Beauty and coziness are rarely companions. The most comfortable chair is the old, busted-looking one, ragged with age and worn into a perfect groove. The warmest home is surrounded with wild growth. The best shoes are smooth with a thousand miles.
Don’t forget otherwise in your quest for aesthetics.
Before I will discuss a topic of potential debate with you, please read the following and sign at the bottom:
Sincerely,
My father once told me that a very important thing you need to know how to do is break into your own house. He then spent the next several hours coaching me on how to do it, letting me think of solutions and try them out, gently guiding me, etc.
His explanation was this: If you ever lock yourself out or something, you’re actually the best person to solve that problem. You know your house better than anyone else, usually. And you’ll be more careful than someone brought in to do the job, like a locksmith – not to mention cheaper. But his broader lesson was that you needed to understand the way your things were protected. If your own house turned out to be shockingly easy to break into, that might be a sign you need to adjust a few things.
We tie a lot of things together in our modern lives. Imagine what would happen if someone stole your phone, for instance. Forget about protecting your assets from thieves accessing them via your device – how would you regain access to those things? Do you have a plan? What if the password storage system you have goes belly-up and you need to re-access accounts in a different way? Do you know how to navigate the various help desks and support teams and their labyrinthine ways?
It’s good practice to be able to hack into your own life when you need to. If nothing else, it’s a fun little self-assessment. But it might save you a major headache.
Marijuana is legal in the state where I live. I don’t personally smoke, but have zero problem with anyone who does. Recently, someone close to me underwent surgery and preferred to use weed over narcotics to manage pain (a sensible approach, in my opinion), so I went to our local dispensary to pick some up for them.
Something I noticed right away: The customer service was amazing. Not just competent, but incredibly cheerful, friendly, and above-and-beyond helpful. It was one of the best customer service experiences I could remember in recent years.
It was so good that it got me thinking about why, and the answer didn’t take long to realize. Dispensaries are on shaky ground. You have to do a lot of work to get local towns to be okay with a store selling what was, until pretty recently, an illegal substance. Lots of folks still don’t like it, and many a town planning meeting has been beset by people protesting such places coming into their neighborhoods.
As a result, those places need to be liked. They need to be safe, clean, friendly – all at levels well above and beyond any normal convenience store or other business. Not only might they lose customers if not, but they’re never far away from the wrong complaint getting their whole business thrown out of town.
This makes them very, very polite.
Compare this to an organization that has almost zero chance of losing your business. Think of a large, entrenched business with limited competition or, even worse, your local government. How polite are they? How helpful? Do you walk out of there feeling like a million bucks?
The lesson: Everyone behaves better when behaving poorly has a potential cost. You lose the service mindset when you don’t have to earn anyone’s business.
My children all prepare their own lunches for school, something they’re quite proud of. Last week my middle kid (Age 8) was making her customary peanut butter & jelly sandwich when she discovered the bread had gone moldy, so we tossed it and substituted a long roll. The next day when she got home, she commented that her friends probably thought it was silly that she had a PB&J on a long roll. She said, “None of them laughed or anything, but I’ll bet they were all thinking it was really silly.” There was a hint of embarrassment in her voice.
So I asked her: “What did your friends have for lunch?”
She couldn’t remember. I asked her about each of her friends by name to help jog her memory, and she couldn’t remember a single item any of them had for lunch. I told her, “You see? People don’t pay any attention to those little things. You might have thought it was silly, but no one else even noticed.”
She perked right up. It was a wonderful moment. It’s great to recognize early that all the little things you’re self-conscious about, no one else could remember with a gun to their head. Your minor foibles are invisible, so don’t sweat them.
Here’s a good thought experiment for you: think of a position you hold on some issue. Now think of an opposing position, one that you disagree with, on the same issue. Can you name three people or organizations that A.) support the opposing position and B.) you respect and can honestly say are holding their position in good faith?
If not, then chances are that you do not actually understand the opposing position and you live in an echo chamber. If you think the test of reasonableness is whether someone reaches the same conclusions as you, rather than how they approach questions of debate in general, then you are always going to have a limited understanding of the world, and won’t be able to change your mind when it’s warranted.
If you can’t think of three such people or organizations – go find them.
