Work is that place you go where everything drives you nuts and you can’t tell the truth about it. Right?
It’s a truism that most people are going to work because they have to, for the money, in spite of every possible discouragement: Being simultaneously overworked without challenge, bored but unable to take time off, wasting time at pointless meetings, having no creative input, with a micromanaging boss who is an obstacle to productivity, all with a long commute. Yay hooray. Does it have to be that way, though? When I got my first office temp job, I was so excited I didn’t know what to do. My previous job had been at a convenience store, so go figure. Literally anything is better than wiping up day-glo nacho cheese while listening to a hyperactive child play with the doorbell. This was a purely entry-level job, standing in front of a photocopier. Other temps had walked off the job on their first day. One of them quit after two hours, remarking, “I don’t have to do this.” Power move! Faced with one of the most boring possible things, the human mind will wander, looking for some way to add excitement. I saw it as a great big video game that generated money. Try to beat the copier and keep it going so you don’t have to wait while it warms up for a new cycle. Count how many copies you make and try for a new high score. My positive, upbeat attitude attracted the attention of the staff. They taught me things. I caught on quickly, and more people taught me more things. Their backlog disappeared. I started supporting two dozen people with basic administrative tasks. Obviously other people would look at this as servitude, which it was - doing other people’s scutwork for low pay and no benefits. Seven dollars an hour was better than minimum wage, but it didn’t go very far. Ah, but almost everyone I knew in those days worked in either retail or food service. I had what almost none of my friends or acquaintances had. I had evenings and weekends off! I could predict my schedule months in advance! I didn’t have to hustle for tips, wear a uniform, or get pulled in to cover other people’s shifts. Also, the basic skills I learned are skills I use every day, in my personal as well as professional life, skills that neither my family, high school, nor college had to offer. The fact-finding mission of my first office job ever was to find out, What is it like to work in an office in a professional setting? I liked it. I always have. I love the business world for so many reasons, the predictability and structure most of all. It is hilarious and surreal in many ways, a self-parodying comedy machine in which we’re never supposed to break character or peek through the fourth wall. Yet overall it’s a clean and well-mannered place to spend time. Right now I’m on a bit of a true crime kick, and it has struck me that it might be very interesting to work in a law office. That’s one of the few fields where I have never worked. Suddenly it clicked that I could easily get a job as a paralegal, where I would learn everything I want to know... And unlike school... THEY would pay ME! There may well be someone reading this who has a job as a paralegal. “You can HAVE it!” this person is thinking. Scoff scoff. This hypothetical person already knows everything that I do not know, and is thus no longer approaching the job with curiosity. I understand that as many people leave the legal profession every year as those who enter it, that it’s draining in the long term. It doesn’t bother me because I don’t want or need an administrative support role in the long term, and I would openly state as much in an interview. “I will work for you with great curiosity and interest, and you will throw everything you can at me as my incentive. If and when it quits working out, no harm no foul.” Or something along those lines. I can speak business jargon at least as well as anyone else. Literally every employed person has the option to replace one job with another. We’re all free to bring in whatever attitude we choose. We just don’t realize it. So you replace one boring, unfulfilling, low-paid job with another. What have you lost? If you already know your current position or field depletes your energy, why stay? I think what gets most people is interpersonal dynamics. We start feeling crushed by management, by bureaucracy, by colleagues, by clients or patients or customers. What makes the day difficult isn’t the work itself, it’s the social atmosphere. Mood, in other words. The thought of revising a resume, going after new credentials, or interviewing fills us with dread. I’ve never had a client who was willing to do a job search - the very thought makes them quake with terror, even if their job is the worst part of their life. It’s the key to freedom, though! You can’t go on a trip without booking the tickets. You can’t move to your dream home without packing and changing your address. You can’t find romance without introducing yourself to your future sweetheart. You can’t get your dream job without that pesky old interview. Every improvement comes from change. It’s possible that someone who has been languishing in a soul-crushing job could transform it by turning it into a fact-finding mission. Possible? Trying to figure that out is a fact-finding mission all on its own. It’s worth a try. The ultimate fact-finding mission is to figure out what it is that makes other people fulfilled and satisfied, even invigorated, by their work. Are we doing what they’re doing? It’s when we’re most engaged that we’re offering the most, and getting the most in return. No Hard Feelings if someone at work hands you this book, okay? This is a book of pure genius that should be part of the onboarding process at every company in the United States, and possibly elsewhere. It manages to be fascinating, authentic, hilarious, and paradigm-shifting while still being completely suitable for the office. Leave it out in a conspicuous place, maybe in the break room, and watch everyone flip through it for the cartoons.
