“Never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach” captures a recognized truth: there are better and worse moments in life to make decisions for our future selves. The trick is to seize the favorable moments to protect ourselves later during the more difficult ones. Precommitment strategies offer a powerful way to do this.

Given the jarring surprises of the past few years, it might seem risky to make any plans beyond next week. Why expose ourselves to more uncertainty and disappointment? However, thinking of our plans as blueprints and judging them by how close they adhere to the original design likely means they lack a critical ingredient.

“How many of you have dreamed of owning a sailboat?” a conference speaker asked the audience. Dozens of hands went up. “How many of you have dreamed of drydocking and painting that boat?” Hands fell back down. Few of us dream about the time, money, and vigilance required to prevent our possessions from falling apart, so we’re often surprised by what we’ve taken on.

When we commit to accomplishing a goal, we commit to the possibility of at least two kinds of failure - the possibility that we won’t get what we want, and the possibility that, if we do, we may discover that success wasn’t worth the costs. These costs include not just the time, money and effort we expended to reach our destination, but also the things we gave up in order to get there. The poet Robert Frost famously alluded to these things as “the road not taken”; economists call them “opportunity costs.”

Has there ever been a more opportune moment than now to reconsider how we’re working, living and generally leading our lives? The first global pandemic in a century has shaken us out of workplaces, habits and relationships, giving many of us perhaps the best shot we’ll ever have at figuring out what we really want to be when we grow up.

A few weeks ago, Marin kayaker Cyril Derreumaux pushed off from Sausalito before dawn to paddle alone across 2,400 nautical miles of open ocean to Hawaii. He had prepared three years for the journey and expected it would take him seventy days.

With vaccinations rolling out across the country, the factory whistle is sounding. Employers such as Uber, Google, Chase, and Goldman Sachs are beginning to call employees back to the office, saying it’s time to resume pre-pandemic work patterns. Employees aren’t so sure. They gave up a lot to reorganize their lives this past year and, like the inhabitants of Plato’s famous cave, had their eyes opened to new possibilities. What happens next in this developing standoff could transform not just the traditional office, but the broader contours of our lives.

Is it really more difficult to learn new things as we grow older, or is it just that we stop trying? This was my question as I drove home from the first day of a one-week drawing workshop the summer before last. My head felt as if I’d been doing math problems all day, and I was a little stunned by how strenuous the class had been.

In this engaging program for BFA’s clients, bestselling author Dan Roam (“The Back of the Napkin,” “Show & Tell,” “Draw to Win”) shows why simple drawing can lead you to a new sense of clarity, confidence, and calm.

Nineteenth-century writer and futurist H.G. Wells would have had little patience today for anyone complaining that we couldn’t have foreseen the Covid-19 pandemic circling the globe. A celebrated visionary, Wells foresaw many of the defining inventions of the 20th century, including the airplane, space travel, and the atomic bomb.

Move over speed, efficiency, and optimization; resilience is the new sexy in business and personal finance. Who cares about maximizing profits and stocks for the long run when a pandemic is upon us? With today’s headlines screaming “U.S. Unemployment Rate Hits 14.7%, Worst Since Great Depression,” we’ll take just getting through the present moment.

Last month, as the turmoil of the global pandemic hit the markets with full force, there were reports of bank customers rushing to withdraw thousands of dollars in cash. A bank in Midtown Manhattan was “cleaned out of $100 bills,” as customers sought “psychologically reassuring stacks of bills.”

One day, years ago, while working as an attorney at a large local law firm, the partner on a case glanced at her office door to make sure it was shut, then said in a hushed tone, “I’d accept a twenty percent pay cut to work even a half day less around here.”

Several decades ago, in search of a new pair of running shoes, I walked into a San Francisco shop so small it was almost possible to reach out and touch the display shoes on each of two long walls at the same time. The signage out front said “athletic shoes,” but most of the samples were for jogging or racing.

All toddlers are clumsy, but our son Max was at risk of a sidewalk face plant each time he toddled out the front door. Time and again, he’d run outside expecting the best, but it was a coin flip whether he’d make it to his destination or stumble and slap the concrete with outstretched arms once more.

The thief who stole my travel wallet at the Barcelona train station must have been a high jumper. Before sitting down on a bench to organize my papers, I’d been careful to make sure no one was around. After the theft, I found an escalator behind the bench, but it was still hard to believe: the thief must have run up the down escalator and leapt over the wall the moment I put my wallet on the bench to set down my backpack. A medal-worthy performance, except that it happened to me.