Tag: Adults

Here is the part nobody says at the start. None of us is easy to date, to deal with, or to please all of the time. We arrive carrying vices, attitudes and settled ways of doing things, and those are the same things that make each of us particular. You will not like everything about somebody. That is not a warning sign. It is arithmetic.

The story being sold

Two ideas do most of the damage. The first is that somewhere there is a person you will like entirely, and the work is to find them. The second is that once found, the thing runs by itself, happily ever after, in the manner of a story written for children.

Neither is true and both are expensive. The first sends people looking instead of building, on the reasoning that difficulty means they have the wrong person rather than that they have a person. The second makes ordinary maintenance feel like failure.

The question that replaces them

The useful question is not whether somebody is right. It is whether you are willing to work for them, and whether they are willing to work for you. Both halves, because one half alone has a name and the name is not partnership.

That sounds simple and it is extremely hard, which is a different thing from complicated. There is nothing to understand. There is only something to keep doing.

What compromise actually is

No relationship of any kind survives without some of it. Love is a matter of giving and of taking, and it is not made of smiles and kind words alone, which are the easy part and the part that photographs well.

Two things are worth separating here, because the word gets used for both and they are not the same. Compromise is giving up a preference so that two people can go on sharing a life. Surrender is giving up something you actually need, repeatedly, so that one person does not have to move. The first is the price of company. The second is a slow arrangement in which one person disappears.

The test is whether it runs in both directions and whether it is visible. Compromise that both people can name is doing its job. Compromise that only one of them has noticed is not compromise at all, it is an accounting error, and it always comes due.

Where this lands

Accepting that nobody is easy is not a lowering of standards. It is what allows a standard to be applied to the right thing. Stop grading the person on how little friction they cause, and start noticing whether they move when it matters, and whether you do.

We rarely tell our friends what they are worth to us. Not out of indifference, simply because nothing prompts it. Three habits keep a friendship warm, and none of them takes much.

Turn up, and stay turned up

When somebody you care about is upset and you have already tried several times to find the right words, stop hunting for them and put an arm round them instead. A hug carries weight precisely when language has run out.

What sits underneath that is the whole of it. Being a friend means being present for all of the thing, not for the good part of it. Anybody can offer a warm sentence and move along. The friend is the one still there afterwards, and who lets you see that they are glad to be.

One qualification, because advice of this kind is usually given as though everybody were the same. Not everyone wants to be held, and a person in real distress may want distance rather than contact. Read the person in front of you. The instruction is to be present. How that looks is theirs to decide, not yours.

Let the gaps be gaps

Be understanding about your friend’s life and the commitments in it. Two people can both be busy, move in quite different circles, and go weeks or a couple of months without meeting or exchanging more than a line.

That is not a friendship in decline. It is a friendship between adults. What holds it together is not how often you speak but a settled assumption on both sides: that you are available to one another, and that if something goes wrong either of you can lean on the other without an apology for the silence.

Worth saying plainly, because a long gap is so easily misread. The friend who has not called is usually not withdrawing. They are usually just tired. Treating the gap as a message is how perfectly good friendships get quietly downgraded by two people who each concluded that the other had lost interest.

Accept the flaws, in both directions

Decide that you can take your friend as they actually are, awkward parts included, because you are carrying a set of your own. A friendship that lasts is one where that decision has been made rather than postponed.

And the clause people leave off: it has to work the other way as well. They should accept you, with your own oddities and failings, exactly as you are. Acceptance running one way only is not acceptance. It is being tolerated, and it is much easier to feel than to name, which is why it is worth naming.

What all three have in common

None of these asks you to be impressive. Turning up, allowing silence, accepting the awkward parts: every one of them is undramatic, and every one of them is a decision rather than a feeling. That is the encouraging part. A friendship in good repair is not the product of unusual warmth. It is the product of somebody having decided, and gone on deciding, to stay.

Of all the racket sports, table tennis is the one played by the most people worldwide, and the reason is not that it makes the best television. It is that almost anybody can play, at almost any age, in a room they already own.

