. . . It’s the best way I know of to peer into the soul of society.

Peel back the layers of your life and you’ll find that important events are most accurately summed up on the back of a F150 speeding down the highway at 95 MPH.

So what is the crystal ball showing today?

“Why . . . So Serious?”

If I need to tell you where this line came from there is a multi-million dollar blockbuster that you should be lining up to see instead of reading this post. If you are still with me, try to answer the question. Difficult, isn’t it? Whether it’s marketing, media, coding or commerce the underlying premise of every piece of self-help literature that we are fed is that we must take ourselves seriously — very seriously.

Look at how we report the news or talk about the media social. Look at how we teach skills and instill discipline. We dress everything up and dance it around and hope beyond hope that someone, somewhere gets how important our little hobbies are.

Unfortunately, instead of earning us the skills and talent we need to be successful, taking ourselves too seriously causes us to lose focus on reality, which is a shame because reality is where the people we most want to reach out to live.

Frank Herbert (through the lips of Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides) said that even a little greatness will destroy a man unless he has a sense for the sardonic. That is a poetic way of saying that the surest path to failure is buying your own hype.

The most important piece of advice anyone will ever give you is that 95% of the “problems” you dwell on don’t matter, so get a grip and smile more. It will really help you conserve energy for the 5% that is important.

Practically speaking, I can’t loosen your Tie or undo your bun (assuming you’re a 1950s corporate caricature), so instead here are a few bullets.

Today, instead of getting upset at a setback, laugh. I bet it won’t matter in 24 hours anyway and if it does — you’ll probably be fired so play ball!

Instead of stressing out about a project, realize that you’ve done it 30 times before and you have nothing to worry about, except, of course, soul-crushing failure.

Take a vacation for the sandbox you play in, whether it’s “Social Media” or Animal Husbandry. See what the world looks like from another perspective and see how unimportant Google Android is to someone who spends her time training horses.

Make a habit of enjoying whatever it is that you do. It’s really easy to hate your life, but why should you? There are plenty of people out there more than willing to do that for you.

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