Everyone is included in No Hard Feelings. There are predictable style differences between extroverts and introverts, strategic optimists and defensive pessimists, leaders and followers, and of course the various generations, races, cultures, and genders. Some of these have been well explored in the business press, and others seem quite fresh and intriguing in the context of emotional intelligence. Stress, burnout, and interpersonal conflict come up often. The authors have excellent strategies for setting boundaries, especially with the digital world. They recommend ways to set a company culture that encourages vacation time and discourages constant access. There are highly practical ways to lay down limits and shut down at the end of the day. Surely being less frazzled and exhausted would help everyone to get along and make it to Friday. One of the features that I liked the most about No Hard Feelings is that it assumes ambition, that the reader is either in a leadership position or may eventually be considered for one. The concept of a “challenge network” was new to me, and I will be using that term when I speak on mentoring and continuous improvement. Everyone should have someone to go to for emotional support, and also someone to go to for advice and constructive criticism. This is the Twenty-First Century, and it’s high time that we all collectively start acknowledging that emotions are real. Mood repair should be a part of standard operating procedure. Recognizing the human factors of communication and emotional intelligence can only make work easier, more fun, and ultimately more productive. Get your copy and put it in your boss’s inbox today. Favorite quotes: ...the future of work is emotional. If you let someone underperform for months or even years without saying anything, you’ve failed as a manager. A friend took me out for my birthday, and it turned into a breakup. Not between us, of course, because we aren’t dating each other!
My friend had a new flirt thing going with a guy from a dating app. This is great fun for me, because I’ve been out of the game for nearly fifteen years and it can be really entertaining to learn about app life from someone else. Vicarious thrills and all that. We were sitting on the beach under the moonlight, eating strawberry ice cream, when her phone lit up. She lit up, too, thinking of her crush and how much she liked him. Her face fell as she read through the rapid-fire barrage of texts. Her crush was accusing her of being out with someone else, because all she supposedly wanted was to date a younger guy. What the heck, man?? She didn’t reply until later, after we said goodnight, but they had a fight and she blocked him. Honestly, who needs that kind of energy? I couldn’t really get over it. I might be a lot of things, but a younger guy I am not! Almost everything we were doing, my friend and I, would definitely come across as cheating if we were in a romantic context. In fact I picked up a phrase that another friend of mine coined. Ro-tic. What’s rotic? It’s “romantic” without the “man.” This is what’s so messed up about jealousy and why it has to be a dealbreaker. This guy was so fixated on the idea that someone would want to cheat on him that he blew up a new romance over it. I have a unique perspective on the situation because I was there, and I know myself to be a monogamously married heterosexual middle-aged woman. Totally not a single bachelor in his thirties or twenties. I know my friend wasn’t out cheating with a younger guy because I’m her alibi, and a pretty boring one at that. What were we talking about, while this delusional man was fuming over his suspicions? Soup. Vision boards. How to give feedback to our direct reports. Interior design. Dog breeds. Book clubs. The thing about jealousy is that it turns a living, breathing person into an object. Rather than a woman, my friend is suddenly a cardboard cutout representing Cheatin’ Females. About 20% of people cheat. That’s one in five. Those people believe in their hearts that everyone does it. People will do whatever they want based on the stories they tell themselves, and some tell themselves a story that involves romantic involvement with more than one person at a time. Sometimes they are willing to be honest about this and sometimes they are not. But it’s only one in five. There are people who find themselves cheated on more than once. Sure, of course. One in five is reasonable probability, and I’d probably buy a lottery ticket based on 1:5 odds! There are two things that happen. Either the person isn’t asking the right questions or setting the right boundaries, or their behavior instigates cheating in a person who otherwise never would have done it. Actually