It is enjoyable, which is not a small argument

There is no better argument than this one. The game is entertaining in a way you do not get elsewhere, and the pace of it produces a genuine lift while you are playing, which is worth having regularly rather than once.

Take that seriously rather than skipping past it. Most exercise fails because people stop doing it. A game you actually want to play is doing something no disciplined routine can do, which is to keep happening.

It turns the house into somewhere people come

A table at home makes the place more fun, and it makes it a house your friends are willing to travel to. It also means more hours spent with the family in the same room, doing something together rather than in parallel.

That is the quiet benefit and probably the largest. A table in a room is a standing invitation. It needs no arrangement, no booking and no particular occasion, and two people who would otherwise have been on separate screens end up talking across it.

It demands complete attention

The game is fast and it requires total concentration on the ball along with fine coordination between hand and eye. Playing regularly sharpens alertness and the ability to hold focus.

The honest version of that claim is narrower than it usually appears. What clearly improves is your reaction and tracking in the game itself, and there is no good evidence that this transfers to concentration at a desk. What does transfer is the twenty minutes during which nothing else could possibly hold your attention, which for most people is rarer than it ought to be.

What it asks of you

Very little. Space for the table, two bats, a ball, and one other person. No particular fitness to begin with and no upper age at which it stops working. Among the things that get recommended for health and family life, almost nothing else has a barrier this low.

Most thinking about information security pictures somebody outside trying to get in. A study out of Iowa State University pointed at something duller and closer to hand: the ordinary employee who, on an ordinary afternoon, does something they should not.

What was measured

The researchers used brain activity to ask what moves an employee to breach the rules of their own company and then sell sensitive information on, or trade it away, and they found self-control to be a significant factor. Their definition of a violation was deliberately broad: reaching confidential data without authorisation, which covers copying it, moving it elsewhere, or handing it to an outside party for private gain.

Professor Qing Hu, working with colleagues, reported that the group lower in self-control gave the consequences of a serious breach less thought before responding. What the study could tell, in his account, was that a difference exists at all: the two groups reacted differently in the brain while looking at identical security scenarios.

The people with higher self-control took longer over the high-risk situations. What occupied them was not the opportunity or the immediate reward. It was how the thing would land afterwards: the damage to a career, the possibility of criminal charges.

The conclusion drawn was that an employee who starts with low self-control is more likely to be tempted when the situation presents itself.

What it does not show

Worth being careful here, because the finding is easy to over-read. This was a laboratory study of how people reacted to described scenarios. It did not follow employees around and count actual breaches, and it did not establish that anybody in the low group would have gone through with anything.

The wider literature on self-control is also not as settled as it was a decade ago. Several well-known effects in that area have proved difficult to reproduce, so a single study pointing in a plausible direction is a reason to think, not a reason to conclude.

The conclusion not to draw

The tempting one is to start screening people for self-control and watching the ones who score badly. That is unworkable, and it is also unjust, because the trait is not a moral rank and everybody’s supply of it varies by the hour.

The one worth drawing

Turn the finding around. If the difference between a violation and a normal day is how long somebody pauses before acting, then the goal is to need fewer of those pauses.

That is a design question and it is entirely within an organisation’s control. Reduce the number of moments where an employee is alone with confidential data and nothing but their own judgement. Make the approved route the quickest one, because a procedure that is slower than the shortcut is a daily invitation to take the shortcut. Put a second person, or a second step, on the actions that would hurt most. And make sure people know what actually follows a breach, since the study suggests that is precisely what the careful ones were thinking about.

The unglamorous version: do not rely on everybody being at their best. Build for the afternoon when they are not.

Insider trading is what happens when somebody who holds privileged and confidential information acts on it before the rest of the market has been told. The information is not yet public; it is certain to shift the price of a share, a bond or a currency once it is; and the trade is placed to capture that shift in advance.

America outlawed the practice in 1934 and Britain followed in 1980. Most countries now prohibit it, at least where shares are concerned.

