Every experience in your past colors how you perceive similar scenarios in the future. This is pretty hard-wired into our instincts by evolution, and it generally served a good purpose in that context. If you narrowly escaped being eaten by a bear once, then anything that sounds like a bear in the future should frighten you.

Of course, that same evolutionary wiring leads us to all sorts of unpleasant biases and prejudices in the modern world, which is one of the reasons we have to be aware of our own wiring – because it isn’t always helpful. Sometimes, in fact, it’s downright detrimental. In our ancient past, if someone from a neighboring tribe attacked you or stole from you, the safest route was to never trust anyone from that tribe again, because the risk of being “got” was so high and tribes were much more mono-cultural. Now, one person wronging you doesn’t affect the odds of a similar-looking person doing the same at all, but the evolutionary wiring is still there – and that’s one of the reasons people with lower self-awareness become tricked into prejudice by their own brains.

You are susceptible to this. And so are other people.

It’s important to be self-aware as a way of rising above our own baser natures. Our instincts tell us to do a lot of things that we absolutely should not do – morally or practically. We need to build habits and structures for ourselves to keep us away from those instincts that we’ve deemed counter-productive to a healthy and moral way of life.

Consider: our instincts tell us to claim resources that are within our reach. Look at any young child – they’ll grab any food they can get their hands on, plus any object they want. It’s in our nature, but “ownership” and “permission” are concepts we have to develop and learn. As an adult, if you see someone’s unattended, delicious-looking sandwich, you still have the instinct to grab it and eat it. You just don’t (hopefully), because you’ve learned and/or developed a moral framework that supersedes the instinct.

Now think about this: we don’t just have existing instincts to contend with. We also have our natural inclination to take every past experience and make it a general fact about the world. And this will hurt you in two ways.

First, this will just make you wrong about stuff. Mostly about people. You’ll attribute aspects to people you’ve never met based on people you have met. The people you’ve met in the past and the people you’re interacting with now don’t even have to have anything in common except the nature of their interaction with your life! Want an example? Imagine a cashier at a local fast food place was rude to you. The next time you go into a different location of that same chain, some part of you will assume the cashier there is going to be rude. You’ll brace for it, you might even treat them poorly to begin with in your interaction (and oh, that’s even worse – because then it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy and you’ll be even more certain that you’ve figured out some general case about the world). But the first cashier had nothing to do with the second!

People don’t even generalize in the same way. Some people encounter one rude cashier and think “all cashiers are rude.” Others think “all people of that age category are rude.” And so on. None of them are right. But it’s so, so easy to fall into that trap. Once you declare a general case in your mind, confirmation bias takes over and you’ll never run out of reinforcing data points if you want to find them. If a BMW cuts you off and you decide “BMW drivers are all jerks,” then you’ll never run out of occasions in the future where a BMW does something else you don’t like – and you’ll never notice all the BMWs that drive perfectly well.

So letting the experience from any one person spill over into your expectations about encounters with other people will almost always result in you harming yourself. The harm, of course, is in lost opportunities. This sort of bias is almost always negative (consider that a pleasant cashier has probably never made you think ‘all cashiers are pleasant;’ positive traits tend to be attributed to the individual unless they’re already part of a confirmation bias pattern you’ve established prior), so it almost always results in you creating diminished interpersonal interactions before they’ve had the chance to take their own shape.

In our modern lives, the gains from positive interpersonal relationships far outweigh the negative risks from bad ones. You are much safer in your modern life than our ancient ancestors. They may have had little to gain from making a friend from another tribe, and an incredible amount to lose in the zero-sum, resource-poor environment in which they lived while developing these instincts. You, on the other hand, have relatively little to fear from a cashier at a local store, and potentially a lot of upside from making that friend.

Okay, so that’s the first way this hurts you. Here’s the second: sometimes you are the person someone else is unfairly biased about. And this is the situation where you can have the most impact if you know what you’re dealing with.