there’s probably something else, which is when a person is attracted to the operatic style of relationship. That’s the one where the couple believe they have massive physical chemistry or some sort of fate has driven them together, and then they have huge fights but make up afterward. Barf me out the door. But some people like it. They can’t believe they are loved or wanted without high drama and explosive emotional outbursts. What a jealous person probably wants, after throwing a jealous tantrum, is that the recipient replies poetically. “I love you the most, there’s nobody else for me, you are the grand passion of my life,” mwah. I actually walked my friend through this as a strategy and offered to talk to the dude on the phone, assuring him that I am not in fact a younger guy. Boring old lady talking about soup recipes. Fortunately my friend has no need of a jealous boyfriend. Who does, really? It hadn’t occurred to her that there was a formula she could follow to keep this guy, because once he revealed this icky jealous side, she was done. If it happens once, it will happen again. She’ll sit next to a man on a plane, or her male boss will call her one evening, or a male person will happen to live within a mile of her, and the jealous guy will get jealous, suspicious ideas. More and more of her emotional energy will be burned up trying to explain reality to a walking delusion. The more she explains, the guiltier she will look. Not only is it better to date among the 80% of reality-based, non-jealous people... It’s better to be alone. Better to live amongst friends, neighbors, and colleagues who take you at your word. Better to associate with people who trust you and accept that you are implicitly trustworthy, which of course you are. The reason jealousy causes cheating is that when someone is constantly under suspicion, they’re forced into this defensive, negative posture through no fault of their own. The very first time that someone else comes along who treats them normally, without this constant criticism and judgment, they will remember what it’s like in Realityville. They’ll turn for comfort to the only person who is offering it. It’s impossible to love a scornful face. I feel bad for the jealous guy, because he had everything going for him. Successful in his career, interesting, funny, physically attractive, well-dressed. “Gee, why are you single?” Until he can get over his fixation that every woman wants to cheat on him, nobody will ever love him. He’ll create his own lack of love until he is no longer funny, interesting, or attractive. The real irony of this situation is that there is not a younger guy in this story, and never will be. One of the things my friend and I were talking about was what it would take for her to settle down and get married. We both agreed that younger guys are fun, but too much hassle, and no longer worth our time due to where we are in life. My own husband happened to be out of town on business. (This evening wasn’t my actual birth date). He didn’t spend any time worrying about what I was doing, eating strawberry ice cream on the beach under the moonlight. He knows that I chose him, that I’d sworn off younger guys before we even started dating. There’s not a younger guy on earth who could give me what I have, either a mature husband or a fun female friendship. Caricature of social media, the same caricature of the past ten years:
I ate a sandwich for lunch AND HERE IS A PICTURE OF IT! Nobody wants to see a picture of my favorite sandwich. There’s no way to make it look good, even if you’re the kind of person who dedicates your off hours to food photography. I am decidedly not that person. Also, I’ve been scaring people away with my propensity for Tofurky and sauerkraut sandwiches since like 1997. The trouble with the sandwich is that I keep improving it with glorious add-ons. It started with the bread. Then it was the stone-ground mustard, then it was the horseradish with beets. Sometimes it’s cranberry sauce, although then the other guys have to go. I know this sandwich is my downfall and one of the major causes of my recent weight gain. I know it is. I also know that nobody in America wants to talk about weight gain, but too bad. I thought we were all about authenticity and not presenting a fake image that drives other people to FoMO. You want authenticity, you have to hear about my love-hate relationship with one of the major characters in my life, which is, my lunch. Not everyone even eats lunch. A lot of you out there with the microwaved popcorn and the Diet Coke have more to worry about than I do. It’s true that I don’t indulge myself by skipping or delaying meals, exploding at people, and then apologizing because “I