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The opposite of negativity isn't perky cheer, it's uncertainty.

We all know at least one perky person. This the best day EVERRRR, isn't everything awesome? We dislike these people because it seems phony: they're trying to show us how great their life is (and maybe convince themselves). As the kids say nowadays, perky is performative.

We all know negative people too, think about them for a minute. That's a stupid idea, that will never work, WRONG.

What's the intention behind negativity? It's to shut down possibilities. The rejection of uncertainty.

Uncertainty is hella tough. But it's often more honest, and therefore more accurate. The pessimist and optimist both act based on emotion.

Will this idea work? I don't know. Positivity embraces possibility.

My favorite Bible verse is the one where Jesus is wrong.

In Matthew 27:46 Jesus cries out, "Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?" Does anyone think that this was a true statement, that God has turned his back? Of course not. He is wrong.

He's been on the cross for dozens of hours, he's desperately hungry, thirsty, hasn't slept, agony. It's only natural that he make a mistake.

It's only natural that he make a mistake. Because he was a man.

You might say, he chose to make a mistake, to perfectly demonstrate his humanity to mankind. That's fine by me. I've chosen to make a mistake before, to let someone have something they deserve. It's a baller move.

Real love is acceptance. Come what may, all the good and bad. Mistakes and all.

Love the mistakes.

There are two different definitions of the word tolerance.

In high school, this kid I didn't know brought in an engine block to bore out the cylinders in the metal shop. This process increases the diameter of the cylinder, which can result in increased compression and horsepower. Unless you do it on the metal shop's drill press.

A combustion engine works because the cylinders, where the gas burns, have extremely small tolerances. A professional machinist who bores a block will use a specialized tool that may remove as little as one ten-thousandth of an inch.

If the distance is off by more than a few hundredths of an inch, the engine won't run. Tolerance means the boundaries outside of which the system can't function.

My buddy who told me about this kid was a punk, and got a scornful kick out of it. I didn't say anything; but I didn't feel scorn either. Life sucks without growth, and growth requires not knowing what you're doing for a while. Balancing between growth and safety requires hella discerning judgment.

Discerning judgment doesn't depend on education. Take the Harvard grad I talked to a party one time, who did major damage to his car's electrical system while trying to install a stereo amplifier. I quote: "I figured, guys with GEDs do this, how hard can it be?" Ironically, he had to take his car to "those guys" to get fixed. But he rationalized his ego: "If I did this for a living, I'd learn it faster than they did."

If you work with with your hands, you understand this in your everyday life. But lately I hear a lot of people talking about things they don't understand. Healthcare, climate science, politics. Do you hate elitists talking down to you? That's understandable, but you need to make damn sure you're not suggesting the equivalent of putting an engine block on a emetal shop drill press.

Tolerance means the boundaries outside of which a system won't function. In order to be successful at anything, you need to make some system function, so you need to know those boundaries.

Expand your tolerance.

I really like Sasha Chapin. He's a writer, and also a writing coach. Since I like him, he comes to mind when I need an example to illustrate a common mistake.

Words are defined by other words, so it's easy to get mixed up in them. One of those words is simple.

Sasha writes about Paul Graham's writing. Paul is a legendary Silicon Valley investor, but he's also a great writer.

Sasha struggles trying to praise a quality of Paul's writing. It's simple, but not simple in these little ways here and there.

The common error lies in the definition of simple: it's the opposite of complicated, not complex. Something can be simple and complex at the same time.

In watchmaking, any part except the hour and minute hand is called a "complication". Day, date, phase of the moon, it makes the watch more complicated than it needs to be in order to tell time.

This doesn't mean a watch mechanism that only tells hour and minute is simple. Simple just means reduced to a state of minimum complexity.

And no less. Reducing complexity beyond the minumum is oversimplification. Like pixellating a picture or compressing audio, it changes meaning. A quartz watch seems simpler than a mechanical; unless you're an astronaut, where exposure to electromagnetism renders a quartz unreliable.

The technical name for watchmaking is "horology". Sometimes technical jargon speeds up writing if you're talking to a specific audience. But too often it can be a signal the write r wants to send about how smart they are. Same with writerly flourishes.

Write about something that matters in plain language. That's hella hard already.

Simple ain't easy.

I don't believe in the supernatural. I had my most powerful spiritual experience in a parking garage. I do believe mystery surrounds us.

If you don't believe me, I understand. You're wrong, but I understand.

Kids get tested for colorblindness in elementary school because they don't know they're missing anything. It surprises colorblind kids to find out red and green aren't invented concepts, like cool and lame.

If you've never had a spirtual experience, of course all the talk about beauty and connectedness sounds phony. It's like people talking about a movie you haven't seen. I'm going to describe my spiritual experience in the most concrete terms possible. If you're impatient, skip to the last line.

Summer of '94, Portland. I'm waiting for my girlfriend (kids, before cellphones, you had to make plans with someone and then just… wait). Sitting in the car, radio on, window open, smoking a cigarette, nice day. I finish the smoke, still waiting. Concrete siding prevents me from seeing out, but a ray of sun stabs in. I kill the radio to save battery.

After a couple minutes, I hear a woman walking through the garage. I can't see her, but you can tell the tap of heels. And the cadence of the gait. She wasn't not rushing.

I notice the distant concrete walls created a deep reverberation. She was still walking. I realize I've completely tuned out her footsteps. The sound is still there, but I'm not giving it attention, I'm listening to the echo.

I hear how her position changes the reverberation. I know the vibrations of the air reach my ear milliseconds after her heels strike the concrete.

I see dust floating in the sunbeam stabbing in. That beam came from the sun eight minutes ago. Light is leaving the sun now.

