In school, effort for the sake of effort gets rewarded.

After all, what's an honors course but an opportunity to do more work in order to prove that you're a person who is willing to do more work simply for the sake of doing more work?

And once you show yourself to be the kind of person who puts in effort for effort's sake, you get more opportunities to demonstrate your work ethic at ever higher levels.

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When we think of decluttering, we might think of removing physical objects from our lives.

It’s a process that has to happen periodically. That’s because the default is to hang onto the things we’ve purchased or gained that are or were useful.

But we need to declutter not only the physical objects in our lives, but other things, too: time commitments, broken systems and processes, relationships, and even plans and dreams.

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The best advice I have is this: simplify.

If you don’t have any problems, you might not need this advice. That’s great! Otherwise, simplify.

You can reduce physical clutter in your physical environment. You can strip away the emotions from a decision that ultimately doesn’t require them. You can do less, slow down, and eliminate tasks, projects, and routines from your life.

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When you look up something on Google Maps like a coffee shop or a gas station, the app will helpfully indicate how far away these local places are.

However, when you click on the listing, you realize that the actual travel distance is significantly greater. That’s because the app first gives you the distance “as the crow flies,” and you’re not a crow.

We get used to taking the long way to get places because we can’t fly and we don’t want to tromp through people’s backyards or ford rivers and streams to get to Starbucks. In fact, we accept that going somewhere really far away might require sitting in an airport for hours with no apparent progress toward our destination.

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Challenging problems aren’t the ones that require a lot of labor. They are the ones that require thinking.

It is a huge mistake to focus on labor and think we’re doing such hard work. Maybe we’re actually being lazy by not coming up with a cleverer strategy for avoiding all that work.

We can use math as good metaphor to explain this idea. The brilliant Prealgebra book from The Art of Problem Solving teaches students to think algebraically — that is, strategically — about math, even no variables are present.

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