was hangry.” I’m proud of this. It’s a cultural fault. I’m one of the only people I know who actually eats a proper, intentional, sit-down lunch every day. The trouble is that I’m a small-framed person eating the lunch of a longshoreman. Not a literal guy: a real longshoreman could no doubt defend his lunchbox from me, or hoist me overhead in one of those big cargo nets until I gave it back. I’m picturing a metaphorical guy, someone much larger than my 5’4”. I’ve been a bunch of different sizes in my adult life. I’ve worn each of eight different clothing sizes for at least a year. These are all places I’ve been before. Right now I’m at one of my least-favorite places, hovering right on the line between normal and overweight. I’m noticing it more because I decided it was time to do something about it, and put my plan into motion, and my weight has been stuck within 0.1 for a week. It’s my sandwich, that handsome devil. I just can’t quit you! When you basically do the same things all the time, you basically tend to get the same results. I eat oatmeal every morning for breakfast, because it’s one of the great loves of my life, and I’ve succeeded on it across workouts. Hiking, running, martial arts, oatmeal is the one thing that sticks to my ribs. My hubby and I eat basically the same couple dozen dinners, because there are only so many thirty-minute meals that we know how to cook. My beloved sandwich is under suspicion because I started upgrading it again. It happened in stages. Our grocery store quit carrying the special bread I used for nearly five years. I went back to my old brand, which is larger, and then started adding more fillings because it looked so... small and flat. Suddenly “my sandwich” was about 20% bigger. Add 20% to your meals, and what happens? It’s simple math. This is a deeply, profoundly controversial concept. I recognize that. What I don’t understand is why it makes sense for my pets, who are different classes of animal, but supposedly doesn’t make sense for humans. My parrot weighs under a pound, my dog weighs under 25 pounds. We measure her food with a tablespoon and we measure his with a half-cup scoop. Obviously she can’t eat the same amount he can - she wouldn’t want to, and she can’t snap off bits of his kibble anyway. Equally obviously, he couldn’t survive on her meals, even when she throws him bits just to watch him skid out on the floor. Nobody thinks it’s pathological that my pets have their meals measured with a scoop. All the vets they have had have told us the same thing, that we feed our animals a little too much and that we need to dial back a bit. They’ve both had endocrine and liver issues, and gee, isn’t that strange? Two chordata, a mammal and a bird, eating different diets from different brands, going to different clinics, with similar health problems? The common denominator, the primates who fill their bowls. Plus a few little treats on the side, day after day. Aww, but they’re so cute when they beg! We relate to them so much through food. They both love music, they both love to go out and meet people, they both love to snuggle and get pets, so much of their personalities are not food-oriented. But we are. We could never harm them by playing them too much music or snuggling too much. We pick the one thing that could ever cause them any trouble. We can also appreciate that animals don’t have issues with body image. Are you kidding? A dog walking around with his ear inside out and his tongue hanging out of his mouth, a parrot picking her nose with her toe. They’re not even ashamed of eating off the floor. We can have frank discussions about their weight right in front of them and it will never interfere with their boundless self-satisfaction. Why am I talking about my pets when I started out talking about my sandwich? Because my sandwich is a sort of pet of mine as well. A fixation, an enduring presence, part of how I define myself and plan my days. I have no idea what else I would do with myself. I know how to disrupt my pattern, and there are two ways. One, I can keep hanging with my frenemy sandwich if I start running serious mileage again. Two, I can bulk-cook a bunch of soups, lasagna, all sorts of other enticing meals with a lower calorie count, and eat a nice hot lunch every day instead. Or I can make a giant project out of it and do both. Left to my own devices, I’ll keep at it with my sandwich, my frenemy, and I’ll still be complaining about the same pattern three months from now, or a year from now, or forever. Nobody redefines my day but me. It’s that time again. We’ve just moved, and there’s a big pile of random stuff in our dining room, staged and ready for our next give-away party. Invites have already gone out.
