What does it mean to be nice?

It might be easier to say what being nice doesn’t mean. Being nice is not the same as being milquetoast. It doesn’t mean not having firm, honest opinions. It doesn’t mean being someone people walk all over. It also doesn’t mean the Minnesota nice of passive aggression. To me, being nice, as a virtue, is about two things: discretion and delivery. Discretion is the fine art of knowing what to say, how to say it, and when. A quick example is, say, the person next to you at work constantly playing loud, terrible music at you. It’s very easy to walk over and yell at them. It’s easy to be passive-aggressive and turn your music up, or theirs down when they go to the bathroom. As I mentioned last week, however, these aren’t likely to affect someone else’s behavior. A carefully worded, polite, friendly comment, with a proposed behavior suggestion for both of you is more likely to be effective.

Unless they’re an unrepentant jerk, but those are rarer than we imagine.

Discretion is also about where we say things. You’re polite, one hopes, to the jerk with the bad music taste in the office. At home, to your partner, you can let it spill. Every social environment has its own level of acceptable discourse about itself and its inhabitants. I’ve been in work environments where taking the piss out of your co-workers was de rigeur, and places where a misplaced word can have long-term consequences. If you’re not sure, a safe default is “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

This is hard stuff, especially at first. If you’re used to being brusque and callous to the point where it’s second nature, try faking it until you make it. With practice—and I do not suggest trying this without practicing first—fake niceness (without the layer of passive-aggression) is indistinguishable enough from the real thing. In any job that involves face-to-face interaction with a fickle and often rude public, dealing with a friendly face, even if it’s an act, is often enough to bring some of the rudest people to their senses. If you’ve ever been to a Disney theme park, you’ve likely seen this in action. David Foster Wallace called it the “Professional Smile,” and noted the effect not receiving it has on how you walk away from an interaction: it’s not good.

Don’t expect to change the way you think of people, and certainly not overnight. What is more important is how you act with people. Given enough time, it’s possible that you will become sincere and nice in how you deal with people. Maybe. Once it feels real to you, as long as there’s no nagging guilt that inevitably comes with a bad interaction, and as long as the person you’re dealing with walks away with a positive impression, you’re doing the right thing. Like so much, this all comes down to mindfulness. Taking a step back from your actions and being aware of the choices you make in interacting with others goes a long way to ensuring you come off as nice. There are enough proverbs about the utility of holding ones tongue that it’s pointless to repeat them here. Remember: you do have a choice about what to say and how to say it. Take time and aim. When you shoot your mouth off from the hip, as it were, you risk missing, and you risk hurting yourself and others. This isn’t cheap, liberal arts relativism. It’s dealing with people.

And, hey, I’m not perfect. Nor do I aspire to be. However, the day will come, sooner than later, when a perfect confluence of events will tax my patience to the limit. My alarm clock won’t go off. The subway will break down, making me late for work. I won’t have had my morning coffee. I’ll find out I had an appointment I forgot about. The cashier won’t give me my change when I got lunch. It rained and I forgot an umbrella. Then, someone will say something to push me over the edge. How one deals with that is the ultimate test of how well you can maintain your niceness.

There’s a time and place to say your piece, and a time and a place to shut your mouth. Generally, unsolicited comments don’t go over well with the recipient, whether you deliver it in a friendly manner, or a sotto voiced rejoinder after an encounter. In cases like these, it’s best to learn to let it go, and not let these things get to you. After all, “what do you care?” In those cases where someone sincerely wants an opinion, don’t be cruel. Be honest, be frank, and be sincere, but by no means be cruel. Everybody has a reason why they do what they do. That doesn’t mean you understand it. It also doesn’t mean they understand it. When dealing with other people, unless you’re Charles Xavier, you don’t have the ability to control how they think or act. You can encourage and suggest, but the way you do it will have a huge impact on how well it goes over. And there are no guarantees.