Why it is objected to

The standard objection is about confidence rather than about the money. Investors may stop trusting financial markets if they can see insiders using an information advantage to enrich themselves at everybody else’s expense. An insider trade is not fair to the outsider on the other side of it, and a market that outsiders will not enter is not much of a market.

The argument on the other side

Here is the part that makes the term worth knowing rather than merely worth avoiding. Some economists hold that insider trading produces more efficient markets, and the logic is straightforward. When an insider trades, the information travels into the price. A share whose price already reflects what is genuinely known about the company is more accurate than one that does not, and the market as a whole prices better for it.

That may well be true. Most financial regulators have decided they do not care, and their reasoning is explicit: they are willing to give up a degree of accuracy in pricing in exchange for outsiders, who are the overwhelming majority of investors, believing they are being dealt with fairly.

Why that trade-off is the interesting bit

It is a rare case of a rule that admits it is not optimal. The regulator is not claiming the ban makes prices better. The regulator is saying that a slightly less accurate market which people are willing to participate in beats a slightly more accurate one they abandon.

That shape turns up in a great many rules once you look for it. A safety procedure that slows the work down, a signature that adds a day, a control that annoys everybody. The question to ask of any of them is not whether it is efficient, but what it is buying, and whether the thing it buys is worth the price being paid.

One practical note. The definitions and the enforcement differ by country and they change, so anything specific about what is permitted where is a question for a qualified adviser rather than for an article.

Consider somebody with real gifts and a clear road ahead who has no particular ambition attached to any of it. When the pressure arrives, or the setback, or simply the long uninteresting middle of the work, there is nothing pulling them forward. Talent does not supply that on its own.

The claim made for ambition is a strong one: that it is the single most useful instrument for finding fulfilment and making progress, and that it outruns both talent and resources by a wide margin. An ambitious turn of mind can carry any person towards achievement and towards being satisfied with what they have done. Here is why it usually wins.

It supplies the motivation

The greatest talent in the world amounts to nothing without something driving you towards a result larger than the one you already have. Ambition is what gives a purpose its fuel and what keeps you going after a goal without letting up.

It keeps you humble, which sounds wrong

Nobody warms to arrogance, and people do warm to somebody humble and committed. The reason ambition points that way is mechanical rather than moral. Being ambitious means constantly measuring yourself against what you have not done yet, and that is a difficult posture from which to feel superior. It keeps the mind off itself and on the goal.

Talent left alone goes to waste

There are people who waste their abilities, and it is generally not laziness. It is that talent by itself does not produce anything. Things start moving only when talent has ambition mixed into it. Meanwhile somebody with very little apparent gift, or none, can take an ambitious drive and build an opportunity out of it.

The part that is still argued

Whether ambition can be taught is a real dispute and the page is honest enough to say so. The optimistic reading is that a person with enough drive who puts in the time can end up as capable as somebody who was born able, which would mean ambition manufactures talent.

I would add a caution and a second thought. The caution is that the word covers two different things. There is wanting a large outcome, which is cheap and which almost everybody has. And there is the willingness to do the same unglamorous thing for two years, which is rare and is what actually produces the result. Praising ambition usually means praising the second while picturing the first.

The second thought is more encouraging. What looks like ambition from outside is often just a clear next step plus a reason to take it. That combination can absolutely be handed to somebody, which may be the honest answer to the question of whether it can be taught.

Seen from a corporate desk the startup looks like the softer option: flexible hours, an open workplace, nobody counting minutes. Those parts are real. The job underneath them is considerably more demanding than the advertisement lets on.

Such a company runs on an ideology of its own, and its method of working is close to the reverse of corporate business, which is where both the appeal and the difficulty come from. That makes joining one a decision worth evaluating carefully, since the environment is genuinely challenging. Undergraduate, bored of a corporate job, or simply after something outside the usual box, the same factors apply. Here is the set of skills the place expects you to possess.

Data analysis

They want professionals who have spent a long enough period in the field to be useful immediately, because an organisation that has only begun functioning, or is new to its industry, has nothing to steer by except what it can measure.

