Tag: Young Adults

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.

Average college scores run well below average school scores, and the usual explanation is that the work got harder. Some of it did. But something else changes at the same time, and it is almost invisible: students stop asking.

In a school classroom the asking is normal and slightly compulsory. In a lecture hall it is optional, the room is large, and the cost of looking slow in front of two hundred people feels enormous. So the hand stays down, and nothing happens, and nothing continuing to happen is precisely the problem.

Why silence is expensive

A lecturer reads a quiet room as a room that has understood. There is no other signal available. So the pace stays where it is, the next session assumes the last one landed, and a gap that was one step wide in September is four steps wide by November. Subjects that build on themselves, mathematics, statistics, anything with code in it, punish this hardest, because every session is constructed on top of the one you missed.

The fear is the wrong way round

The thing that keeps the hand down is the belief that asking advertises incompetence. The research points the other way. Alison Brooks and colleagues ran a series of experiments on advice seeking and found that people who asked for advice were rated as more competent than those who did not, not less, and the effect held across several settings. Asking reads as engagement. It also flatters the person asked, which is not a cynical observation, just a true one.

Most professors are, genuinely, enthusiastic about the subject they teach, and are approached by a surprisingly small fraction of the people they teach. Approach them freely whenever you have a doubt. You will actually learn the thing, and you will also make a good impression as a sincere student, which is worth more than it sounds when references are being written.

Ask early and ask small

The useful question is the narrow one asked the same week. Not “I do not understand chapter four”, which nobody can answer, but “I lost you at the step where the sign changed”. If the room is hard to speak in, ask afterwards, or in two lines of email. The format matters far less than the timing.

And the timetable

The other half of this is ordinary and worth repeating. Write the week down, keep to what you wrote, and make certain the plan is one a human being could follow, with hours left in it for friends and for doing nothing at all.

The reason so many study plans collapse is not weak character. It is that people are consistently optimistic about how long work will take, a bias Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named the planning fallacy, and a plan built on that optimism fails in the first fortnight and takes your confidence with it. Build the evenings off into the plan from the start. A modest timetable you actually follow will beat a magnificent one you abandon.

Laughter therapy, sometimes called humour therapy, is the deliberate use of humour to improve how a person feels. Hospitals run programmes. The claims attached to it have grown enormous, and that is a pity, because the modest true thing underneath is genuinely interesting and gets buried under the rest.

The claim that holds

Robin Dunbar and colleagues ran a series of studies in which people watched either comedy or neutral material and then had their pain threshold measured. Threshold rose after genuine, helpless, breathless laughter, and it did not rise after material that people found pleasant but did not actually laugh at.

That distinction is the whole finding. The active ingredient appears to be the physical exertion of laughing, the repeated forced exhalation, which is the kind of effort that triggers endorphin release much as other exertion does. Polite social laughter does not involve that exertion, and it does not produce the effect.

This also explains why laughter is so relentlessly social. Laughing is many times more likely in company than alone, and the pain threshold that rises is a rough measure of endorphin activity, which is the same system implicated in social bonding across primates. Shared helpless laughter is closer to grooming than to medicine.

The claims that do not hold

Ten to fifteen minutes of laughter burns forty calories. This traces to a single small laboratory study of energy expenditure while people watched comedy. Forty calories is a few almonds. It is a charming fact and it is not a plan.

Laughing releases endorphins that outdo an equivalent dose of morphine. Nobody ever measured any such thing. The sentence sets a hormone against a drug in units that do not exist, and it has survived for decades purely because it startles.

It protects against heart disease, builds immunity, and lowers the blood sugar spike after a meal. Each of these rests on a small study measuring a marker, not on any study showing fewer heart attacks or fewer illnesses. A marker moving is where research starts, not where advice starts.

What to do with all that

Nothing medical. If something is wrong, the person to talk to is a doctor, and no amount of comedy substitutes for that.

What the evidence does support is smaller and easier. Laughing properly, with other people, for long enough to lose your breath, makes the next hour more bearable and the people you did it with feel closer. That is not a miracle cure. It is a decent reason to spend an evening with the friends who make you laugh like that, which very few of us schedule and most of us miss.

You did everything correctly. You set the goal, you took action, and somewhere along the way it did not work and the result you wanted did not arrive.

Then comes the account of why. It was a bitter winter. The supplier delivered late, or delivered the wrong item, or the right item in the wrong colour. The schools closed and the children were at home. You caught a cold. The dog died. You have heard every one of these and you have offered most of them.

The test

Here is the thing that makes this hard. Every sentence in that paragraph may be entirely true. A reason and an excuse are not distinguished by honesty, because both of them are usually honest. They are distinguished by what happens next.

A reason changes the next attempt. The supplier was late, so this time there is a second supplier, or a longer lead time, or a penalty clause. An excuse changes nothing. It closes the matter and leaves the arrangement exactly as it was, ready to produce the same result.

So the question is not whether it was your fault. It is whether anything about Monday is different because of what you have just explained.