This is hard. It’s hard to balance being nice with being honest, and being strong. It’s hard to bite your tongue when someone’s goading you, directly or indirectly. It’s very hard to get that angry, threatened part of your brain to stand down. Hard, however, is not the same as impossible. It all comes back to mindfulness. Slow down, step back, think before you speak, or type, or click “Submit” and see if this is going to actually help matters. And, of course, in the event you do blow it and wreck someone’s mood, step on someone’s toes, and make the situation worse, rather than feed the cycle, apologize and move on. Or, just move on, if you have to. I think, however, the results of being nice pay off in the long run, far better than the initial pleasures of snark. Try it for yourself, and see.

It’s hard to be nice, these days.

It seems to me, now more than ever, that our interactions with others often turns into the trading of barbs. Any opinion expressed runs the risk of being reacted to with snark. [1] I know I’m not the only person who sees this. My friend Andrew Marvin touched on this a few months ago.

We allow other people to affect ourselves like this all the time. It’s a perfectly natural, human thing. Of course we should care about what our loved ones think. But when it comes to minutia—like what someone’s drinking—I can’t see any worthwhile reason to care.

Ask yourself, “How does this person’s decision affect me?”
If the answer is that it doesn’t, that’s great. Let go, and become a little bit more free.

If the answer is something negative, ask yourself why. Is it a good reason, or is it kind of silly?

These are important things to ask, but another important thing to ask is why we are compelled to even remark? What is the root of the snark problem? Why is so much of my dialogue, and other people’s, so concerned with negativity? What purpose does snark serve, and what drives us to use it when there are far more constructive means of communication at our disposal?

For me, the problem took focus as we wrapped up Episode 5 of Crush On Radio. What I intended to be a sedate discussion on special editions of albums and their bonus tracks became a very opinionated, and often very nasty rant on my part. After we wrapped up, I immediately laid down a rule for the show that we can’t have another episode that is all griping and snark. It’s not constructive and contrary to the spirit of the show, which is about sharing music and stories about music with people.

What makes avoiding being snarky so difficult is that it’s omnipresent in society, and on the Internet especially. One can’t state an opinion in a public forum without having at least one person insult not only your opinion, but you. For an example, look at the comments on almost any story on a newspaper website. No matter what the topic, politics, culture, technology, food, you’re bound to say something that will set someone else off. After enough of this, it becomes natural to take the defensive position and pepper your statement of public opinion with harsh invective from the start.

Who knows the reason for this? Some suggest the anonymity afforded by our means of communicating with each other frees up the asshole that lurks within us all.[2] There are multiple attempts to deal with the problem in the digital sphere, ranging from “Karma” systems such as on Reddit to enforced “identity” systems like on Google Plus. The effect on behavior varies depending on the method, but nothing ever can completely remove the snark problem, short of making the entire site read-only. [3]

The worst part of all this snark is that it’s not constructive. Even if there’s something of value buried beneath the vitriol, it doesn’t get through. When someone is snarky, even if the point they make is valid, it automatically puts the recipient on the defensive. They don’t take the time to ponder the valid point, they only defend themselves harder. Facts already have a tendency to make people who disagree with them strengthen their disbelief. Delivering a valid statement in a way that is going to cause offense certainly isn’t going to help.

It’s a leap to say that the problem of snark in offline life, whether we speak it aloud or not, is a direct result of Internet-based snark. Despite this, immersing oneself in this well of negativity, anger and trolling has to have some effect on how we conduct ourselves when we’re away from it. Was I so willing to be an aggressively sarcastic, snarky jerk—even if it’s in my head—before I got involved in online discourse? Who can tell? Either way, as I get older and, presumably, wiser, I see this becoming a problem for myself and others. Since I can’t change their behavior, I’ll have to start with myself.

Next week, I’ll be proposing a Solution

I coasted my way through elementary school. I coasted my way through middle school. I coasted my way through high school. When I went to college, the coasting stopped for a while, but in time, I found I was able to coast there as well. You coast by expending as little effort as possible to meet the expectations set before you. I could do homework assignments and write papers the night before—in college, sometimes an hour or two before—and earn perfectly acceptable grades. I pulled down A and B grades, on papers done in panicked states the night before. I churned out papers about books I hadn’t finished, or even read past the first few chapters. I knew what my teachers wanted, I knew how to do it, and I knew how to spell. I knew how to, if necessary, pad a paper out without making it look like it was padded.

