Two for me:
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The moment you feel tipsy it’s time to ease down. You have a stomach full of booze that’s going to make you more drunk even if you stop immediately.
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If you think people are good, you’re probably right and if you think people are bad, you’re probably right.
People are good IMO.
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In general terms, people as individuals = good. People in groups = bad.
Sex is like air. It’s not a big deal unless you’re not getting any.
“Like your job. Love your wife.” - Dell from Trains, Planes, and Automobiles. You can generalize that to say, your job is just a means to an end. Don’t work a job you hate, but look elsewhere for true fulfillment in life.
Two TV quotes go through my head every day.
Bill Nye: Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t.
Doctor Who: Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.
What if you meet a Nazi?
Punching Nazis in the face is a kindness to those they victimize.
Kindly punch them in the face. Kindly.
Kill them with kindness.
Poop on company time.
“Go to the bathroom when you don’t have to go so you don’t have to go when you have to go”
Or, er, use the bathroom when one is available so you don’t need one and there isn’t one there. I can now use the restroom on demand even if it’s not much just so I’m not desperate later and can find a better location.
I call that the preemptive strike :) Very fond of it as someone with a bladder the size of a five year old.
Mine’s “never run after a bus”. It’s pointless; you won’t make it, just wait for the next one. Things go shitty because of that? Well, that’s life, just deal with it. Running after things just makes you out of breath and desperate instead of learning planning and patience
I run after the bus all the time and make it. Saves me ten minutes I can spend with the friend I’m visiting.
Edit: plus it’s extra gains
“I shouldn’t have saved so much”. Said a friend a generation older than me. He retired when he realized he didnt need to work any more and that he wasn’t going to burn through all of his money. He said he would have rather spent it while he was younger and enjoy it.
Don’t gotta worry about that.
I work in an environment that can have some tight timeline, high stress moments. People often deal with this with a kind of controlled panic- “Hi. This thing is not working.” “Fuck, this is not working, quick, try that thing! Argh! Not working either! Oh no, shits fucked. Shit… Ok, try the other thing! Fuck, call Gary, they might know what to do!”
Then I worked with a person who had this totally different approach. When shit hit the fan, they just super calmly looked around, and said “That’s a bit boring.” Just that phrase shifted my whole perspective on the industry. Just treat the problem as a minor annoyance, and you’ll see that it’s rarely worth getting panicked about.
The other thing they taught me- no matter how urgent it is, never run. Running makes it look like we fucked up. And we don’t fuck up, we just have the next thing that needs to be fixed.
I get the approach here, but unfortunately, this is impressively hard to do without a (fiscal) safety net.
I agree that it is wise to push out panic-inducing thoughts; mindfulness and all that. That’s not always possible when professional failure equates unemployment and the possible crippling poverty that follows. In my experience, employers do a garbage job at pointing out where the guardrails are, and what the bar is for dismissal, going as far as refusing to put anyone on a PIP before letting them go. Many people are in countless pressure-cookers like this, perpetually on the edge of their seats if they’re paying any attention at all.
From all that I take this advice to boil down to: Practice mindfulness, ease, and inner-peace, especially when the shit hits the fan. You can’t control the consequences, but you’ll recover better if you keep your head.
no matter how urgent it is, never run. Running makes it look like we fucked up. And we don’t fuck up, we just have the next thing that needs to be fixed.
Fake calm to be calm. Nice.
When shit hit the fan, they just super calmly looked around, and said “That’s a bit boring.”
Yeah, that could go badly… If people think you’re not taking their emergency seriously, and it turns out it’s not a quick fix, they’re probably not going to be very happy
I do find redirecting them calmly to be even more helpful. Just don’t let their panick infect you, and start working the problem normally
That usually calms people down instantly, because it skips the part where they have to convince you there’s a problem, instead you just skipped to giving them what they actually want
I grew up in a racist town, and was indoctrinated on racism in my youth. It never sat right with me, but even so, I still struggled with racist thoughts that would jump in to my head when I encountered indigenous folk.
Someone said to me though that it’s not the first thought that jumps in to your head that matters, because that’s what you’ve been trained to think. What matters is what you do after that thought has appeared.
And that’s stuck with me. It helped me be aware of the impact of indoctrinated hate, whilst also not getting tied up with guilt over my inability to completely purge myself of the indoctrinated bullshit.
It allowed me to retrain myself, and to make sure the shit I was raised with doesn’t get passed on to my own kid.
Thank you for sharing your perspective on this. I think we could heal if more people felt they could openly discuss how they grapple with it.
This is really deep.
I also gotta say: I reserve more respect for anyone who changed their attitudes to something I admire than someone who always held them. Me? I’m pretty progressive. But it’s not like I can take credit. I share similar views to most people with my upbringing. Holding these beliefs is about impressive as a ball rolling down a hill.
Questioning your beliefs and going somewhere else? That’s an achievement.
To be clear, I’ve always been progressive. I was never overtly racist in the way so many of my peers were growing up. But their overt racism impacted me and filled me with assumptions and unchallenged beliefs that it took years to identify and challenge.
