Being able to apologize properly is a skill worth honing. At least for those of us who aren’t perfect. It's helpful in almost any situation involving other people, which, it turns out, are most of the important ones.

Since my whole family consisted of people unable to apologize, I could not have been farther away from being able to do so myself. I'm sure I hurt a couple of people on my way to getting better at it.

I had to be proven wrong, repeatedly, to finally accept that I’m fallible.

That I'm not only possibly wrong, but likely.

Years later, I’d look back, realizing I’d misjudged situations I once felt sure about. Each of these moments chipped away at my arrogance, leaving a simple truth: I can and will mess up.

This changed my reaction to criticism. Instead of defending myself, I started considering if it might be valid.

I had to learn to put my ego aside and...

Bids for connection are moments in relationships (no matter what kind) where somebody indirectly asks the other person to share an experience with them. These moments might not seem like much, but when accumulated, they are important for the health of the relationship.

Steven Pinker states that good writing is pointing out:

Pinker suggests approaching writing as if you were pointing something in the environment out to another person – something that she would notice for herself, if only she knew where to look. Imagine directing someone's gaze across a valley, to a specific house on the other side. "You should pretend," writes Pinker, "that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing." He calls this the "joint attention" strategy.

It helps me to consider my writing as a bid for connection with the reader. I'm pointing something out, asking for joint attention.

It doesn't have to be an earth-shattering new idea or the most exciting piece of content ever. It's just a small moment that we share.

I treat relationships, health, and hobbies like projects that demand effort, and whose success is my responsibility.

They become a perpetuum mobile of self-efficacy. The more I invest, the more control I feel over my life. This builds momentum. This flywheel can only be stopped by a lack of kindness toward myself.

To make this work, I see the things important to me as malleable, and I see myself as someone who can shape them.

Since everything, including myself, changes over time, this is a never-ending cycle of improvement. Hoping something will stay the same is a futile fight against entropy.

So I embrace entropy as a fundamental truth and consider everything important to me as a fun project I get to work on.

Making an effort is never wasted.

I pay close attention to the scalability of my actions. This often leads to situations where it seems like I’m acting against my best interests, but I want to make choices my future self will thank me for.

Instead of allowing myself a slow morning after a restless night, I go for a run.

Instead of relaxing on the couch, I'm teaching myself how to code.

Instead of avoiding a difficult conversation, I embrace it.

These things share one important truth: I know that I will feel better once they've happened. These actions are scalable because they optimize for delayed gratification. They anticipate a future that will be better because I welcomed friction.

Nothing worth having was ever achieved without effort.

Once I internalized this way of thinking, it changed how I see myself and those around me. Chasing instant gratification doesn't align with the life I want, and watching others do so isn't something I enjoy.

I want to be, and surround myself with, people who are willing to put in the effort to live a life their future selves will thank them for—people who make scalable, life-affirming choices because they know these actions grow and compound over time, leading to greater, unexpected benefits.

Since I started running in January, I’ve noticed something that, while not incredibly surprising, is still new to me: while I’m running, I feel stronger, more physically capable, and healthier. It’s a reliable way to experience eustress on a scalable level.

What’s more, when my body feels like it’s functioning as it should, the quality of my thinking improves as well.

Physical strength leads to clearer, more optimistic thoughts, and less ego-driven thinking. When I’m not using energy to build up defenses, it’s easier to be more kind, humble, friendly, empathetic, and loving.

In short, feeling physically strong makes it easier to think strong thoughts. Running is a simple, scalable and reproducable way to achieve that.

Something I enjoy a lot is thinking about potential future versions of myself. At some point, I’m going to be a dog owner. Someone who enjoys classical music and regularly attends orchestral concerts. I might have a couple of years where I get into biking, woodworking, hiking or knitting.

It's not like I'm actively planning these versions. I might get a dog when I'm 50. Or when I'm 75. I could start woodworking tomorrow or 20 years from now. Maybe I'll spend my 40s learning how to play the piano. Who knows.

The fun in thinking about these possible iterations is not in knowing when exactly they're going to happen but in expecting to have a life full of achievable possibilities. A life full of things I’m going to enjoy.

No matter what happens, there’ll always be an iteration of me that’s preoccupied with his current obsession—who’s looking forward to getting out of bed to go for a walk with the dog, sanding a piece of wood, polishing a bowling ball for the big tournament, or practicing a sonata.

I love that for me.