Teachers either loved me, or hated me. In my high school American History class, my teacher would write detailed outline notes on the blackboard for us to copy down. I never did. He noticed this, but also noticed that I got and understood the material just by reading the notes and the textbooks, and let me slide. He loved me. I took another class with him. In high school geometry, the teacher taught the class with a hands-on method using tracing paper, compasses, and protractors. We figured stuff out ourselves, and I hated it. I picked up what needed to be picked up inside of the first five minutes. I slept through most classes, yet aced every test. She hated me. I earned no credits in geometry that year. [1]

This did not set me off on a good footing for my adult life.

I don’t know the root cause of my coasting, but I suspect it’s tied to my ADHD. [2] Sitting down and doing the work is, without a doubt, hard. For me, it couldn’t possibly be harder. There’s always some squirrel fighting for my attention. Even as I write this paragraph, I stopped to check a link in the show notes of the podcast I’m listening to while I work. Before that, I tried to do a Google search to find out if there’s syntax in Markdown to do an <abbr> tag. I’ve checked Twitter, and Facebook. When I was younger, I kept a TV on in my bedroom over my computer so I had something to distract the distractible part of my brain when I actually did my homework. It didn’t work. TV, computer games, and my own navel were all much more compelling.

Without something caffeinated in the morning, I often can’t get down to work at all.

The pieces are falling into place.

Here’s the thing: I’m pushing thirty. I’ve graduated college, had a few years in the work force, and I’m only figuring out these things now? I suspect a large part of this came from the lack of consequences in my coasting. That’s not to say I didn’t experience any consequences at times. The first time I ever got an F was a fourth grade test on poetry and rhyme schemes. I failed my Seventh Grade English class three semesters running, ruining my grade average in a year that determined what high school would attend. I failed out of my first college in three semesters. I spent a year out of work, slowly going insane.

Marcel Proust wrote:

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.

The question is what lesson did I take away from those failures? That depends on which one we’re talking about. My earliest failures taught me the limits of how little effort I could get away with, and that minimum only increases over time. Once you’re away from the structured environment of the modern American education system, the amount of effort you need to exert goes up exponentially. Maybe that’s why it’s taken so long for me to see the problem, and so long for me to work on solving it. Touch the stove enough times, and you’ll either realize it’s hot and stop, or you’ll get burned.

I’ve been burned.

It’s my own damn fault.

And owning up to that is, of course, the first step.

But, I’m learning how to deal with all of this. I’m learning to actually do the work, even with my a-neurotypical brain chemistry. A lot of the methods are hacky kludges, in lieu of something that can properly modify the chemical soup I live in. One of the biggest things is, of course, writing stuff down. Developing a trusted system to get things that have to be done out of my head, organized, and in a place that I can process them so I can know what has to be done and when has gone a long way to improving my work ethic.

Not all of these are based on the GTD methodology, though Things does play a major role. There’s also Lift for keeping track of all the things I have to do daily that I don’t already. When I’m doing stuff that’s tedious, I use timers. Lately, I’ve started using Pomodorable, which integrates with the Today list in Things. I choose the task I want to do, and a 25 minute timer starts ticking away. It’s an app that’s still new, and a bit buggy, but I think it shows great promise. It’s already becoming a vital part of my workflow.

I owe a large part of this essay to the most recent episode of Back to Work, and the wonderful conversation I had in the chat room during the show with people just as messed up as I am. This essay is just my own personal experiences, and my own personal set of tools. I have the help of technology—which is a double-edged sword I’m still learning to wield—and a loving partner to catch me. There’s still a ways to go.

Even for those of you who are a bit more neurotypical, and can get things done, and don’t need medication or therapy or “lifehacks” may find something of value in the idea of cultivating ways to patch up your own weaknesses. We all have our problems, and we all have our neuroses and things that get in the way of living our lives and making stuff. Sometimes, we need a yellow foam ball to relieve our anxiety.

