Take an Interest in People

How many times a day are you asked “how are you doing?” How often does the question actually have meaning? Very rarely. It’s usually just an automatic part of speech. The person asking it doesn’t really want to know how you’re doing and would likely prove to be impatient if you were to take the time to tell them. If you run into someone and say “I remember the last time we spoke you were thinking about changing jobs. How’s the hunt going? Are you feeling any happier in your current gig?” That’s a very different kind of question. That’s showing care and interest. When you do that people feel good about themselves and feel good about you.

About a month into university I walked by a guy on campus who I recognized from residence. We had never spoken before but this was the third time we had crossed paths and exchanged nods so this time we decided to stop and chat. We both had time before our next classes so we decided to grab lunch. When we sat down to lunch he asked me “So Rob, how are you doing?” I told him I’m doing fine. He said, “No, no, no, how are you really doing?” The question caught me off guard for a second but then I opened up to him. I told him about feeling a bit weird about my Israeli girlfriend returning home, and still getting adjusted socially to living in Montreal but on the whole life was going well. We had a real conversation. This guy went on to be my roommate and best friend through university.

I find it particularly enjoyable to go about life this way. When I take an interest in people and give them my proper attention I feel good about myself and it makes me happy. Similarly, I find that I get the best out of people. When you treat people in a way that makes them feel good they treat you well which in turn makes you treat them even better. The positivity builds on itself. It’s an awful lot like smiling. When you smile, the world smiles back at you. Being a kind, engaged person is a reward in and of itself but it has other long term rewards too.

Have you ever met a person that things always seem to work out for? A person who seems ill prepared, kind of goofy but somehow their ass always lands in the butter. (it’s an actual expression, I promise). I’m that guy! I’ve been told numerous times that I was born with a horseshoe up my ass (horseshoes are lucky apparently).

I’m sure part of it is that I’m just plain lucky. However, I’m confident that I’ve created some of my own luck just by being good to people. When you’re good to people as you walk through life you find people willing and eager to help you at opportune times. I got my first real job in life because a friend of a friend unsolicited thought give me the username and password to his university job board. I had established a connection with him when we had spoken in passing. Taking the time to get to know him resulted in him thinking of me. It was an easy favor for him to do and it made a big difference to me. Fast forward two years later and I got him a job with my neighbor. Fast forward a year after that and he set me up with his girlfriend’s cute friend. It was a nice cycle of goodwill, favors and karma. I got my second professional project because I volunteered my time to help when I had nothing to gain. When circumstances changed I had already established trust.

The same rule proves itself in smaller ways too. You’re in much better shape when you’re running late to file a document if you’ve established a rapport with the filing clerk. Similarly, you’ll be happy you took the time to get to know your neighbor when you board a flight and aren’t sure if you turned the oven off.

So again, take an interest in people. It’s its own reward and you’ll see somehow life seems to just work out a lot smoother when you’ve made friends along the way.

Don’t Listen to your Body, It Lies!

I’ve learned that how productive I am in a day is in large part a function of how early I put on my pants. This is true of weekdays and weekends. If you work for yourself or at home then this is especially true.

I am not a morning person. I wish I was. I find that when I wake up in the morning, my body screams at me: “Go back to sleep! There’s no point in getting up now because I won’t be able to function properly anyway. Trust me, I know myself. You might as well get some more sleep so you won’t suffer through the whole day.”

Doctors always say listen to your body. I’m telling you that as it relates to staying in bed, your body lies to you. If you get up and get going you might feel like crap for the first half hour while you recover from your grogginess but after that you’re ultimately fine. Your body isn’t telling you how you are going to feel but just how awful you feel right now.

This is especially true for naps. I love naps. One, I just enjoy them. Two, I’ve been reading that they are a very efficient form of sleep. There’s a theory that the rapid eye movement (or R.E.M.) portion of sleep is the critical, recharging portion of sleep. When you sleep eight hours in a night you can expect to have 2 hours of solid R.E.M. time. This should leave you feeling well rested. If you incorporate a fairly consistent nap into your routine, your body learns that it has less time to work with during the nap, so you shift into R.E.M. a lot faster. As such, napping can provide much more concentrated sleep. So if you incorporate napping into your life, you can get away with sleeping fewer hours for every 24 hour cycle while feeling equally rested. This can be an important trick for sleep deprived parents. (Research the veracity of this paragraph for yourself. I don’t know it to be true)  

I’ve spoken with many people that say that they can’t nap because they just feel so awful afterwards. Again, I ask do you feel awful for the rest of the day/evening or do you just feel awful for the next 20-30 minutes while you’re “degrogging”. I suspect it’s the latter.

