The original post with this title, from March 4, 2014, was one of Seth Godin’s most popular. (It was later immortalized as the title of his 800-page book.)

At the end of this week, it’s important to offer some gratitude, so I want to offer some to Seth personally. When I first saw him speak live, I felt my mind change at the end of his presentation. I mean, I heard it.

Knowing Seth would be speaking, I planned for weeks to come up with some way to connect with him during or after his talk. I’d ask the sharpest question, or rush the stage, or ambush him outside the venue afterwards, or … well, I’d think of something.

But by the end of his talk, he’d changed my mind: shaking his hand, or even getting his email (the holy grail of networking!), wasn’t going to change my life. After all, I can’t be Seth: he’s already the best in the world at being him.

Instead, if I wanted Seth to change my life, I was going to have to change it after listening to him. He and others could help, of course, but I’d have to do the work. “Here, I made this,” was his mantra that morning — not “Hey, I got another business card.”

So when Seth finished speaking, I stayed in my seat. I didn’t rush the stage. I didn’t lay an ambush. I changed my mind, and — “drip by drip” — began changing my habits and practices. I still don’t know where it’s going, but that’s not really the point.

The point is that meeting someone can certainly open doors, but the only way to do our best work or become our best selves is by, well, doing it.

So: thanks for changing my mind, Seth. And here — I made this.

People are the most important decisions you’ll ever make. Who’s going to work with you? In which positions? How will they work with each other?

Learning how to identify, attract, and retain the right people is one of the most valuable skills out there. Think about this enough, and it will change the way you hire, manage, and retain. It might change the way you work.

Start early. Ask yourself what each person brings to the table. Watch and learn. Measure your predictions against performance.

And remember: many of the great coaches were scouts first and foremost. After all, it’s a lot easier to coach a team than to form one. As we all learned as children, hammering puzzle pieces into place wasn’t fun for us, or good for the pieces.

Our culture has a complicated relationship with the idea of winning. We love to use the language of sports and conflict in all aspects of daily life.

Yet, if we pause to think about it, winning means different things in different contexts. It doesn’t mean the same thing in war as in sports as in business as in politics. And it might not even mean what we think it means in those contexts: someone wins the Super Bowl every year, but there’s always another Super Bowl — and usually a new champion — next year.

Then there are other contexts in which it’s hard to picture winning at all. Can you win in friendship? In marriage? (If you won, would you still be married?)

On a day when everyone’s claiming victory by their own chosen metrics, it’s worth asking what winning means, what sort of wins are really possible in politics, and whether we want to live in a political culture that thinks about winning in terms of war or in terms of relationships.

At some point in every wilderness medicine course I’ve taken, we’ve confronted the question of what to do with the uninjured person who’s making life difficult for everyone else with all his undirected energy.

It turns out that the simplest way to ground such a live wire is to give him a job. “Here: I need you to hold this and not lose it.”

The job may or may not really matter in the grand scheme of things. What really matters is that it allows all the loose energy of a freakout to be focused on being part of the rescue.

That kind of freakout is usually caused by seeing a problem but not a way to be part of the solution. That makes everything feel even more out of control.

A calm and generous act of leadership is to find a way to channel that energy. “Hey, we need you. Can you give us a hand with this?”

Turning out today is important. Of course it is.

But how much will today change, in the long term?

The long term belongs to people who choose to turn up today, and tomorrow, and the day after that.

Not every day, not every act, comes with a little sticker to show you did your bit.

But doing your bit every day is the most powerful vote you can cast for the future you want to see.

Keep turning up. We need you.

It’s scary when things are messed up.

It’s scarier to think about what might come next.

It’s scariest to think you might be responsible for what comes next.

Can you bear to act as if what you do (or don’t do) each day shapes the future?

Can you afford to act is if it doesn’t?

Wabi-sabi is an old Japanese aesthetic term for the idea that the little imperfections in a piece of art are intrinsic to its beauty and value.

For example, hand-blown glass always has a little mark that shows where it was finally disconnected from the blowpipe. Machine-blown glass doesn’t have that. Is it more correct to have a perfectly smooth surface, or to see a little blemish that is evidence of the work of human hands?

And if human handiwork always entails a little wabi-sabi, does that mean people have some wabi-sabi, too?

Do credentials necessarily connote competence?

How do you know?

Our culture has a complicated relationship with credentials and the institutions that grant them. On some level, we need them: nobody wants a self-qualified surgeon or airline pilot. On another level, we resent them: why should some self-important elites tell us what to do? And, on so many levels, we sell them: if you want to get ahead, you need to do what we did to get where we are.

If you’re in the business of granting credentials — and especially if you can hear the hoofbeats of price competition, digital learning, and changing customer preferences (both among credential-seekers and those seeking the credentialed) — it’s worth thinking hard and creatively about what competencies you’re instilling, how you’re doing that, and how you’re demonstrating that.

And if you’re currently seeking a credential (or soon might be), it’s worth thinking as creatively as you can about what competencies you’re building, and how, and how you’re going to talk about them.

If you’re assuming that holding the same credential your role models got 30 years ago will work the same way now, you’re probably accepting a lot of risk. Taking a few years to level up isn’t necessarily a bad idea — the trick is ensuring it means what you want it to mean.

After Brian Doyle’s “Prayer for All Saints and All Souls Day,” in A Book of Uncommon Prayer: 100 Celebrations of the Miracle and Muddle of the Ordinary

What makes a saint?

Canonically, it’s three miracles, a mysterious officious inquest, and a formal seal of approval.

But if Bryan Doyle is to be believed, it’s “trudg[ing] humbly beneath immense loads, sharing … mercy and cheer and song and food and drink and courage with everyone they [meet].”

In other words, per David Foster Wallace (on a significant occasion), it’s having the perspective and grace and forbearance to cope in “the day-to-day trenches of adult existence” — in which, as he knew, the apparently banal can take on life-or-death importance.

Brian Doyle described these people, the saints known and unknown (“the latter faaaaar outnumbering the former”) as “all the billions of holy beings who strove and struggled and soared or sank; all of them our teammates on the road to light.” Yes, “even the worst among them.”

It’s an extraordinarily powerful exercise to encounter people in this way: who was this person? Who is this person? Regardless of how this person appears to me, can I summon the grace to wish this person well — as though he or she, like me, might be a holy being crawling or stumbling or walking on the road to light?

We hear a lot about the “banality of evil,” and that’s an important reminder. But All Saints and All Souls days are about the liberating power of the banality of good, the unsmall courage and generosity of showing up for our “teammates on the road to light.”

Nobody needs you to be a certified saint. But who needs you to show up as a teammate?

Rules imply we know what’s right, and when you’re wrong. And they give us license to tell you (or yell at you) when you’re wrong, until you’re either ostracized or back on the good side.

Magic is really trust and respect. Magic says we can’t possibly pre-legislate every kind of bad behavior, and, more importantly, we don’t want to litigate every felt transgression. We already respect each other enough to avoid nonsense to the best of our ability without feeling we need to anticipate and enumerate every possible kind of nonsense.

If you’re a member of a group, or especially if you’re building or leading a group, ask yourself whether you’d rather rely on rules or magic to set the terms. Then ask if the group is ready for your choice.

The culture seems to have this badly backward. In-person groups tend to approach problem-solving or community-building as rule-making; virtual “communities” like social networks want to rely as nearly as possible on pure magic when that’s clearly not what their members want or are ready for.

The whole world can’t run on magic. But we can’t live without it, either.