A Quick Way to Make Sure People Talk Kindly About You

The other day an acquaintance of mine needed a ride somewhere. We were both leaving a coffee shop and it made sense for me to take him where he was going.

But truthfully, I didn’t want to.

I had some writing to do and it felt like my day was getting away from me.

The old me would have given him a ride but not been happy about it.

And likely the fact I wasn’t happy would have shown. The acquaintance would have thought I was a jerk, or at best distracted, and likely wouldn’t have had many nice things to say about me behind my back.

Photo Credit: AfroDad, Creative Commons

But then I remembered an important thing I learned from studying stories:

Characters who “save the cat” are more beloved by an audience of movie-goers.

In movies, characters have to “save a cat” to endear themselves to the audience.

What that means is they have to do something nice. If a storyteller wants us to like a character, the character, early in the movie or book has to call his mother or help a lady across the street or, well, save a cat.

The reason this is true in story is because it’s true in life.

We don’t just like people who win or are good looking or are smart or all the things our culture holds up as successful. We like people who say nice things to us or do nice things for us.

Those are the people who we talk kindly about behind their backs.

The whole thing reminds me of that truth Malcolm Gladwell shared in one of his essays.

He studied doctors who had been sued for malpractice by their patients and found out that doctors who make the most mistakes aren’t necessarily the doctors who get sued the most. The doctors who get sued the most are the ones who made their patients feel neglected or not cared about.

In fact, if a doctor simply spends an extra minute sitting with his patient catching up a bit, he is far less likely to be sued.

That’s all it takes—an extra minute.

Here’s how this translates into our lives:

Regardless of who we’re talking to, taking an extra few seconds to make chit chat and to genuinely be interested in people’s lives is our real-life way of saving the cat.

We endear ourselves to people very quickly and it doesn’t take much.

When I gave this new acquaintance a ride, instead of being frustrated and dropping him off, I asked a few questions and then when we got to where he was going we sat and talked another minute in the car.

Then, because I actually liked the guy after getting to know him, I got out of the car to shake his hand and say goodbye. It cost me hardly any more time and my guess is the guy probably thought I was a pretty decent person. Easy.

Anyway, lesson learned. I’d never create a lead character in a story who doesn’t save the cat, so why would I want to be a character in my own story without doing the same?