What is a give-away party? It’s a social occasion where anyone who is invited can look through the pile and take stuff home. Why do we do it? There’s a built-in deadline for us to finish sorting stuff and moving in. Also, we can give away things that we can’t donate. Stuff we don’t need circulates back to the Stuff Place. We continue to live with the expectation that we keep only what we actively use, so that we can keep our expenses and home maintenance as low as possible. In my work with hoarding and chronic disorganization, almost everyone struggles with letting go of stuff. One of the few things that will break up this pattern of emotional attachment is to feel that something is going To the Right Person. I’m “saving it” for “someone who might need it.” The paradox behind this is that 1. We believe there is someone who truly needs this thing, although obviously we do not need it ourselves, AND YET 2. We are keeping it in the only way that absolutely guarantees it WILL NOT go to anyone who needs it. It’s like if I had a ham-and-cheese sandwich and I put it in my fridge, even though I’m a vegan, because “it shouldn’t go to waste,” but I didn’t tell anyone I had it. Who did I think was going to come knocking, asking if I happened to have an extra ham-and-cheese sandwich sitting around? What we are doing is hosting a housewarming, but instead of bringing us a bunch of potted plants or candles, our guests can just bring snacks. Actually it’s a reverse housewarming, in the sense that we expect people to take things home rather than add to our inventory. It’s surprising how many things can’t be donated, like garage shelving or glass furniture. A lot of thrift stores won’t take furniture of any kind. We’ve always given away a lot of stuff over Craigslist or Freecycle. It can be complicated because it’s a toss-up whether someone will actually show up to take what they claimed to want. I can’t count how much time I’ve spent hanging around, waiting for a call that never came, then having to re-post something and go back and forth for eight emails. I gave away our moving boxes after this move and it took nearly an hour for the guy to get through traffic and find our address. What most people will do when they realize they no longer need something is to leave it in place for a long time, and then maybe carry it off to the garage or a junk room. When asked, people will claim they’re “going to have a garage sale” or they’re “going to sell it on eBay.” That day never comes. The next time it comes up, they double down, and all that happens is that they feel more intensely annoyed, defensive, or anxious. The stuff is still there, radiating complications. We quit having garage sales when we realized it took two of us an entire summer Saturday to make $150. We made less than minimum wage. We would have been better off financially if one of us got a part-time job at Taco Bell and the other literally beat all the yard sale stuff into smithereens with a big mallet. Check my math: ($150/2 people)/(12 hours)=($75)/(12)=$6.25/hour (Also no free tacos) A give-away party takes the financial aspect out of consideration. What we’re doing is showing magnanimity. When we give away something like our first blender to an intern, we’re giving that person a chance to make blender drinks and still pay down their student loan. Rather than spend all the time and mental bandwidth trying to sell a used blender that cost $25 new, we can maximize our mental efforts doing something else. We set an example of generosity that will be paid down the line over time. “We were broke at your age, and now it’s our turn. When you’re our age you can pick up the check.” We accept that The Blender Cost $25. That money is gone now. We are not buying into the sunk cost fallacy. We paid $25, we got (by definition) $25 worth of use out of it, and now it goes back to the Stuff Place. We value our time at $X/hour, and evening time at $2X/hour, and weekend time at $10X/hour. It would be absurd at the deepest level to value our free time at pennies on the hour. It’s entirely possible that nobody who comes to our party will take anything out of the give-away pile. We’re certainly not forcing anyone! We simply want to set the example that stuff comes, stuff goes, and what is truly important is friendship. Maybe we’ll be left with a big box of empty canning jars and a set of plastic shelving and some random housewares. That’s cool. At that point we will do what we have always done and set about advertising this stuff to the community. Please, take it off our hands. The result of a minimalist lifestyle that involves regular give-away parties is that we have minimized our rent and maximized our savings. We might have given away “hundreds of dollars’ worth” of stuff, but in the process we have saved TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars in rent. We’re maximizing our retirement portfolio, rather than maximizing a giant pile of junk in a garage full of black widow spiders and mice. Or, worse, a storage unit, doing nothing but eating money month after month and not even contributing to our home equity. What we’ll remember about our give-away party is seeing our friends, eating snacks, laughing, talking, and playing games. If asked to make a list of all the stuff we gave away, we won’t be able to remember it all. That’s fine, because almost everything that exists can easily be found in the Stuff Place, and when we need anything, we can easily get it. There is plenty and there will always be plenty more. It comes up a lot. People generally can’t believe that a married couple our age are voluntarily choosing to rent instead of own a home. One of our young ones came over on open house night, and blurted out, “You guys RENT??” Like it had completely violated his impression of us or something!