As long as the work gets done.

And as long as the work that gets done is done to the best of our ability, without shortcuts, last-minute scrambles, or simply coasting on the minimal amount of effort. [3]

For me, that’s been the hardest lesson to learn.

This past Thursday, I interviewed for a job that I was barely qualified for. This wasn’t apparent when I started the whole process, but as the interview progressed, it dawned on me that if I did get the job, I would be in over my head and have to tread water, fast. Despite that, I felt the interview went well enough that the job was in my grasp. Friday, I obsessively checked my e-mail, hoping for a response. Same thing on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. At last, a little after five o’clock on Monday evening, I got the news.

They told me no.

And I’m fine with that. “No” is not the answer I wanted, true, but it was the answer I was prepared for. As They Might Be Giants said, “If it wasn’t for disappointment / I wouldn’t have any appointments”. But, disappointment is not the same thing as failure. I don’t feel like a failure because I was told “no.” That I even got a chance to interview, to show off my skills on the command line to an audience and have the opportunity to prove myself based on a polite e-mail message and a couple of portfolio pieces is enough to make me feel like I won something.

I tried. They said no. Time to dust myself off and try again.

The fear of rejection, the fear of being told “no” stands in the way of so many of us. Nobody likes to be denied something. When the opportunity to go for something that’s so far out of our reach comes to us, we freeze. “What if I don’t succeed?” we tell ourselves. “What if they say no?” Truth is, as my father says, the worst thing that could happen is that they tell you “no.” They can tell you “no” in many ways. They can be polite about it, or they can punch you in the gut. They can say it quietly, or they can scream it until your ears bleed. They can use flowery, verbose language that makes it sound like they’re not saying much of anything at all, or they can be blunt. It’s all still “no.”

I suspect part of it comes from expectations, and the way people define themselves on their successes and failures. Nobody wants to be branded a failure, but we all have far more failures than we have successes. Allow me to quote myself:

Failure is seen by many to be a permanent state. I blame report cards. That F you got in first quarter English goes on your Permanent Record, or so they say. You failed, and therefore you shall be forever branded as “The Failure,” right? Guaranteed, inside of a decade, or less, nobody will remember your failure except you, much as nobody will remember you getting a boner when standing in front of Ms. Grundy’s classroom in 5th Grade.

On Cultivating a Superego

I don’t have the psychology and sociology background to explain Western society’s distinct love of shortcuts to success, to the point where books like The Secret sells over twenty-one million copies. Despite it, there’s a wonderful dichotomy between the fetishization of success, and the lengths people are willing are to go to skip the work. Even I would occasionally chip in two bucks to the office Powerball fund, despite knowing the insane odds against winning. What’s the worst that can happen? I’m out two bucks that would have gone into the snack machine, anyway.

There is a scarier prospect than being told “no.” and that’s this: What if they said “yes?”

Then, in this case, it would have been brown-trousers time. Because it’s something I wanted, I would have dived in with gusto. However, for just as many people afraid of failure, there are as many or more afraid of success. For most things we try, failure just means we’re back where we were before. Success means that everything changes, and nobody likes change. The best part of being in a stuck in a rut is that it’s your rut. It’s made for you, or you for it, like Douglas Adams’s puddle. Some force has to shake us out of our rut, and that force can be either internal or external. Sometimes it’s both. We also don’t like stagnation.

Perhaps the fears we have of both of those little words, “no” and “yes,” come from our own internal dichotomy. There’s an endless tug of war between the two conflicting sides of ourself—Seth Godin’s Lizard Brain, and our better, higher self. Unless you have a lot of mental training, they both have the same level of control. When one wins, the other loses, and they both hate to lose. They’re not afraid to show it, either. Even worse is that you have to listen to them, because they are you. You can shut one up, or the other, but only for a little while. You just have to choose. Whichever of those angry, scared voices pops up to remind you that you could be told “yes” or “no” and to be afraid, you tell that voice to shut up.