Collected with current innovation, that material becomes knowledge about what the customer actually needs, as against what the founders assumed. It then supports decisions about which activities are beneficial to survival in the market and which are not, and those conclusions become the strategies. How much any firm gains varies, since it turns on how carefully it analyses its buyers and aims its own products and services at them. Understand them better, gain more.

Problem solving

Every professional must possess this and in a young company it is load-bearing. The aim is to resolve the difficulty quickly and with some judgement, arriving at an answer everyone can live with.

What is wanted is your own solution, unexpected rather than standard, because supplying one is how a good image forms in a small room where everybody watches everybody work. Handling problems independently comes close to the definition of succeeding here, and it is also what fetches a promotion.

Appetite for learning

Some visible proof is expected that the enthusiasm you brought to this employment has not dropped below where it stood on the day you joined, and ideally has grown. Willingness to take up challenges matters, because new businesses hunt continually for better approaches and lean on whatever innovations have just arrived, and somebody has to learn them.

That means being pleased about developing yourself, chipping away at your own aptitudes, and accepting that plenty remains unknown to you.

Selling yourself

Startups look for people who do not rely on a settled apparatus of systems, processes and resources. Much of what a big budget employer would have handed you is absent, so you work with whatever limited opportunities exist and stay speedy and efficient about it. And you have to project yourself and the work so that both register on the consumers you are trying to reach, because in a company this size nobody else will do it for you.

Patience

Uncertainty and lengthened hours are part of the arrangement, and they examine even workers with years of experience and real dedication behind them. Anybody without passion, and without belief in what the company hopes to achieve, tends to abandon ship during the hard stretch, and a hard stretch always comes.

The page adds one more skill, and it is the one holding the rest together: emotional intelligence. It helps you bag the job, and afterwards it helps you handle the pressures that working at a startup brings.

There is an old tale worth retelling, and then there is the reason it has lasted.

The story

An elderly man put it about that his neighbour was a thief. The younger man was arrested on the strength of it. Some days later he was cleared, and he walked home through the same streets carrying the humiliation of having been taken away in front of them. He then took the older man to court for accusing him falsely.

In the courtroom the old man offered the defence such people always offer. They were only remarks. Nobody was hurt.

The judge did not pass sentence. Instead he told the old man to write down every remark he had made, on paper, and to cut the paper into pieces, and to scatter the pieces on the way home. Come back tomorrow, he said, for the sentence.

When the man returned, the judge issued one instruction ahead of any sentence. Go out, he said, and collect every scrap you scattered on your way home.

The old man said what anybody would say. That is impossible. The wind has taken them and I would not know where to begin.

And the judge said that this is exactly what a few careless remarks do to a person’s good name. They go too far and into too many hands to be called back. The old man understood what he had done and asked to be forgiven.

Why it holds

The moral attached to the tale is plain enough. Do not accuse anybody of anything before you know whether it is true, because your words can destroy a reputation that was never at fault.

What makes the story more than a pleasant lesson is the asymmetry it describes. An accusation is interesting, so it is repeated. A correction is dull, so it is not. The two pieces of information travel at completely different speeds through the same set of people, which means a retraction almost never reaches the whole audience that heard the original.

And there is a second effect layered on that. People remember that they heard something about a person far longer than they remember what it was or whether it turned out to be true. A name acquires a faint cloud. Nobody can say why.

What it costs to be careful

Very little, which is the point. Before repeating something about somebody, ask where it came from and whether the person telling you actually knows. If the answer is that somebody else said so, you have not learned anything, you have only been handed something to carry.

The judge in the story could have fined the old man. Making him try to gather the paper was better, because a fine ends and the understanding does not.

Openness is treated as a virtue and mostly it is one. But a handful of things reliably cost you something when they leave the room, and the cost is different in each case. Here they are, with the reason attached, because a rule without a reason does not survive contact with a good evening and a willing audience.

What happens at home

Difficulties inside a household are settled best inside that household, among the people who actually have to live with the outcome. Taken outside, the same difficulty acquires an audience with opinions and no responsibility, and the people in it acquire reputations that outlast the argument.