• “My girlfriend is constantly nagging me to know exactly where I am at all times, to give her my phone every time I see her, and to send me pictures of myself whenever I’m out without her. I hate being treated like a criminal; we’ve barely been dating a few months and I’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve this treatment.“
• “I’ve only just been promoted to manager of this team, but they already seem to hate me. They’re constantly going over my head to confirm my instructions with my boss, they don’t offer any input even when I ask their opinions, and they won’t do anything without me expressly giving them permission. What have I done to make them not trust me already?“
• “I took over the Johnson account, and the client treats me like I’m an idiot. He emails me, then texts me to make sure I got the email, and then wants to call me to discuss the contents of the email. And that’s for every little change! He won’t just give me the full scope and let me work. We’ve only been working together a few days, why does he already think I’m stupid?“

Do any of these sound familiar? Have you encountered situations like one or more of these in your own life? They’re frustrating. You feel like the other person has formed this very unfair, quick opinion of you – and you can’t figure out why. Many people do what these quotes indicate: they blame themselves and try to figure out what they’ve done wrong to offend the other person.

The answer, quite often, is nothing. Talk to anyone who’s ever rescued a foster dog: sometimes that dog is terrified. You can be the sweetest, kindest pet owner in the world, but the last owner wasn’t. The last owner might have done some pretty terrible things – that’s why the dog is being fostered in the first place. It’s not that the dog has a reason to be afraid of you, specifically. It’s that the dog is instinctually terrified of entities that are similar – or even in a similar position – to the last entity that hurt it.

Your girlfriend might not be mistrustful of you, but maybe she was cheated on by her last partner and hasn’t yet separated that baggage from the general category of “boyfriends.” Maybe the last manager of your new team was a micro-manager and manipulator and your team has developed habits to protect them from that behavior. Maybe the last account manager for the Johnson client was an idiot who needed things explained several times and the client started doing things that way to ensure results.

In most scenarios, you aren’t the first “whatever you are” to the other person. You won’t always be someone else’s first significant other, first manager, first account rep, first customer, or first fan. Whatever you are to them, they’ve probably had at least one other – and you’re inheriting the baggage from that relationship.

As soon as you acknowledge that, it breaks an enormous barrier. If you treat the other person’s behavior as if they were basing it on your behavior, you’re going to spiral into a very negative pattern. For example: You think your girlfriend is reacting to something you’ve done, but since you haven’t done anything to deserve this reaction, you naturally assume she’s overreacting or being unreasonable. This leads you to invalidate or diminish her feelings as you dismiss the concerns leading to her behavior. And now, of course, she has even more reason to react the way she does and even more validation that her general opinion of “men” or “boyfriends” as a category is justified.

If instead, you acknowledge that from her perspective she has what seems like a perfectly reasonable mental framework for interacting with the category of “boyfriends,” then you can interact with that framework in a respectful way. You can accept that she’s carrying baggage from real past harm, and you can assure her that you won’t harm her in that way without invalidating her past experiences. You can separate yourself from her experience, in other words, without invalidating it. You can ask her to share about what hurt her, and agree that it was bad and her pain was real. You can avoid blaming her for “putting that on you,” and instead give her the space to not.

Is this fair? Should you have to carry the responsibility of doing this? Who cares? Trying to constantly seek fairness will make you deeply unhappy, and instead of worrying about who’s to blame and therefore who’s responsibility it should be, you should just take the fastest, most magnanimous route to happiness. (Note from Johnny: Huh, it turns out I write about that particular theme a lot.)

If you want other people to not take their own negative baggage and foist it upon their relationship with you, you have to acknowledge that baggage exists. You can’t act like you’re the first person they’ve ever met and expect that they’re going to base all their interactions with you solely on a calm, calculated evaluation of your behavior and your behavior alone. You don’t even do that with others, even when you’re aware of it and you try, because you’re a human and humans are imperfect machines. So have some grace about others who probably haven’t even read this insightful blog post and thus don’t know what you know (but go ahead and share it with them if it will help you create some shared language to help you talk about the topic).

If you’re at the beginning of a new interpersonal relationship with an individual or group that is likely to last into the foreseeable future, it is incredibly good practice to get this out in the open right away. Share with each other your experiences, positive and negative, with past people in similar roles in your life. Talk about the way they might color your perceptions of each other, and acknowledge both that those experiences were valid and that bringing that baggage forward instinctively is understandable. That’s the most direct way to overcome those instincts and to leave the baggage in the past where it belongs.

Imagine gathering together one hundred people who all wanted to build a bridge across a canyon. They’ve never met before, and the only thing they know about one another is that they share this goal. You drop them off at the edge of the canyon and leave, leaving behind no instructions or directions, but plenty of tools and resources.

What do you think will happen?

I’ll tell you what won’t happen – they won’t flawlessly and immediately get to work. This isn’t a hive of bees or a colony of ants with a prior, established social order. These are one hundred humans, and before one hundred humans can work together on anything, someone will have to establish order.