Back to the issue of putting on pants. You can start taking care of things in your underwear. You can fire up your laptop and address some emails. You can clean up a few things around the house. But are you really being that productive or effective when you’re still in this half started mode?

I find that staying in bed is a form of procrastination like anything else. You can be procrastinating from doing your morning routine or getting on with your day in general. The key thing to breaking procrastination is inertia. When you’re doing nothing, you like to keep doing nothing. When you get going on a task you like to keep going. So it can make a huge difference to your day if you choose to pop out of bed and jump in the shower right away. I find that I’m infinitely more effective and more committed to making good use of my time once I’m wearing pants.

This same notion of getting going in the morning can be applied to any task that you’ve been procrastinating on. The trick is “cracking the egg” or taking the first step towards accomplishing what you want. Momentum is very important and I find that once you take just the very first step your natural inclination will be to keep going. Avoid the excuse of thinking that you need a bigger window of time to make meaningful progress so you’ll wait till you have more time to get started. Shenanigans! Take even the most basic of first steps right away and it can help tremendously. Also once you start to tackle a task you start to know everything that’s involved. Once you know what’s involved, even if it’s a lot it seems far less daunting than the unknown.

In Sum, Don’t trust your body when it tells you to stay in bed. Put on pants early. Embrace napping. And crack the egg on tasks you been procrastinating on.

I started writing this blog in hopes that it might help improve people’s lives. In that spirit it would make me very happy if after reading this post, you take 20 minutes to get started on something, anything that you’ve been putting off for a while. Give it a shot! I think that it’ll make you happy. If you actually follow through I encourage you to let me know about it in the comments.

Good Relationships Equals a Happy Life

Relationships with friends and family is one area of my life that is already truly rich. I have cultivated very rewarding, loving and enduring relationships with family and friends. I have great people in my life. I feel very supported and loved. I am confident that my family and friends feel I provide the same thing.

Relationships with the other human beings I believe is at the heart of happiness for most people. It certainly is for me. Understanding, being understood, appreciating, being appreciated, loving, being loved, supporting, being supported and sharing experiences and fun is what I believe to be the essence of life. The rest is ultimately noise. It’s very important to not forget it. It’s very easy to allow other elements of life to hog the majority of our focus and distract us from what makes us really happy.

Having quality relationships in your life is not a one time achievement. It is something that requires a lifetime of cultivation, nurturing and maintenance. And much like most good things in life you get out what you put in. This works in two ways: One being a good, committed friend is a reward in and of itself. You feel great about yourself when you put yourself out for people you care about. Also it feels great to care about others so much that you’re motivated to do it. Two, the more you put into relationships the more others will put in in return. I acknowledge this doesn’t always work perfectly. People don’t always reciprocate properly. People can be shitty that way but the rule generally holds true. 

My friend had back surgery a few years ago. He was so touched that our other friends and I went to the trouble to come in from our respective cities to visit him upon his release from the hospital. I told him the outpour of support he received was a reflection of the type of friend he has been over the years.

Friendship comes naturally for me. In general I’m plagued by laziness which impedes my pursuit of other objectives. I need to be disciplined to kick myself in the ass to do things that will make me happy. However, cultivating and nurturing relationships is one area that requires no discipline for me. I naturally want to be talking, spending time and having fun with my friends for the majority of my free time. So while having worthwhile relationships takes a great deal of effort, for me it’s very easy because unlike many things, it’s something I’m naturally inclined to pursue.

I think too many people take their friendships for granted. As people become adults with spouses, kids, mortgages, careers and all that other fun stuff they start to cut further and further into the time they spend with friends. I think having less time for friends is just a reality of adult life however it is very important to still give relationships the high priority they deserve. While it is important to dedicate a certain amount of time, it’s not all about time. It’s more a question of heart and level of engagement. Prioritizing relationships will make you happier while you are investing in them and you’ll find you’re strengthening and securing something you will very much want in place in the future.

           

Let’s discuss what goes into being a good friend. I don’t think there is a single recipe and different people look for different things but I can tell you the kind of friend I try to be/what I look for in others.

Loyalty: I try to inspire confidence in my friends that I will try my very best to come through for them in whatever way they may need me. It is important that I consistently come through and that I come through even when it’s not easy. Anyone can be a good friend when it’s convenient. You learn a lot about people when circumstances are difficult. The last component of this is prioritization. It is important to me that my friends feel I prioritize them appropriately in my life.

Dependability/Reliability: This basically means doing what I say I’m going to do. If I make plans with you, in the absence of the sky falling I will be there. The opposite of this is being flakey and over time it erodes friendships.