I was born in Moree (the destination of the Freedom Ride (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Ride_(Australia)), and racism still shapes the town today. I don’t think it would be possible to grow up in that town without being shaped by racism in some way.
Fixed link and good one for not just going with the flow.
Wait… I thought the significantly higher than average percentage of Aboriginal people in Moree would cause the population to be less racist in general. Your experience implies that is not the case.
There’s diversity, where you have a lot of different types of people, and then there’s places with a high concentration of a minority group
The first one makes people less bigoted, because you can’t avoid dealing with people when they’re everywhere. Your not going to last long in NYC if you don’t want your food touched by them. Either you deal with it and get used to it, or you’ll find it hard to eat
The second one doesn’t force those normal human interactions. Instead, you have exposure. You see them around, but don’t have to treat them like people. You might not interact at all.
So every time you see them, it reinforces the racism
You see it all over the American South, people around the black communities aren’t less racist, they’re giga-racist
Those are words of wisdom that have always stuck with me too. The fact that your first thought can just be a hair trigger gross thing. But who you are is the reaction to that thought, and the actions you take then.
I was raised by racists and generally not-good people and I learned from an early age to lie lie lie. So recently when a friend was offering me money for something, my trigger thought was to ask for a few hundred dollars more. And just. Gosh, ew, no, no, that’s awful. I still feel bad about the fact that my initial thought was that, but the reaction that follows are where my morals actually lie.
Not an easy lesson to learn, but a very important one, IMO
From the safest places come the bravest words - The Sound
I you want to do something, you’ll find a way.
If you don’t want to, you’ll find an excuse.Sometimes I’m finding reasons not to do something (like exercise), and have to remember to stop looking for excuses and start looking for solutions.
Don’t commit more than one crime at a time
I live by this one too. It also makes me think of the Whren v. United States case
It’s not secret if two people know it.
I was asleep alone at home.Also “two can keep a secret, if one is dead.”
Don’t write down your crimes
Hahaha exactly! So good.
Don’t write anything down you don’t want everyone to read.
Don’t livestream your crimes while in a group of people committing crimes.
My friend calls that - Don’t be stupid while you’re being stupid.
Get ready, because this is kind of cheesy stuff, but these two pieces of sports advice, taken together, have guided me for years.
First: a mentor of mine who was a pool shark taught me that when you’re playing pool, there is always a best shot to take. Sometimes, when you’ve got no good options in front of you you want to just do nothing or quit. But no matter what, billiards offers a finite set of options of where to try and aim the cue, and if you rank them from best to worst, there is always a best. When you’re in a bad situation, you find it and you take the best option. Often, that’s either a harm reduction strategy, a long-shot that feels impossible, or a combo of both. But if you always do this you’ll usually suffer far less harm in the aggregate, and if you take enough long shots you’ll occasionally achieve a few incredibly improbable wins.
Second: A kayaking instructor taught me – and this I’m told is true in many similar sports – you go where your focus is, so to evade a problem, focus on the way past. If you see a rock, don’t stare it it, you’ll hit it. It doesn’t matter if your brain is thinking “I gotta go anywhere except that rock!” If you’re looking at, you’re heading into it. If you don’t want to hit the rock, instead you have to look at wherever it is you DO want to go. It takes a bit of practice, because your brain sees “rock!” more easily than “smooth water flowing between two rocks”. But that’s how you get down a river, and it’s also how you work through almost any other problems in life that are rushing at you: don’t focus ON them, focus on whatever is the preferred alternative. This is especially useful if the alternative is sort of a non-thing, like an empty gap between two problems. And it often is.
Taken together, you get the basic approach that has steered my problem solving throughout adulthood. And it really works.
Great tips! There’s actually a term for the second one, target fixation.
i took a motorcycle class where they also taught us that second one too: focus on where you want to go, not on what you want to avoid.
i hadn’t considered it in a broader context until your post, but you’re right it works
“Target fixation”
I like that your first one doesn’t imply that you always need to find a good option, you only need to look for the best. Sometimes all of your options are bad, and in any other situation you’d never go for them.
More of a famous quote I guess, but:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Since I first heard it, I’ve been far less annoyed / paranoid about other peoples actions, at work in particular.
It seems my mind fine-tuned the phrase without me noticing it, for years I’ve thought of it as:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained bystupidityincompetence."It hits a little harder, I think, because incompetence should be vincible, a condition that can be overcome, implying that it’s a choice, a lazy indifferent choice, a mediocrity.
I try to live by a similar “always try to interpret peoples actions in the most positive possible way”. This means that if someone says something hurtful, they probably didn’t mean it, either something came out wrong or you misinterpreted them. Spend a couple seconds thinking about what they could have meant, and suddenly you’re choosing to interpret them in a way that makes your day better instead of worse.
Same goes for actions. If someone does something you don’t like, you can very often choose to figure out what a good reason for their actions are. Trying my best to think like this has made me a lot happier and more easy-going.
When someone is road raging I like to pretend they have diarrhea
Aka Hanlon’s Razor
