One of my most closely held secrets, speaking of secrets, is that I used to ghostwrite self-help books and audios for a living. Oh, yes. If you ever required any more evidence that an entire field is a scam, you need only consider that these roadmaps to everlasting happiness are being churned out by people whose lives are utter disasters.

But old habits die hard, and I sometimes find myself falling back into certain patterns of thought left over from that time, patterns I find myself compelled to share here with my captive audience.

Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Okay, so there are three categories of things:

1. Things we want to have or do
2. Things we need to have or do
3. Things we think we should have or do

I suppose there could be a catch-all fourth category of things we neither want, need, or feel obligated by, but let’s not muddy the waters. Of the three listed, only the first two are really important, and yet it strikes me that most people spend most of their time on the third.

Things we want, things we need, things we think we should:

1. Joy
2. Prudence
3. Fear

I’m reminded of phone numbers. As a designer, it’s sometimes appropriate for me to find new ways of presenting the same old information. One way I used to do this was to replace the hyphens between the digits of a phone number with periods:

555.555.5555, instead of 555-555-5555

A few of my clients liked this, but most didn’t. It wasn’t a strong resistance, but they preferred the familiar dashes. Fine. People are allowed to have preferences, and comfort with familiarity does not necessarily rise to the level of fear of the different or unknown.

More recently, I decided that a much cleaner and more elegant solution was to eliminate the punctuation entirely:

555 555 5555

Now, doesn’t that look pretty and perfectly legible? If you saw that, especially accompanied by the word “telephone,” as it always is, would you not instantly comprehend it?

Oh, dear reader, you should hear the howls of indignation and terror that arise when I present designs with telephone numbers in that format. You would think Osama bin Laden had grabbed a Macintosh and started churning out business cards. Not because it’s ugly, but because phone numbers “should” always have hyphens! That’s just the way it is! What if their customers didn’t understand that was a phone number? Don’t I know what chaos will absolutely reign, the very fabric of our society torn asunder?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Fear is a powerful motivator.

I’m afraid of things, but punctuation is not among them. I’m afraid of bugs, collapsing bridges, disease, and that the Chimperor will somehow wrangle a second term in the White House and complete his destruction of this country. You know . . . reasonable things.

But I think, most of all, I’m afraid of becoming the sort of person who does things because I should do them, because they’ve always been done and always will be, amen. Oh, and having to be a self-help writer again.