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January 13 - February 6, 2020
What happened to allow Jack to begin to give up his craziness? He felt mirrored by me. In his experience, the world required him to mirror and agree with it, whether it was a doctor saying, “You need this medication,” or a psychiatrist saying, “You realize that these are delusions, don’t you?” In that scenario, the world was always sane and right, and Jack was always insane and wrong. And “insane and wrong” is a heck of a lonely place to be.
Our agents and brokers, for instance, immediately formed the opinion that their office assistant was a flake. It never even occurred to them—any of them—that the person’s behavior had a different explanation. Why? Because all their lives, they’ve heard people who don’t do a job well described as “lazy” or “slackers” or “flakes.” Their colleague fit the pattern, so they applied the same labels—and those labels stuck.
So being a quick study isn’t a bad thing. It only becomes bad if your quick study is inaccurate and leads you to the wrong conclusions. Unfortunately that happens to us every single day, because our brains are far better at leaping to conclusions than at stepping back to analyze them.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
While this book is about connecting with the people who can make your life better, some people don’t want to make your life better. Instead, they want to destroy it. Some of these people want to suck you dry, while others want to con you, thwart you, bully you, or make you the scapegoat for their mistakes. To save yourself, you need to strip these people of the power to hurt you. There are three ways to do this. The first is to confront these people directly. The second is to neutralize them. The third is to walk away and make sure they don’t follow you.
Needy people refuse to make decisions or handle issues on their own. They want you to spend hours holding their hand and helping them sort through their life problems. You’ll handle one crisis only to find them weeping inconsolably over the next one. And you’ll sink deeper and deeper in the quicksand each time you try to pull them out.
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done. —LOUIS D. BRANDEIS, 20TH-CENTURY SUPREME COURT JUSTICE
Project confidence, and you’ll inspire confidence. Project insecurity, and everyone will sense it. (Or, as the diplomat and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once put it: “It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.”)
