How You Can Change Your Friends with a Few Words

The older I get the more I realize there are three major things that shape us: food, water, and words.

And the one that shapes us most is words.

It was the words of my friend Bob that talked me off a ledge, many years ago. I’d failed in yet another relationship, and Bob was the one who called and told me who I was. He said, “Don, you’re good at relationships.”

He looked deep inside me.

And he saw something different than was being displayed on the surface. He saw somebody different, somebody better. It was as though he was nourishing a seed deep in my soul—a seed that, within a couple years would grow and flourish and become the person he was telling me I already was.

In stories, lead characters don’t win the day on their own. It almost never happens. Nobody reading a story about a guy who saves the day without help would believe the story. So as stories have evolved, storytellers invented a whole new character to bring into the story. I call that character the guide.

Yoda was a guide. Haymitch was a guide. Q in the James Bond movies acts as a guide.

And the guides give confidence to the heroes.

They give them a plan and a pat on the back and a call to action to go and win the day.

And there’s another thing guides do in stories. They let the hero know, at the end of the story, that he or she has changed. That he or she is in fact now brave, courageous, and accomplished. In other words, they name the hero.

At the end of the movie Moneyball, Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill, sits Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, down to have an important conversation. They’d had an incredible season with the Oakland A’s but Billy still doesn’t believe in himself.

He doesn’t believe he did anything good.

So Peter sits him down and shows him a video of a heavy-set triple A baseball player who has always been afraid to round 1st. He was a pretty good hitter, but rarely hit a double because he was too slow. One day the hitter decided to go for it. He was going to try to hit a double.

He hit the ball squarely, put his head down, and plowed toward first. And then disaster happened. He tripped on the first-base bag.

Peter Brand paused the image and Billy Beane laughed. Poor guy, Billy said. Everybody’s laughing at him.

Peter hit play again.

Yes, Peter said. But they’re not laughing because he fell down. The video revealed the player crawling back toward first, trying not to get thrown out. But the first baseman helped him up and pointed toward the outfield. The player had hit a home run. He’d cleared the fence by 60 feet.

There was some silence in the room as the player went on to round the bases. It’s a metaphor, Peter said. You hit a home run and you don’t know it.

This moment reminds me of a scene in my wedding. Just before the ceremony, Bob came over and said it to me again. He said, Don, you’re good at relationships.

This time, I believed him.

I mean I had work to do still, but it was Bob’s way of saying, see, I told you so. See what you did. See who you are.

We need more friends like that. Friends who nourish the seed of goodness inside of us. It’s their words that will make the seed grow.