There’s a brick wall in your way, and you bump into it. Your nose hurts, and your path is blocked. You’ve got several options of varying levels of effectiveness now. Probably the least effective of your choices is “yell at the wall.”
You can be mad, and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s a natural human reaction to pain and frustration. But taking it out on the wall is pretty silly. The wall won’t change in response to your scolding.
Imagine if it did, though? Imagine if every time you screamed at the wall, it got a little higher. Maybe longer, too – harder to go around. Each admonition, no matter how much it satisfied your wrathful impulse, just made your destination harder to reach.
That’s what it’s like when you try it on people.
Using anger as a tool for interacting with other people is the shortest-term solution. If you’re being attacked or you’re in a sporting competition, summoning up a few good shouts and drawing some extra strength from your rage can help, but that’s about the extent of the situations where it’s useful. In every other context, from managing employees to parenting children, a response drawn from anger is a poor choice.
At best, you get a short-term redirection of their action through your manipulation and do enormous damage to your long-term relationship with that person. At worst, you don’t even get that; you just get an equally angry response. In every case, you poison yourself along the way.
It’s tempting, I know. When someone makes you mad, even if you don’t want to “take it out on them,” you at least want them to know that you’re mad, right? That they’ve upset or disappointed you. But consider why you want that: you really want them to change their behavior.
Their new behavior, the actions you want – they’re on the other side of that brick wall. Yelling at the bricks won’t get you closer.
The Opportunity Machine 