And with one hundred humans, that’s no small feat.

Even if you imagine that the desire to build the bridge is so strong in every individual that they’re willing to stick it out, it still might take weeks before the group has organized into anything cohesive enough to begin. Who’s in charge? Who will do what? Who will decide those things? How can they change? How will the rewards be split?

If you repeated this experiment one hundred times, with one hundred different groups, the final quality of each bridge would be far, far more dependent on how each group handled this initial organization than it would be on, for example, the actual engineering abilities of the individuals in the group.

That skill – the ability to organize people – is incredibly rare. And most people don’t even understand it, let alone have it. People use the phrase “herding cats,” but that always makes me laugh. Herding cats is way easier. Most cats share the same motivations, for one. And for two, most cats are smaller than you, and can’t object to being tricked or forced. If I want a hundred cats to go into a barn, I could manage that far easier than I could manage to get a hundred humans to build that barn.

This is one of those things that most people simply can’t believe is that difficult until they’ve tried it and failed miserably. It’s one of those tasks that looks so much easier on paper, because on paper all the different people are profiles and you’re just trying to solve an organizational puzzle. That’s tricky enough, but it’s solvable. But then once you start to put your fancy little org chart into practice and people just… don’t do it, then you realize all the different layers of communication, buy-in, negotiation, motivation, conflict resolution, and rapport you need to manage to be even mildly successful.

People are so harsh on “bosses” – managers are seen as this parasite class of people that contribute nothing but steal credit and value. And look, sure, some are really bad. Some are a hindrance and are doing more harm than good. But that’s just further demonstration of how hard it is to be good at this.

The next time you see something impressive get done by any group of people larger than about five, just take a moment and remember how incredibly impressive it is that anyone managed to organize that effort. Maybe one person out of a hundred is good at it – if that.

If you’ve been going back to the same well for a long time, it can be a bit of a shock when it goes dry. But no well lasts forever; things change.

It’s natural in life that the shape of the world sometimes shifts in a way that isn’t convenient for you. Sometimes you have to dig a new well. But that will be a joyous day – the new water is always sweeter than the last dregs you drank when you were fighting off the idea that you had to change.

Here is a good habit: When you are in someone else’s home, do more than just obey their rules. Observe their customs.

Participate in their way of life. Follow them without picking everything apart; just soak it in, especially if it’s your first visit. And “home” here can mean a lot more than just someone’s house. It can be any rabbit hole into which you’ve followed them – if they are more native to the space than you, then let yourself be led.

We carve such deep grooves and ruts into our own lives that very few things can shake us out of them. One little trick is to just step over into someone else’s groove. Something that is common for another can be wondrous for you.

I bet you think that the loss of one hand would be catastrophic. Imagine all the stuff you do with both of your hands! Lots of those things would be really hard.

But humans are adaptable. After all, if you had three hands life would be so much easier. Two isn’t necessarily the ideal number. But you figured it out!

All this is to say – your circumstances will change. Sometimes gradually, sometimes rapidly. But you’ll always adapt, one way or another. Keep your chin up.

If you have an apple cart in the market square and you’re not doing well, it’s natural to feel frustrated. What a lot of people do when they’re in that situation is make a list of everything they’re doing right, look at that list, and then say “I don’t understand, I’m doing everything right! Why isn’t anyone buying my apples?”

If you make a list of the things you’re doing right, you aren’t going to find problems. Obviously.

You might not even be doing anything wrong! But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do different things with more success. Maybe you have the best apples in the county and you’re a great salesperson with awesome prices. But maybe you live in a part of the world where everyone has apple trees in their yard and so they just don’t need yours. In other words, it might just be the market itself – and you’re in the wrong one.

The point is, listen to what the market tells you. Don’t be stubborn. If you’re trying to sell apples and no one is buying them, then you need to change something. You need to sell something else, or you need to sell somewhere else, or you need to change how you’re selling. But trying to justify how you “should” already be successful isn’t going to make you a dollar.

On the subject of the horrific fashion faux pas of wearing both suspenders and a belt with a suit, a tailor once told me: “Never trust a man who doesn’t trust his own belt.”

For some reason, I think about that moment quite frequently. It makes me smile.

It’s a decent lesson, though – while “better safe than sorry” is common wisdom, the truth is that doubling up on solutions is usually wasteful. An ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure, but a pound of prevention is definitely overkill.

