Let’s cut to the chase: You don’t need my advice.

I write about things I care about, and I hope that what I have to say encourages you as you work to make things a little better every day, but I have no illusions that you need me.

It’s okay. Really. Because it’s not about me. It’s about the people who benefit from you making things better.

You see, I read a lot of blogs and books and all sorts of stuff to help me do my best work. I’m one of these people that needs to be reminded of the stuff I already know until I really know it.

Often I read blogs that are inspiring because they reinforce something I already know, or force me to face a challenging perspective I already know I need to wrestle with.

Some would call this a gigantic waste of time, but I call it the fuel that helps me do my best work. Perhaps it’s a shortcoming, but if I need those reminders to do great work then I’m going to seek those reminders out.

So trust me, I know you don’t need my advice today. You don’t even need me to tell you that you don’t need my advice.

But maybe you could use a reminder that the world needs your greatness. Badly. That what you do matters and that you are, in fact, making things better. That without you pushing your light into the darkness, even just a little, the darkness might win the day.

It does, you are, and it might.

So please, please don’t stop.

I’m in the midst of planning a family vacation and am learning things about myself that, apparently, everyone else already knows.

It turns out I am very, very good at illustrating to others why things are a bad idea. I have always thought of myself as a pretty positive person, but man, I can find every reason something won’t work like it’s my job. (to be fair sometimes it actually is my job)

This can be very helpful in some settings, but I’m about to drive my wife crazy letting her know all the possible problems or inconveniences that I can conjure related to a cruise to Mexico with our daughter.

The best part is that she gets frustrated by how negative I am and I just don’t understand why. I’m being helpful!

Of course, as is true in most situations, she’s right.

So I’m trying to give my skepticism a rest and just choose to give more weight to what is likely to go right than what might, in the worst case scenario, go wrong.

I think I might actually be happier and end up making a lot of things better.

There is a time and place to shoot holes in ideas and consider the possible negative outcomes, but it seems problematic that such a practice is my default. I mean, everything is not going to fall to crap if I don’t consider every single variable in every single situation.

So I’m going to elect to see the brighter side. For a while at least.

Who knows, things might actually turn out okay.

What about you? Do you ever sabotage your own happiness by dwelling too much on negative possibilities? Does your skepticism make it difficult to make things better? Or is it a necessary tool to vet ideas?

If my 4 year old daughter could share her thoughts on life, with a suped up vocabulary, I wonder if it might go something like this:

Grown ups are weird. They make life look really hard.

This is what life looks like to me: Wake up, get dressed in clothes that make me feel beautiful (matching colors are optional), play, dance, draw, imagine, eat, learn, breathe. I can’t reach some things but I’m getting really good at the essential life skill of climbing on precariously stacked objects.

The world around me is an amazing place and I learn about a million new things every day. I am always discovering, imagining, creating, building, and wondering. I can’t believe that much of anything is impossible.

I may not know everything (yet) but life seems to be full of possibility. Why my parents can’t see that is a mystery…

I know that we can’t all climb around on random objects while wearing mis-matched clothes every day, but I don’t believe we should leave all of our childhood wonder behind.

We should be learning every single day. We should be imagining. We should be playing. We should be constantly aware of the simplicity of each heartbeat and each breath.

Life can be complicated, to be sure, but if we’re going to make things better I think we’re going to have to remember what life was like before we drummed all the wonder out of it.