When someone does you a favor, especially if you asked them to, don’t say “I’m sorry.”
They don’t want you to be sorry! They did the favor because they wanted to, because they care about you and want you to be well. You didn’t cause whatever burden they’re helping to carry, and you didn’t force them to help carry it. Apologies aren’t warranted.
When you apologize without necessity, you make the other person feel needlessly guilty. They start to wonder if they did cause your hardship – or at least, they may wonder if you think they did. It’s a rift for no reason!
They don’t want you to be sorry, and you have no reason to be. So replace that apology with sincere gratitude! Thank them for their help, their sacrifice, their effort. And don’t ask if you can do anything for them! Just do something for them, if you can. If you ask, you force them into saying “no,” because then it seems like they’re only helping you transactionally, when their initial effort was probably very genuinely altruistic. Just express your gratitude, and take the next opportunity you can to do something nice for them.
Accepting help is hard, and we’re all a little bad at it. But try this stuff. It helps.
Resilience isn’t stubbornness. It’s not resistance to change. It’s adaptability.
People often confuse the two. They think that being resilient means fighting against the tides of change successfully, but it’s the complete opposite. It’s rolling with the punches.
A long time ago, I managed a sales office for a third-party sales company (that means we did the sales for client companies, rather than selling things we made ourselves). After a long time with a particular client, they changed some of their product and service offerings, which meant we had to re-train our staff, and the commission structure changed. I led the meeting where we went over those details.
I was amazed by what I saw, and recognized then that I was witnessing something very important. As I was laying out the changes in the commissions, products, etc., I watched the whole staff basically divide themselves into one of two categories.
Category A, which was the majority, were people who immediately started complaining. They objected, groused, fought. All for nothing, of course – this came from the client and we had no control over it, except to drop their contract, which we obviously weren’t going to do. Fighting me was especially silly. All that sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nothing, that is, except wasted mental energy and attitude.
And then there was Category B. A minority of people on the staff immediately began figuring. They asked intelligent questions, diving into the new structure. They started doing quick math on scrap paper. They looked up a few things about their territories. In other words, they took the change as a given, despite being no more pleased with it than anyone else. And within that new structure, they immediately started figuring out the ways to make the most money.
Over the next few months, the leaderboard rankings changed within the company. Everyone in the new top 10% of sellers was in Category B in that initial meeting.
That’s resilience. You don’t have to like the changes. But you do have to know when fighting them won’t do a damned thing, and that the smart move is to adapt. The resilient people win.
Here is a secret to lower stress and better productivity: know your own abilities very well.
One of the biggest contributors to stress is a misaligned calendar. If you have too much to do or too little time, you get stressed. And if you have too little to do, you start having that FOMO (“fear of missing out”) creep up on you. Often people say “yes” to too many things, not realizing the cost in time and treasure they’ll have to pay.
It is worth the little bit of extra time up front to build ways of measuring your own ability. When you have a big To-Do list and you don’t get through all of it, spend a little time the next day journaling about the experience. What did you get done? How long did it take you? Why did you avoid the remaining items in favor of the ones you completed? This can help you form a more accurate picture of what you can actually get done in a day, and plan accordingly.
Have to do a quarterly report? Start up some tracking software to see how long it actually takes you, how many breaks you take, etc. Then next quarter, you won’t think you can get it done in four hours when it actually takes you sixteen.
We are generally bad at estimating our own capacity. When you can do something quickly and with minimal effort, trust yourself to do so and don’t stress about that thing looming on the horizon. Instead, focus on the things that require greater effort while you still have energy to expend.
There is a hospital near me, the major one that serves all the area I live in. The last two times I brought someone there, they never left. Both my father and my oldest friend ran out the last of their clocks in that building.
I know it isn’t the building’s fault; I’m not superstitious like that. Statistically, most people you know will die in a hospital. But both of them were in there for a long time, and as a result so was I – there are bad memories painted on every wall of that place.
Today, I picked someone up from there. Someone dear to me left that place, in my car, and with (apart from a little recovery time ahead) a clean bill of health.
It doesn’t all balance, of course. Good memories don’t paint over bad ones. But it’s nice to know that we can still get a win, we living.
The Opportunity Machine 