What you own

The designer watch on the wrist, the well-known sunglasses, the expensive smartphone produced at the table and flashed around the circle. It feels good to hold some repute in your group, and it remains unwise to let others become aware of the size of your family wealth.

Two separate risks sit under that. One is plain: somebody visibly worth robbing is likelier to be robbed in the street, and likelier to have burglars take an interest in the house. Strangers you never wanted the attention of now have a reason to give it. The other risk is slower. Money corrupts friends and relatives who were perfectly decent before they knew the figure, and once they are jealous they are around you constantly, which is not the compliment it looks like.

What you believe privately

Convictions about spirituality, about meaning, about life and death. What you conclude on such topics should be your own belief rather than something you set about inculcating into other people. Choose to make one of them a topic for discussion and reactions of every diverse kind arrive, few of them useful. The thing to hold on to is this: what you think is an interpretation you arrived at, not the objective fact of the matter, and forgetting the difference is exactly how such a discussion turns into an argument with ill outcomes nobody wanted.

The brave thing you once did

Recounting your own bravery and heroism leaves you looking self-obsessed, whatever the episode was. All of us face difficulties in the inner world and the outer one, and all of us somehow cope with them. Everybody has their virtues. Do not take yourself too seriously.

The common version of this mistake is the careful one: recounting the episode as though you were not boasting, merely mentioning it, which fools nobody and quietly feeds the ego anyway.

The philosophy you live by

Everybody needs to believe in something in order to go on with their life in a healthy way, and we all keep a few things that make living easier and soothe the soul. But any inference you draw from your own life concerns you and only you, because it is what you can see from your own small window, and nobody else was standing at it. Hold it. There is no need to share it or to push it onto others.

What frightens you

Every person alive is afraid of something, and however large and threatening a particular fear appears from inside it, human beings do in fact cope.

Here is where I would part company with a strict rule of silence, and this is my own view rather than the page’s. Fear broadcast is a burden you hand to other people. Fear told to one person you trust, when you actually need help, is the single most useful sentence in this whole list. The rule is not to keep everything in. It is to know which of these you are doing.

Each person carries a manner of moving through life that belongs to them alone. That is easiest to take seriously once you notice that every human being stands in a distinct position, and nobody else is standing quite where they stand.

We grow up in different places, shaped by a range of influences nobody chose. The preferences, values and beliefs we hold are bound up closely with where we came from, and the impulse to make our own experience particular is instinctive, because doing so is what lets us cope when we have to face things alone. The result is that each of us carries a perspective that is genuinely ours and not quite anybody else’s.

What that means in a difficult room

Interacting peacefully and usefully with people from every walk of life is first a matter of understanding where they are coming from. Once you have some of that, you can adjust your expectations, which stops you making assumptions about them that were never warranted.

Because in the middle of a disagreement, the assumption arrives on its own. They are being difficult. They are being unreasonable. They are just stubborn. We become frustrated when somebody close by does not share our opinion, or will not support what we are trying to do.

It is far more likely that the person in front of you simply holds a different notion of what matters in a life. Stubbornness and a different set of priorities look identical from the outside and require completely different responses.

The move that opens it

When there is a barrier between you and somebody else, think of questions you could ask that would give you a fuller picture of their point of view. Not rhetorical ones. Actual ones, to which you do not know the answer.

What you often discover is that the difference in perspective dividing you is not really about the matter under discussion. It is attached to an insecurity or some personal difficulty that shapes how they see everything, and the argument you are having is a proxy. Asking what they are protecting will get you further than establishing who is correct.

Two honest limits

The first: you will never fully grasp the complexity of another person, and you do not need to. You can go a very long way on the simple habit of reaching towards people in a spirit of sympathetic comprehension, and stopping there is not a failure.

The second, and this one matters more. Accepting that somebody was formed elsewhere is not the same as accepting whatever they do. Understanding why a person behaves badly explains the behaviour, it does not licence it, and there is a version of tolerance that quietly becomes an excuse for putting up with harm. Respect the right of every person to determine their own course. That right ends where it starts costing somebody else theirs.