Dark side of my nature - redux
Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 06:37AM
“You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you; they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.” John Gardner on maturity (quoted by David Brooks)
Given the choice, I would rather be liked than disliked - as a co-worker, a colleague, a relative, a neighbor. a human being. There is, I'm sure, some survival advantages to being likeable - one is less likely to have one's head bashed in, being able to live long enough procreate, when others feel an affinity toward you as a person. One's self-perception, after all, is in large part made up of reflections and reactions of others. At least mine is.
Yet the older I get, the less I worry about my popularity. I know things I do and say simply honk people off at times. Knowing that some people are just never going to love me isn't that important. It's even, as Gardner suggests, "quite relaxing." Many changes I made as a technology director during my career (switching to Gmail from Outlook, for example) royally pissed a few people off, and in meetings, little digs and questions let me know the change was an ongoing rub and that I was personally responsible for their unhappiness.
With some people, you just know nothing will satisfy them. No action will make them happy. Not one thing you can do will make them like you. And I'm OK with that.
In fact, the dark side of my nature asks, "What can I do to drive these people even a little more crazy?" since they will never like me anyway. I would love for someone to invent an ethernet cable that works when I am near and doesn't work when I am not around. (Maybe I will create a Kickstart campaign. Partners?)
I remember a tech once telling her principal, "Nothing I do seems to make you happy. But luckily you are a lot more fun to watch when your mad." I suspect she had long stopped worrying about her popularity with this disagreeable man.
Reader Comments (2)
How about "I tolerate you"?
Kenn,
You are a much nicer person than I am!
Doug