That’s generally how you know you’ve hit upon a truly contrarian position. Nobody understands it or why you’re doing it. Young or old, rich or poor, artist or business professional, nobody gets it. You don’t... own... a car? You... don’t... drink coffee? You... actually like... the middle seat? Personally, I do weirder things, like using chopsticks with my non-dominant hand, and nobody notices that stuff at all. Most of the time people are just thinking about themselves, that or their phone. You can get away with A LOT in plain sight. People may give feedback in one form or another, but that doesn’t mean you have to pay attention or base your major strategic decisions on their opinion. Especially if you think the common denominator isn’t working for most people. Default: tired, broke, cluttered To sum up, our strategy is to rent a tiny apartment, use public transport, and max out our retirement contributions. Literally anyone in the world can live in a small space and not own a car. This is not elitist. It’s about the complications you are willing to tolerate. What are the three basic home-owning strategies?
Ideally we would love #1. We live in Southern California right now, and we agree that it’s paradise. It’s a combination of a beautiful place with a great climate, ready access to fascinating work opportunities, and a culture that suits us. Unfortunately, buying an amazing house where we live costs about 4x as much as the same house somewhere else. We understand #2, and we know precisely how to do it. We are both tool-oriented DIY types, part of our initial attraction to one another. One of our few continual quarrels revolves around who gets to assemble new furniture. The problem with this strategy is that all your free time, evenings, weekends, and holidays, goes to fixing up the house. It becomes your only hobby, that and accidentally breaking some drywall. #3, geographic arbitrage, is something else we understand. Pack up and go somewhere else, like... Belize? Our biggest problems with this strategy are 1. Jobs, 2. Our pets, and 3. Choosing one place. Quite frankly we would only go in this direction at the point of retirement, and neither of us really believes in retirement as a thing. Oops, another hot take! Let’s save that one for a different day. The biggest problem with owning a house is that nobody wants to talk about the externalities. The closing costs, the annual maintenance costs, the higher utility bills and other hidden costs, the extra chores of yard work and housework, the risk position, the house becoming a character in your story and demanding things, like extra furniture. Risk position! There are NO GUARANTEES that you won’t need extensive wiring work, plumbing repairs, and a new roof, just as you find out you have a cracked foundation... and then you get hit with a major natural disaster shortly after finishing it all. When you own a house the buck stops with you. People will try to talk you into home ownership in the same way they try to talk you into having children, or adopting a cat. They won’t talk about all that stuff like burst pipes, teething, or the cat barfing on your bedspread. “It’s different when they’re yours!” Yep, my point exactly. The main reason that my husband and I haven’t bought a house is the way mortgages are structured. The loan is front-loaded, and almost everything you pay for the first five years is interest. You aren’t building equity. Due to our strategic position on career growth, we haven’t felt that we could guarantee we would stay in one city for five years. We decided that before we got married, and in point of fact, we were right. If we had chosen the house over the career opportunities, we would have had to pass up several promotional choice points. We’d be making 50% less money, and, to be honest, I would probably be tired of the house and constantly being in Remodel Purgatory. It’s my nature. If I lived in the fanciest house on the entire planet, there would be something I didn’t like about it, and I would want to either rearrange all the furniture or remodel something. I don’t have it in me to just fall in love with one specific building and want it to never change. There are other home-ownership strategies out there, and probably room for more, because anything can be modified or disrupted. For instance, a lot of people live with their parents and save money, and someone could probably do something similar while house-sitting. Another common one is to live in a granny unit or put in a garage or basement apartment, get tenants for the main house, and use their rent to pay down the mortgage. Or get a job that includes housing, like working on a cruise ship or at a fire watch tower, and save as much money as possible. One day, we might buy a house. We’d do it when we had fallen in love with that city, when we had a sense of knowing about that property, when we had nothing better to do with our copious spare time. When that will be, only time will tell. In the meantime, yeah, we rent. What’s it to you? This book is a gem by one of the all-time greatest motivational speakers and writers, the inimitable Mel Robbins. It’s more than inspirational, though. It provokes insight and emotional breakthroughs that are impossible to forget or ignore. Usually we know what we ought to be doing to move toward our dreams, so the question is, Why aren’t we? Stop Saying You’re Fine helps to answer that.
