all connected, and we’re all in the economy. Together, those two things mean we’re bound up in society. And both society and the economy are eagerly waiting for all of us to connect the dots and make something interesting.

It helps to know your history if you’re going to connect the right dots and make your interesting work intelligible. But making interesting connections, today, is where all the value is.

And if making things better is your thing, it’s the best chance you’ve got to do just that.

Clear writing, it’s said, is the product of clear thinking. (Of course, the inverse is also true.)

Yesterday, I spent nearly five hours typing: collecting dots, connecting them, and seeing what conclusions emerged in the process.

I didn’t find the answer to life, or even necessarily to the dilemma that caused me to start typing. But I got a lot clearer about the questions I ought to be asking, and what kinds of answers I’m really looking for.

“Just type” is one of the core principles of Seth Godin’s workshops, and that experience was a powerful lesson in the value of just typing. A few hours at the keyboard brought much more clarity than many more spent reading, hiding, or (over-)thinking.

When you don’t know what the right answer is, or even what the right question might be, start writing. Sooner than you think, it’ll become clear.

In general, I prefer not to repeat activities. I make a new recipe nearly every night. I walk home from the grocery store by a different route than how I walk there. And once I’ve figured something out, I’m quickly looking to hand it off and take on a new challenge.

“Been there, done that” is the beginning of the end — and the end is sharp.

But there’s a difference between rote and a return. As the ancient philosophers understood, you can cross the river on your way out of town and on your way back, but neither you nor the river will be exactly the same.

In a life of campaigns, Caesar would have crossed the Rubicon many times. But he and the river became legend because he once crossed it in a way no one had seen before.

Opportunity never waits to knock until it’s convenient for you.

When things happen — or wish to happen — it’s always in the midst of the muddle of the everyday.

The dishes still need to get out of the sink, the laundry has to be folded, those emails have to be answered, and on and on.

And yet. Sometimes, it’s time to put down the everyday routine and answer the call to adventure.

If it doesn’t feel convenient, or you don’t feel ready, or you don’t know how, you’re in good company: none of the great adventurers could see the end at the beginning, either.

And the truth is, you already know how to have an adventure. Even if you don’t know what you’ll see from the next peak, you know how to lace up your boots and take a step.

And another and another, till you see what you can see.

Statistics captures the possible variances in a system with the evocative term “degrees of freedom.”

Though I’ve never been on especially close terms with statistics, this idea has stuck in my mind. In a more abstract sense, I find it a helpful way of thinking about how to strategize in a system.

If, for example, your days feel too busy, it’s tempting to think of only a couple of variables: number of days and level of busyness. But there are many more potential degrees of freedom than that: busy days are made up of busy hours, which are made up of commutes and calls and impromptu conversations and overcommitments and …

When you can’t seem to get a handle on a problem, try breaking down the variables into smaller pieces. At that scale, it’s much easier to see the variance — and the degrees of freedom available to you.

Two patterns to notice:

(1) Which things tend to go wrong consistently?

(2) When those things go wrong, how — specifically — do they tend to go wrong?

The world is alive with opportunities to bring the right people together.

Host a dinner party. Organize a hike. Play a game. Rent a room at a restaurant.

Don’t be too programmed about it, and don’t think of it as networking. (Most networking doesn’t resemble a net at all: it’s more like trolling, hoping for a bite, and then hoping that whatever bites turns out to be a keeper. That’s a frustrating and inefficient way to catch your dinner, never mind an opportunity.)

The art to this is to figure out who needs to be in the room, how to get them there, and what kind of experience you can create once they’re in the room.

This is an extremely generous and valuable way to show up, and you’ll be amazed at what can follow from the emotional labor of putting something like this together.

How do you win an alpha contest?

I had dinner with a friend this week who’s a phenomenal teacher, and she taught me something about this. She’s one of the most talented people I know when it comes to playing in different sandboxes, and she recently ended up in an especially fancy one.

She didn’t plan it this way (it’s just who she is), but she realized she made an impression. And the way she did it was by completely ignoring the status symbols that everyone else was competing on.

My friend is no Franciscan: you won’t pick her out by her habit of renunciation in a roomful of burgeoning-net-worth Millennials. No — her particular genius is to show up, fit right in, and then kindly show these people that net worth isn’t the only measure of a person. Ditto the “right” labels, jacket buttons that work, and all the rest.

In a room full of alphas measuring whatever they measure, the best way to impress them is by showing (with kindness) that that stuff’s all beta — amidst all that performance, stand out with personality.