Acceptance: This means I know everything about you and I like you anyway. My friends should feel comfortable to be who they are and behave the way they want to behave and know that I’ll still want to be their friend and support them. In a good friendship you don’t feel the need to manage the impression you’re making.

People come as a package. There are going to be things you like and don’t like about everyone. However part of accepting a person means not getting angry with them for behaving as you expect them to. For example, I have a friend who is not reliable at keeping plans he makes. His flakiness is definitely something I dislike about him and it’s frustrating. However, he has many other redeeming qualities which make him a worthwhile friend on the whole. It doesn’t make sense for me to get angry with my friend each time he proves himself flakey because I know this about him when I sign up to be friends with him. I can choose to not be friends with him if I find his flaws that bothersome but if I choose to stay in the relationship than I should accept and tolerate undesirable behavior which is consistent with what I signed up for. It only makes sense to get angry when my expectations are violated.

The ability to tell a friend they’re fucking-up: I think it’s very important to have people in your life who let you know when you’re making a mistake. It’s socially awkward and difficult to confront someone with negative feedback. I know I have a good relationship with someone when they can comfortably tell me they think I’m wrong and need to make a change, and I can receive the feedback without being defensive and trust that the feedback is being given with the best intentions. This comes back to the issue of there being acceptance in the relationship. It is a lot easier to take negative feedback from a friend when you trust that the friend’s support is unwavering.

Reciprocity: This basically refers to both people committing and investing equally into a relationship. When one person puts more than the other into a relationship it’s very difficult for there not to be resentment. Ideally you find people who approach friendship the same way you do and desire the same level of investment. And of course don't let yourself be the weak link.


In short, find good people, and continually and happily work at nurturing the relationship. It'll be a reliable and consistent source of happiness and pride.

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Beyond, trying to be a friend with strong character and looking for the same thing in others I have a few other basic suggestions to improve your relationships. Click here for the next post on confronting problems and apologizing properly.

The Magic of a Proper Apology

Confront problems: If you’re upset with a person let them know it and give them an opportunity to make things right. If you just keep your displeasure to yourself, obviously the relationship suffers in the short run but more importantly unresolved issues get dredged up in the future when there are new problems and animosity mounts. You need to pick your battles so you’re not resolving conflicts all the time but at the same time it’s important to address anything that really bugs you. You’re doing the other person a service by telling them you’re upset and giving them an opportunity to correct things rather than just liking them less. Also solving problems the right way strengthens the bond between people. A social conflict can be a real opportunity. When a problem is resolved in a proper way, you have the potential to have a stronger relationship than you had before the problem existed.

Apologize Properly: This is the flip side of confronting problems. When you are in the wrong, admit it and apologize immediately and whole heartedly. There are a few things that go into a proper apology. First, acknowledge what you did and the legitimacy of the other person’s feelings. Second, you must feel and communicate genuine remorse. If you don’t feel bad about what you did and regret your actions you can’t offer a meaningful apology. Three, you should offer and make an effort to correct any damage done by your actions whenever possible. Four, make a sincere promise to avoid repeating the offense in the future.

Defensiveness, justifying your behavior and emphasizing the other person’s role in the problem all undermine the strength of an apology. I’m not recommending accepting blame undeservedly but when you ultimately know you fucked up offer unqualified, sincere apologies.

Many people find it difficult to admit they’re wrong and apologize. It hurts the pride and can feel like your showing weakness. But the exact opposite is true. It takes much more strength of character to admit when you’re wrong. People don’t appreciate excuses, they highly appreciate genuine apologies. Excuses exacerbate problems and deteriorate relationships. Genuine apologies diffuse problems and strengthen relationships. If you don’t naturally feel comfortable admitting when you’re wrong and apologizing start practicing it. I promise it gets easier and actually feels really good. It’s cathartic to apologize and frees you of that shitty feeling you carry around when you know you fucked up.

Finally, a proper apology is very disarming in all types of relationships. For example if your boss is really pissed off because you’re 20 minutes late and you say this: “I’m really sorry I’m late. I screwed up. I understand why you’re mad. You have a reasonable expectation of your employees and I violated it. I plan on staying 40 minutes later tonight to make up for the time I missed this morning. In the future, I’m going to plan my mornings more effectively so I’m consistently at work on time. And again I’m sorry I screwed up today.” How is your boss able say anything other than OK and thank you? It makes no sense for your boss to belabor the point once you’ve acknowledged the problem and made a commitment to correct it. There is no more basis for anger or argument. Notice the example included all the components of a proper apology. This type of apology works in all types of relationships from professional to friendship to romantic. When you fuck up apologize properly.