If you want people to listen to you, use their own agenda, their language, their motivators.
If you want people to act, show them yourself.
If you want people to change, help them reflect and find their way.
There’s this idea that bossing people around is effective. It’s only partially true. You might get people to listen, to act, to change by commanding them, but that’s never going to stick.
They are the heroes to their own story. At most, you can be the guide.
Relationships are hard work. All relationships.
That’s mainly because in a relationship we are asked to take something into consideration that we are incapable of understanding: the other party involved.
It takes a lot of work to just accept this simple fact. That understanding is not the basis of a relationship.
Caring is.
The things you can learn to accept.
It’s unbelievable.
You are resilient and you can live every day learning to accept feelings, thoughts, situations that on paper you would never want in your life.
It helps to frame them in a narrative that serves your higher purpose. And it helps to remind yourself of that narrative at challenging times and at good times.
Once you have that, you are simply unstoppable.
What good is it to blame it on others? People who might or might not be still around. People who’ve passed by, who stopped for a while, who’ve been a constant, whom we’ll never talk ever again.
And what good is it to blame it on the circumstances? What has happened, what might have been, what will be tomorrow. The weather, the economics, the politics, and the structural difficulties.
At the end of the day, we are the greatest enemy to our own achievements.
We are in control, just not of the things we tend to blame.
We can decide to wake up and do the work.
We can extend an hand and help a friend.
We can be kind, inspiring, and motivating.
We can say thank you and I am sorry.
We can still talk when nobody listens.
Or we can shut up when we decide it’s enough.
One way or the other, we can.
And we should.
This one here from The New York Times is a cautionary tale.
It’s about never trusting the glamour and sparkles you see on social media. Even when they seem to be selfless and well-intended.
And it’s also a tale about not confusing the object with the subject. Just because the latter is rotten, doesn’t mean the former is as well. That is to say, it is still possible to pay a fair wage to your employees, build a good company, and not be a total asshole.
This other one from The Guardian is also a cautionary tale.
It’s about the inevitability of being caught at fault when you are a public figure. It’s about the fascination of newspapers of any kind and size for stories which are not stories. It’s about the need to accept that the better you are at what you do, the more others will try to take you down with frivolous items, leveraging both the inevitability and the fascination described above.
And it’s also a tale about letting all this wash over you and continue on your path.
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