If you are primarily

known as an employee who takes notes, you probably are filling time trying to do something valuable, you probably aren’t, and you probably should be fired/your job shouldn’t exist.

Vow now

to always let another car in. Even if you are late. Even if you are tired.

There are places to get mad at others. This is not one of those places. By being selfish you save yourself, what, 10 seconds all while capitulating to unreasonable anger. Instead, show reasonable mental equanimity and train yourself to care about what actually matters.

All men are terrible.

All women are manipulative.

There are no good guys out there.

Women don’t know what they want.

Etc.

It’s easier to be angry than sad.

We will fight hardest

and be most frustrated when something that’s obvious to us is not obvious to another.

This is how we will spend disproportionate time on certain matters compared to their real-world effects. Someone will notice this disconnect and decry “too much focus” on something “not that important.” This someone won’t be technically wrong, but he also misses that everyone tends to agree on the most important things – like, you don’t have to convince someone the nuclear proliferation is dangerous – and so urgent rhetorical battles involve pushing for consensus in the still consequential areas where disagreement amazingly occurs. Though dropping the “consequential” moniker probably wouldn’t change much since the urge to stamp out absurdity (i.e., the person who misses the obvious) is so strong that even otherwise taciturn individuals can’t themselves.

The Downside of Awareness

So now everyone’s heard of that once “rare” or “stigmatized” thing you have. Maybe that’s nice. There’s probably more funding invested in solving it. The downside is that when it was unknown and rare, you were seen as an individual and were treated to minimally judgy curiosity. Post-awareness, however, you’re just some generic individual stripped of his personal battle and instead tossed into the nuance-free box constructed via the awareness campaign.

It’s a terrible thing

to reject someone’s vulnerability. And anything other than compassionate embrace will feel like rejection.

In Instead of Out

Instead of finding one reason to dislike someone and ruling him out, find one reason to like someone and rule him in.

No, They are Worth That Much

You can’t stand CEOs making xxxx more than a janitor because your exposure to excellence it too limited. Do you know any pro athletes? If you did and you experienced “competing” against them, it would be impossible to deny the existence of galaxy-sized gaps between people’s abilities.

Now perhaps you scoff at this sports comparison and claim that business is less objective than vertical leaps and 40-yard dashes. But is it really? Think about how much smarter the smart kid in your school was compared to everyone else. Then consider he/she was only the best in one school within a state of thousands of schools. Consider how smart the state’s smartest kid must then be. Multiply again for the nation’s. The top CEOs are at that level of selectivity. A few dozen people among hundreds of millions. They all truly can mean the difference between success and failure for a business in a similar way to your school project going from a 73 to 99 if that top student joins your team.

That transformative ability, like Lebron’s basketball prowess, is truly worth xxxx more than the worst player’s/student’s contribution (to say nothing of the janitors within the organization).

 

Status or Joy?

It’s tough to know if you want to purchase that cool thing because the thing, in and of itself, would bring you joy or because it would deliver you status (and perhaps joy through that gained status). A solution is to surround yourself with such wealth that nobody notices your new Ferrari. No heads turn, no glowing conversations commence. In that scenario, you’ll quickly learn what material goods cleanly deliver happiness (and should be purchased) and which ones were mostly about how others viewed you (and should be avoided).

look for personal bluffs. Call them. Try to understand why you would want to believe something that isn’t true.