A key point to the book is that we already have all the information we need. Almost every dream is a dream that someone else has, too, and chances are that millions of people have done it before. That’s what I told myself when I was training for my marathon. If millions of people have done it, then surely I can, and I did, even when I was being passed by various para-athletes such as a blind runner with a seeing eye dog. The instructions are there, the workbooks are there, the teachers and coaches are there. When we finally decide to move forward, we will do it surrounded by resources, information, and support. The problem is what we call Resistance. It’s the feeling of not wanting to do something, even though you believe you should. Resistance comes up in different forms for everyone. For instance, I feel it most when I have to make a business call. I’ll happily wash someone’s sink full of dishes or fold all the laundry on their couch if only they’ll make calls for me. Once we start recognizing the feeling of Resistance for what it is, it becomes easier to call it out and to catch ourselves acting out boring old patterns. The solution that Mel Robbins teaches is to figure out a bunch of small steps toward your goal, pick one, and then TAKE ACTION within five seconds. This trains the impulse and strengthens the connection between thought and implementation. If I think, I should call my friend, and I do it, then I’ve done something positive. If instead I let that impulse slip away without calling, I may start to replace my positive feeling with guilt. I’ll then waste the time I could have been chatting with someone I like, and the exact same minutes could go toward reinforcing a negative impression of myself. When I do something within those five seconds, I get two rewards, the satisfaction of doing the thing and the freedom from beating myself up after procrastinating. Mel Robbins is a coach, and this book comes from years of working with individuals and conducting workshops. This stuff works. I even used it to get this review written. If you have a tendency to procrastinate or you feel stuck on something, please treat yourself to the delightful and transformational experience of reading this book - Stop Saying You’re Fine. Favorite quotes: Everything you could ever need to live the life you want is right there at your fingertips. You are very powerful when you put your mind to it. The snooze button is the perfect symbol of human resistance, and the emblem of anyone who feels stuck. If you hear yourself ever saying “It is what it is,” that’s not the powerful you talking. We are all stuck in some area of our life, pretending it’s not that bad so we can justify doing nothing. If your mind can kill a great idea by dampening it with emotional turmoil, it will. In any area of your life that you want to change, adopt this rule. Just do the things that you don’t want to do. You need to hear this loud and clear: No one is coming. It is up to you. Recognizing and seizing these moments is like opening a doorway into an alternate universe where your life is not governed by routine. If there’s a way to avoid doing anything, you’ll do it, even though it won’t make you happy. You’re actively trying to convince yourself that it’s okay to feel disappointed with yourself on a regular basis. You will never just wake up with the motivation and fortitude that you’ve been missing for years. The only choice you have is to force yourself to change whether you feel like it or not. The only wrong choice is to do nothing. A great secret of dating and marriage is that usually, Person A likes Person B more than Person B likes Person A. You can see this in action with my parrot and my dog, as she pursues him for snuggles and tries to get him to scratch her head. She is the Liker and he is the Liked. If you want to be happy in a relationship, figure out which one you are and whether it’s working for you.
