The remedy for a tender gum is usually to floss it. Similarly, a great way to boost your energy levels when feeling sluggish is to exercise. Also, addressing the tension in the air between you and your business partner is better than letting it simmer, and massaging a sore muscle helps alleviate the pain.

Denial and avoidance are perfectly valid ways to deal with discomfort, but they’re unlikely to yield durable and positive results.

When it comes to agreed-upon deadlines, your manager doesn’t need you to be a hero or a self-sacrificing martyr. Consistently meeting deadlines without drama and fanfare will save you unnecessary stress in the long run.

Early in my career, I relied on my ability to perform well under pressure (at the last minute) to deal with anxiety-provoking deadlines. Even when the deliverable was strong, it was energetically costly to produce under those circumstances.

Much later, I discovered the joy of starting early, revising with plenty of time, and engineering accountability along the way. The upshot is a career hack: once you reliably tap into your brilliance on-demand and ahead of schedule, you can level up and become the owner of how a solution is delivered at scale, rather than the recipient of yet another task.

I was gassing up a rental car last week before heading out on a road trip, and I spotted a caffeine emporium (Starbucks) across the street. I live in Brooklyn, so it would be faster and easier to leave my car at the gas station instead of trying to find a nonexistent parking spot.

It would only take about five minutes for the round-trip excursion, I estimated, and I was confident that I could make the trip before the gas station proprietor called a SWAT team on me. But wasn’t there another way?

I went inside, let the gentleman know the vehicle I was in (so he could see how much I had spent on purified dinosaur extract), and asked him if I could leave the car there while I grabbed a coffee across the street.

Despite my being the only patron at the moment, he would have been well within his rights to decline my request or ask me to move the car away from the pump, but after looking outside, he said, “If it’s only going to be a couple of minutes, it’s fine.”

Candidly, this is the response I expected. It was early morning, my walk inside was a third of the way to the Starbucks, and most importantly, I put him in a position to be generous and to feel good about giving me a break.

If I had acted entitled and counted on him not bothering to make a fuss, would there have been a problem? Probably not, but that’s not the point.

The point is that we all have dozens of micro-moments to give people the dignity, respect, and consideration that they might not get elsewhere.

It’s easy, it’s free, and it matters.

I’m always shocked (but never surprised) at the power of doing what you say you’ll do.

Call it integrity, call it what you will, but we live in a moment of infinite distractibility and you can practically build a career—or at least a reputation—off of people not having to worry whether they can count on you to keep your promises.

The dew point is the temperature at which the air becomes saturated with water vapor. This water vapor is the condensation, or dew, that begins to form when the relative humidity reaches 100%.

The dew point also explains why landlocked cities like Las Vegas and New Delhi in the summer feel markedly different from cities near bodies of water like Jacksonville or Manila, even with the temperature being the same. Warm air can hold more water vapor, and the stifling stickiness we experience is the dew point at work.

I’d like to posit that a related phenomenon is at work when we engage in challenging interpersonal communication. When we take the time to deliver feedback with thoughtfulness and care, its impact is vastly different from communication that takes place under conditions of frustration and resentment.

The good news is that we exert far more influence over the ambient emotional temperature than we do the weather outside.

When we do the hard work of processing our emotions beforehand and communicating from a place of generosity, the emotional dew point reaches a point where the recipient can experience the substance of our message rather than the suffocating negative emotions we’re radiating.

One of the pitfalls of people-pleasing is that none of the people, over the long term, are pleased, least of all, you. We lose a part of ourselves each time.

Short-term thinking invites us to say yes in a way that reduces short-term discomfort, but this only accelerates our journey to an untenable destination.

The alternative is, of course, getting clear with ourselves (and then others) about the rules of engagement, even and especially when that means having an uncomfortable conversation up front.

“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
—Prentis Hemphill

Oak Bluffs is an idyllic resort town on Martha’s Vineyard that has held a unique place in black history since the late 1800s. During segregation, it was one of the few resort communities where black families could vacation freely alongside white families. It still serves as an important oasis and gathering place for (wealthy) black families and professionals, with many rental properties booked years in advance by its loyal patrons.

Ralph Lauren honored this rich history last week with a collection in partnership with Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. As a part of the campaign, they released a documentary titled A Portrait of the American Dream: Oak Bluffs. Enjoy.

The people who advance most quickly in new roles aren’t necessarily the most ambitious, qualified, or hard-working—they’re the ones who arrive with a clear idea of what they’re looking to learn, contribute, and accomplish.

Rapid advancement might not be your goal, but incredible things can happen when you hold yourself to a compressed timeline. And even if your goals shift over time (they will), the point of creating them is the effort it takes to define them in the first place.

A trap I see many brilliant folks falling into is treating their job as a cog in the organization’s machinery, rather than a vehicle by which to accelerate their professional trajectory. When we contort ourselves to fit into a machine, it often starches out the thing that makes us special and differentiated.

The reality is that the best opportunities benefit from (and encourage) the things not listed in the job description, and these unique contributions can paradoxically stem from what you’re bringing rather than what you’re asked to do.

This doesn’t mean that we can ignore our responsibilities—executing on those is table stakes—but we can also earn the privilege of contributing more.

And one of the many benefits of knowing what you’re looking to get out of an experience is the clarity that informs when it’s time to make a change.

I’ve always looked forward to big moves and new beginnings, in particular as catalysts for personal growth and development. When I moved to Buenos Aires in 2013, my first order of business was to shave my head and see how I looked bald. The good news is that I could pull off the look, but why did I have to wait for a 5,000-mile flight to fire up the clippers?

When I started summer basketball camp in elementary school, none of my teammates were there. And for whatever reason, I felt free to inhabit a different and better athletic identity, and quickly established myself as one of the best players. Wasn’t that already available to me?

We put off becoming the person we might be by saving the effort for “one day” in the future. But just as January 1st is an entirely arbitrary date on which to begin resolutions, we don’t even have to wait for tomorrow to become the person we want to be.

Start today.