Start with what actually matters

A great deal of time goes on work that does not really matter, and the tasks that do matter go unfinished. The excuse then arrives to account for the productivity problem, which is a neat way of justifying poor decisions about where the hours went. Identify the few tasks that genuinely matter, finish those, and give the remainder whatever is left over.

Watch for a belief that has set a ceiling

What you hold to be true about your own limit governs what you attempt, and what you attempt governs what arrives, so a belief of that kind behaves less like an observation and more like a forecast that quietly arranges its own weather. It shows in the thinking, then in the talking, and most of all in the doing. Conceding that one of these is wrong is uncomfortable, and it is the only thing that opens the loop.

Or is the method itself the problem?

Where the same approach keeps producing the same disappointing result, change the approach. Most people will not, because an untried method carries risk while the familiar one has a known ending, even a mediocre known ending. Courage is cheaper here than it looks, precisely because the familiar method has already shown you where it stops.

Or are you simply being impatient?

In an age of immediate everything it is easy to forget that some things take the time they take. You may not have failed at all. The results may simply not have arrived yet, and doubt at this stage will stop you taking the one action that would let them. Decide in advance how long you will keep going, and do not hold the verdict before the window has closed.

And sometimes it is genuinely not you

Worth saying plainly, because the whole genre pretends otherwise. Take the economy as an excuse for a business that will not grow. People are spending more cautiously and the easy customers are not there any more. That is real. What is also real is that the remaining customers, higher up, are committed and keen, harder to find and worth considerably more when you find them. The external condition was true. It just was not the end of the sentence.

Almost nobody is turned down for the reason they replay afterwards. The real causes are mundane, and several of them are within your control on the morning itself. Here are the ones that recur, and the single idea underneath them.

Dress to disappear

Clothing that is inappropriate for the room will cost you the job, and nothing about that is fair, but it is reliable. Wear something formal and presentable. The aim is not to be admired. It is that half an hour later nobody can recall what you were wearing, because they were busy listening to you.

The two opposite failures

Over-confidence first. You may genuinely know the subject better than the person asking, and it will still not help you to get ahead of yourself. Whoever is sitting opposite got that seat for reasons unconnected with who knows more, and if they are plainly wrong about a detail, put it right politely and move along rather than settling in.

Now the opposite. Quietness and excessive caution cost just as many offers, and that is the commoner error among people who prepared hard. Say your points out loud and give your opinions some weight. Otherwise the room concludes that you either do not care or cannot cope, neither of which is remotely what the silence felt like from your chair.

Why those two are the same failure

Both are calibration errors. An interview is not really a knowledge test, because the knowledge can be checked in other ways. It is a test of whether your confidence matches what you actually know. Overstate and you fail it upward. Understate and you fail it downward. This is why the two pieces of advice everyone gives, be confident and be humble, stop contradicting each other once you see what is being measured.

Prepare the subject, not the company page

Going in unprepared reliably ruins it. Read up on the subject matter beforehand so your basics are solid. If you improvise well you may escape once, but in most cases the face gives it away: the expression while the answer is being assembled tells the room that the answer is being assembled.

Do not lie

Not once, not about anything. Where a question falls outside what you know, say so plainly and stop there. That costs a fraction of what a bluff costs, because the person asking generally knows the answer already and is now watching you assemble one. Get caught and the offer is gone, and in a small industry the next offer may go with it.

Your curriculum vitae matters too, of course, and it deserves its own attention: no spelling or grammatical errors, and altered to suit the nature of the job rather than sent out identical forty times.

If the same trouble reappears on your desk quarter after quarter, the honest reading is not that it is a difficult problem. It is that it has never been solved, only interrupted. Effective problem solving is a fairly dull sequence of four stages, and almost everybody skips the first.

Define the real problem

The most common approach here is to ask why, and then to ask why of the answer, five times over. It came out of Toyota’s production floor and it survives because it is embarrassingly cheap to run.

Suppose too few people are visiting the company site. Why? The writing is not holding them. Why? It was written for the business rather than for the reader. Two more turns and you are usually standing somewhere quite different from where you began, and the remedy has moved from an advertising budget to a research one.

The friction worth naming: five whys will hand you one tidy cause even when there are three, because the format only has room for one chain. Run it twice from different starting symptoms and see whether the two chains meet.

Generate alternatives

Once the root cause is named, the temptation is to take the first decent idea and polish it into a solution. Resist that and write down ten, quickly, before judging any of them. The point is not that the tenth idea will be brilliant. It is that generating and evaluating are different mental operations, and doing them at the same time means the evaluating one wins, which kills the odd-looking option before anybody has looked at it properly.

This is lateral thinking rather than vertical thinking: moving sideways to a different approach instead of grinding one idea deeper.

Evaluate and select

Now the judging is allowed. List the advantages and disadvantages of each option, then compare them on cost against benefit rather than on which one you liked when you wrote it.