Behind the barriers, sea gulls call, wheeling over the buildings. Down where the peninsula ends at the harbor, the sun shines on the ocean. The clouds scudding behind the gulls and the water the gulls drank this morning evaporated from the ocean yesterday.

Everything is in constant motion towards its final purpose.

Music is the most scientific of the arts.

Thelonious Monk said, "All musicians are mathematicians." And music theory and geometry are truly inseparable, the Pythagoreans invented both at the same time. But he didn't go far enough.

Great musicians have to understand how their instruments communicate. That requires understanding acoustics, which is a form of physics.

Scientists manipulate reality to produce effects we can all observe, outside ourselves. Musicians manipulate reality to produce effects only observable by each person, inside.

Both disciplines can appear like magic. Both require discipline. Once in a while, someone comes along and nothing's the same afterward.

The two have falsifiability in common. Music can be compared externally, like science. There is an objective definition of correctness.

Art is the part that can't be compared. The feeling, the style.

Information is physical. And mental health is a condition of information.

When your computer does anything, its physical state changes: some electric current in a transistor, or magnetization on a hard drive. There aren't really any ones and zeroes in a computer, just charges and not-charges. We label charge as ones, and not-charge as zeroes. But any change to the charges is physical.

How many theories of where the mind comes from are there? One thing we know for sure though, the mind is dependent on the brain. Physical changes to the brain result in changes to the mind: oxygen, glucose, electrolytes, injury.

Depression runs in my family. Some people have high blood pressure or bum knees, we have depression. I don't see any shame in this anymore; it's a condition I have to take care of physically.

All brains have the capacity for depression. The brains that have a tendency towards it require physical maintenance: quality sleep and nutrition. Exercise. Minimal use of any mind-altering substance, especially the legal and socially acceptable ones. Lots of water.

The magic of information is that it can change at the speed of light. Years ago I decided to change my mind about my mental health, to approach it without stigma. It took years to get to where I could. But now when I talk about it, you can use that information.

The better I take care of my brain, the less I have to work on my mind. Now that's mind over matter.

At the time Newton wrote 'Principia', the question of whether the sun orbited the Earth or vice versa was wide open. Calculus closed the question. Newton's predictions of the motion of the planets was so much better than anything else it was unquestionable.

Newton knew he was on to something good. He also knew the issue of which orbit was extremely controversial. He chose to address the controversy head on, in an ingenious way.

"Hypotheses non fingo", Newton wrote, 'I feign no hypotheses'. Newton didn't even pretend to explain what gravity was. He just found a hella excellent way to describe it.

Newton's description was so good, other people were able to milk it for insight for 250 years. But it was only able to gain traction in the first place because he admitted he couldn't talk about such a large part of it. Ever since, we have the 'how' in droves, we're drowning in 'how', but we're starving for 'why?'.

Newton called his approach 'experimental philosophy': "In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction."

Or as I like to tell junior developers, over and over: prove it. Don't tell me about why something is behaving a particular way, find a way to show me. A demonstration is like an experiment: if it doesn't have the possibility of failure, it's fake.

There are facts, based on demonstrations, and there are feelings. But feelings have hella influence on the interpretation of demonstrations, the judgement of fakeness. Turns out facts and feelings overlap pretty significantly. Changing one requires changing the other.

The most important thing you can say: "I don't know." Anything has to start with admitting you don't know everything.

Art and science aren't as different as they might seem.

Human experience has a paradox to it. We exist at the same time both inside and outside our heads.

Outside, because everything we do depends on the external world. All the interesting stuff is "out there": scenic destinations, sensory entertainment, the endless surprise of other people.

Inside, because we only have access to the outside when it comes inside our heads. Information flows in, and from it our minds create a model of the world. But it's a model, a replica. We experience the real thing milliseconds after it happens – like a batter needs to direct their swing where they think the ball will be.

The obvious difference: Science deals with numbers, which describe relationships outside. Art deals with feelings, which describe relationships inside.

But both deal with the unknown. Every artist is trying to create something new. Sometimes the thing that's new is the tiny improvement of a form they've executed a thousand times. Maybe the new thing is the feeling of this time.

A less obvious difference: art values time. Science takes as long as it takes to achieve a result, 10 minutes or 10 years or 10 lifetimes. An artist has to balance how much time they spend on any given work.

In fact, you could describe the whole of art as deciding where and where not to spend time. By this definition, there's an art to everything, including science.

Since we only get one life, time is the quality we understand the least. Art explores meaning through time the same way science studies reality through measurement.

"Bite aversion" is why you have to leave puppies together for a while after they're born. When the puppies are really little, they bite a lot. If you take one away at this point, without a lot of training, he'll grow up to be a bitey dog. They need to learn that biting hurts, and biting someone else is likely to get you bitten back.

Junior high kids, same thing. This is the period when humans develop enough of a social sense to become truly, deeply, terrible; but often don't have the empathy to refrain from deploying it.

In 7th grade, there was a black girl who picked on me. Way bigger than me, physically an adult woman. I didn't know her; we didn't ride the same bus, but we waited in the same area. She heckled me with an abusive mix of aggresive flirtation and friendliness followed by hostile sarcasm. Abundantly clear how much she relished my humiliation.

I knew even then that she had it worse than me. She was heavy, wearing inexpensive clothing, missing an adult tooth. I knew why she needed to take it out on someone else. But I also knew how not to get bullied, and that was not to give them the satisfaction. So I just took her abuse stone-faced until she moved on to easier targets.

I forgive her. I forgive everyone who's ever done anything wrong, because it's all part of who I am today, and I love who I am, flaws and all.

Forgiveness doesn't mean weakness. Dogs who've passed through bite aversion aren't going to put up with being bitten. They just don't take it further.

Forgiveness means not taking it personally.