There should only be two kinds of actions: ones you don’t take, and ones you take with great enthusiasm.

This isn’t me saying to only do things you want to do – that would be nice, but it’s not realistic. It’s me giving you the powerful advice that you should never do anything begrudgingly.

I’m of the mindset that I like to get the maximum benefit out of everything I do. And when you do something begrudgingly, you forego a lot of that benefit. Sometimes in life, you will simply have to do something. Pretty often, actually. And some people react to this truth with great petulance, kicking rocks and grumbling the whole way. They act as if the most important thing in the world is that everyone around them knows how much they don’t want to be doing this.

First, that’s silly because doing that takes significantly more mental and physical effort than just doing it and going on about your day. But second, and more importantly, that’s leaving half the reward on the table.

Whenever you do something, there’s always this great secondary benefit of scoring points with other people. Remember when you were an adolescent and your parents made you do the laundry or the dishes? Once that command came down, you were going to do that chore no matter what. It was set – your attitude wasn’t going to change the task at all.

Now imagine yourself back in that position. You have your assignment, and absolutely nothing about your attitude will change it. So now you have two options:

1. Do those dishes with the maximum amount of belligerence and sass. They will take longer, you will be in a worse mood, and your parents will treat your completion of the task as the bare minimum required and not feel any obligation to reward or even praise you. Or…
2. You can do those dishes with great cheer and enthusiasm. This takes no additional effort on your part – I’m not even suggesting you do extra work like also sweeping or anything. I’m saying just your attitude alone will make the task more fun and enjoyable, get it done faster, and your parents will be so utterly thrilled with you that they’ll probably buy you a car.

This is one of the great hacks of life: Training yourself to always approach tasks that you have to do as if you had, in fact, chosen to do them with great joy. It’s getting twice the reward from the same or less amount of effort, while also having more fun.

This is the easiest thing in the world to put into practice, today, if you know how to spot it. What’s something your partner or roommate harps on you to do more? Look, you know you’re eventually going to cave and do it – so don’t “cave and do it,” jump on it! Do it with enthusiasm, make a production out of it, and gift your actions to that person with some nice comments about how much their happiness means to you.

Assignment you don’t like at work? Well, unless you’re planning to quit, you’ve probably got to do it at some point. So do it with cheer! Might as well score some additional reputation as a go-getter and pleasant work colleague if you’re doing the same tasks anyway.

Almost everything you do is an exchange with somebody. If you’re putting in the same on your end either way, but you can get more in return by simply changing your attitude, that’s a superpower. In the same way you should generally brag more about what you’ve done, you should also smile more about what you’re doing. Both of those things squeeze more juice out of the same orange, in a way that benefits you and harms no one else. So don’t begrudge – be great!

In Haribo gummy bears, the green ones are strawberry.

Now, that’s obviously ridiculous, but that’s not the point of this post. The point is that my six-year-old daughter told me this fact, and I immediately expressed incredulous doubt. How could such an absurd thing be true? She was quite certain, however. My doubt persisted until she obtained a package of them and showed me that I was incorrect.

Now, here’s the thing about all this: I actually wasn’t certain. If I’d spent 2 seconds thinking about it, I’d have realized that I couldn’t tell you what any of the gummy bear flavor/color combos are. It just seemed silly to me that strawberry would be green. Meanwhile, I had every reason to believe my daughter:

1. She had volunteered the info, which clearly indicated a more recent expertise than I had.
2. She has, in general, more candy expertise than I do.
3. Most importantly, she has what I call “credible certainty.” I cannot recall a time she has ever expressed that level of certainty and been wrong.

Some people are over-certain. They express certainty when they shouldn’t (like I did!) with great frequency. When that happens, you shouldn’t take their certainty as evidence. But when someone (like my daughter) never expresses certainty unless she’s right, then you should absolutely update your thinking when that person feels correct enough to argue.

Lesson learned: I damaged my own “credible certainty” today. Fortunately, my daughter is as kind as she is smart, and forgave me.

Could you genuinely think about absolutely nothing for ten minutes?

I don’t think I could. I’ve tried and failed pretty quickly. I’ve always considered it an advantage that my mind is active enough that I’m never bored – I always have something I can think about that feels like a positive use of my mental time. But it’s hard to shut it off.

Not hard. Impossible.

What kind of mental abilities might I unlock if I could do that? Is it worth the effort to train myself to do it?

Or is this just one more thing to think about?