A list of pros and cons does not remove bias. It slows the bias down enough for somebody else to see it, which is why this stage works better with one other person in the room than alone.

Implement, and keep watching

Having gone through three stages and weighed a good many factors, there is a strong pull towards believing the chosen solution will be right. It will not be. Put it into practice anyway, early, and then keep measuring whether it is actually working.

That last clause is the whole difference between a problem solved and a problem interrupted. A solution nobody measured afterwards is indistinguishable from a solution that failed quietly.

Thinking hard about a problem is not a fault. It is most of what a mind is for. The difficulty is that the useful version and the useless version feel exactly the same while they are happening, and the useless one often feels more thorough.

The psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent a career separating the two. Reflection examines a situation and arrives somewhere. Rumination examines the same situation repeatedly, usually its causes and its consequences, and arrives nowhere, while feeling like diligence. Her finding was not that rumination fails to solve the problem. It is that it reliably makes the mood worse while not solving it.

Here are five signs, and each one has a version that is ordinary and a version that has tipped over.

You find meaning in everything

A message answered six hours later. A stranger at the bus stop whose gaze lingered. One line of criticism at work, replayed on the journey home and again at midnight. The tipping point is not that you noticed. It is that you assigned an intention to something which almost certainly had none.

You think more than you do

Weighing two options is sensible. Weighing nine is paralysis, and the number is the cause rather than the symptom. Each option you add does not simply join the list, it creates a fresh set of comparisons against everything already on it, and comparisons are where the doubt is manufactured. Take one reasonable option and commit to it.

You cannot let a thing go

The matter is closed, the conversation is over, and the whole cycle turns up again on Tuesday with nothing added. Ask whether the rethinking has produced a single new fact since the first time. If it has not, it is not analysis, it is rehearsal.

You are always seeking new information

Overthinkers are very often avid readers, which looks like a virtue and frequently is. The hazard is a mind that has been fed so much material that it has plenty to work with at two in the morning. More information is not always more clarity.

You constantly analyse people

A crowded railway platform is either fascinating or exhausting, and for the same person it is often both on the same day. Reading other people is a real skill. It only becomes a burden when it never switches off.

What actually helps

Not telling yourself to stop, which behaves like telling yourself not to picture a room. The workable version is to bound it. Give the question a fixed slot, twenty minutes with a pen, and write the conclusion down even if the conclusion is that you have too little information to decide yet. A decision that is written down stops needing to be re-reached.

And be honest about which of the five above you recognised. The one that irritated you on the way past is usually yours.

You went in for an embrace and were met with an outstretched hand. You crossed a line of formality at a dinner table without seeing it was there. You went down hard in front of a full room. The heat in the face arrives before any thought does, and the question that follows is always the same one: do I brush past this, or do I address it?

What is actually happening

The trigger is narrow and it is always the same: some shortfall of yours has just become visible to other people. That is all it takes. Not failure, which can be private and survivable, but exposure. And the fear of it is expensive out of all proportion, because a person who is frightened of looking foolish stops attempting the things that occasionally make people look foolish, which is most things worth attempting.

Four shapes it takes

Privacy breached. Personal photographs taken and posted for everybody to see, a reputation damaged, friends lost. The exposure here is genuinely not your doing, which makes it the hardest of the four to carry.

Caught not knowing. Skills stretched a little on a curriculum vitae, and then a searching interview where the stretch becomes visible. Guilt and shame are legible things, and an interviewer spends the working week reading faces.

Not fitting in. This one belongs to almost everybody who moves somewhere new. The first weeks are fine. Then the small frustrating collisions with a culture you have not learned yet begin to accumulate.

Image slipping. The effort to look younger than you are, which begins astonishingly early and which everybody can see you making.

The move that makes it worse

Withdrawal. It feels like damage control and it is the opposite, because retreating means you never find out that you recover. The awkwardness stays at the size it was on the day, preserved, because nothing came along afterwards to contradict it. Facing it in the moment is unpleasant for a minute and it tells you something true, which is how small a non-event most of these are.

There is a measured version of that. When researchers asked people how much others had noticed some awkward thing about them, the estimates ran to roughly double what the onlookers reported. Thomas Gilovich and colleagues gave this a name, the spotlight effect. You are lit far less brightly than it feels.

The part nobody mentions

Visible embarrassment is not only a cost. Matthew Feinberg and colleagues found that people who showed it were trusted more and treated as more generous by others, and the reason is mechanical rather than sentimental. Going red announces that you know the rule you just broke. Somebody who breaks a rule without flinching has told you something much worse about themselves.

Six questions, afterwards

Sit down later, when the heat has gone, and walk the thing back. Which events led up to it. What your own response actually was, as opposed to what you wish it had been. Whether the cause was carelessness or plain lack of preparation, and which of the two it honestly was. Where the comedy is, because there is nearly always some. What the episode taught you. And what you will do at the same junction next time.

The question about comedy is doing more work than it looks. A moment you can laugh at has stopped being a verdict on you and become an event that occurred.