If you want to grow, you need to be able to learn, experiment, and stay consistent. That's only possible if you're able to keep yourself motivated, which is impossible if you're not being kind to yourself.

Many people think that being kind means not doing what needs to be done because it's hard. That giving themselves breaks from trying is what they need.

They think it comes easily to those succeeding at what they set out to do and if they themselves struggle, it's obviously not for them. They're special in how hard it is for them. Hence, they deserve time off from trying.

That's one of the biggest misconceptions, and I believe the inherent problem is with how people talk to themselves.

Growth is the result of enough repetitions, many of them ending in some sort of failure. Your drawing doesn't look like anything you expected, your run felt terrible, your code doesn't compile.

If your inner voice gets destructive every time you mess up, you're less likely to try again. Ironically, you are getting in yet another successful repetition of talking badly about yourself.

If you learn to not succumb to negative self-talk, it gets a lot easier to get back to what you set out to do and start another repetition. You'll still fail, you'll still find it hard, but you won't be in a constant fight with yourself anymore.

I strongly believe that everybody can achieve whatever they set out to do, as long as they keep at it. It might take forever, it might require a whole lot of deliberate practice and deep work, but as long as the repetitions don't stop, progress is inevitable.

The key difference between you and those who make it seem easy is probably that they're kinder to themselves.

The first and last time I felt envious was when my friend Kjell got a Mac before me. It’s not that I grew up in a particularly wealthy household—quite the opposite, in fact—but I had never wanted something as badly as my first Mac, feeling as though my future as a designer depended on it.

It took me a while to recognize the feeling, and I experienced quite the epiphany when I was finally able to label what was ruining my mood. I believe this was my first instance of practicing introspection.

It was also the first time I decided I didn’t want to feel a certain way and began to work on changing my perception of the situation. I wanted to be happy for my friend.

This experience was significant and continues to resonate throughout my life. I consider self-efficacy one of the most important skills a person can have. Writing about my first Mac brought these memories back, and I hope Kjell never noticed my feelings at the time. Though I doubt it, as I also wasn’t very good at being nice back then. That, however, is a topic for another time.

There’s this concept of self-efficacy in psychology that really resonates with me. I see a lot of life through this lens. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. A strong sense of self-efficacy promotes human accomplishment and personal well-being. A person with high self-efficacy views challenges as things that are supposed to be mastered rather than threats to avoid.

I believe that you can choose to be self-efficacious and things you do can make you feel self-efficacious. Most people fail to recognize when these moments occur, and even fewer make a conscious effort to intentionally create such moments for themselves.

Changing the physical world does this to humans. That’s one of the reasons so many people daydream about gardening and why pottery feels a bit like therapy. You create something that wasn’t there before. You moved something and it stayed in place. You’ve literally made a teeny-tiny dent in the universe.

You won’t be able to describe to a person who never experienced anything like it, how gardening makes you feel. Starting with nothing, spending hours of work, accepting failures and imperfections to then see a result of something you made, tickles the core of what we are. Sure, you can explain all the steps of the process and tell them you felt “good” doing so but there’s no way to describe the intensity of that feeling.

Turning a rotary dial to call someone, pressing buttons to control a SNES video game character and swiping and tapping on glass to send an email did this to us with ever increasing amounts of directness. Every evolution of digital technology helped us feel more self-efficacy.

For better or worse.

I think AR interfaces are the inevitable next step in computing because they make us feel more self-efficacious. You won’t be able to properly describe how moving digital windows in the physical space of real life made you feel. It’s counter-intuitive to even think that the way you interact with the window your bursting inbox makes a difference, yet it does.

Spatial computing can’t be described. It must be felt to be understood.

The other day I stood in a meadow, waiting for a puppy to poop when I somehow got involved in a conversation with an 83-year-old woman. It started by me asking her if it’s okay if we come closer so the still not pooping puppy can say hi and learn that there’s no need to bark at people.

She answered: “Sure, but I won’t pet him!”.

We chatted for something like 30 minutes and I found out that she not only doesn’t want to pet this specific dog but dogs in general. She even enjoys looking after her daughter’s dog sometimes (who likes to sleep at the end of her bed when he’s visiting) and still won’t pet him.

I didn’t ask why. It didn’t really matter. She told me her rule and I understood that this is one of the foundational truths of her life. She doesn’t pet dogs.

There’s something intriguing about people who set boundaries that you can’t understand, but you can respect.

In the end, there was no poo. We found an interesting stick that had to be gnawed on for a long time, though.