I talked about this with a friend of mine who is a notorious flirt. Sometimes she shows me texts from various men who have been pursuing her for years, offering vacations and marriage proposals and dinners and gifts. She definitely prefers to be the Liked person in the relationship. Why settle for less? Indeed! This is the opposite extreme from all the lonely single people I know, rehashing entire conversations with their (usually single) friends. What does this mean? Does he like me?? As a married person, I remember those days, not fondly. If I want to know what my husband means by something, I just ask him. I know he likes me. I know if he wants to go out with me and I know what to read into a suggestion of lunch or a coffee date. The communication patterns of flirting and dating are nothing like friendship or marriage - they’re usually pursuer/distancer. People like this pursuer/distancer thing for some reason, even though it doesn’t resemble any of their other relationships. I think it has a little to do with aspiration. Single people can be really funny about this, with their little checklists. Basically we all want someone who is, in comparison to ourselves: Funnier Easier to get along with More interesting Better looking Better dressed Better organized With more money, And probably A better cook Who also loves cleaning and doing me favors In what areas are we willing to tolerate being the “better” one? Why be “better” when that might mean we’re settling for less? The trouble with that is that if everyone is always looking for a personality upgrade, social climbing by having Date 2.0, then everyone will always be chasing everyone else in circles. It also means that searching for an upgrade means you will be the Liker, not the Liked. As a (cisgender heteronormative monogamous) married person, I think it’s probably better for both parties when that relationship is as close to equal as possible. If not, at least in the current social norm, it’s probably better when it’s at least 51/49 in favor of the man feeling lucky, rather than the woman. I spent my teenage years and much of my twenties feeling lovesick over someone or other. I had my share of unlucky suitors whom I rejected, because I wasn’t interested, but I didn’t like the idea that my crush might feel the same way about me. In college I finally realized there was a pattern at play, and I decided that I would be the decider, the dumper rather than the dumpee. I recognized how much energy I was wasting, chasing people who didn’t feel the spark. I didn’t want to have to coax someone into liking me, and I didn’t want to have to guess whether it was going anywhere. Clear signals or nothing. All this came after a rough breakup that left me crying on the floor. Enough of that. I didn’t want to spend any more time crying into a carpet when there is plenty of love in the world for everyone. Next? Next I got a boy who borrowed a cookbook to make me vegan chocolate chip cookies. I got a boyfriend who left a long handwritten love letter on my porch. Suddenly I found that I was only dating people who called, who showed up, who did me favors and brought me thoughtful gifts and cooked for me. I got a permanent upgrade to Liked. It’s like flipping over a magnet. I’m a nice person. I’m a giver. I’m the friend you trust to give your cat eye drops when you’re away. I’ve always done my part to bring whatever romance and fun that I can to my relationships. When I was younger, when I didn’t realize I was always the Liker, I just burned a lot of that energy on people who didn’t appreciate or necessarily even want this sort of thing from me. Better to share what I have with my friends and family - and volunteering in the community - than to use it up chasing some boy. Some of this is Love Languages stuff and some of it isn’t. I’m a Quality Time person with a minor in Acts of Service, a trait that people seem to prefer in others rather than themselves. One of the reasons that my husband knew to woo me by doing things like installing a shower head or trimming my parrot’s nails is that I recognize Acts of Service for what they are. Give what you wish to receive. Also, praise whatever you want more of. This is a man who will never write a poem or a song about me, which is great, because I swore off musicians a long time ago. He does things that actually matter to me, not to some pop culture image. The part that isn’t about Love Languages is the part about whether this person is the dating kind or the marrying kind. The traits that make a fun boyfriend don’t always overlap very well with the traits that make a good husband. (Not sure about the girlfriend/wife thing). The early phase of dating someone new is not compatible with getting up early for a day job, keeping the fridge stocked, or getting laundry done. It’s a fantasy. You can’t keep mystery and familiarity together. The parts of a developing relationship that turn into reliability and solid communication tend to drive out the frisson of What Are We, Exactly? I knew to marry my husband partly because I spent a lot of time figuring out what I would want in a long-term marriage. I also knew because by the time he proposed, we’d known each other for four years and we’d spent a year hashing it out. I knew enough to stop being the Liker and work toward something more balanced. This summer has really done a number on our waistlines. We went on three trips out of town, adding up to over a month. Between that, moving, and my series of oral surgeries, there hasn’t really been a normal day for us in months. Like most people, that means we haven’t been eating normal meals, either. We’re in our new place, which has a mirrored door on the bedroom closet, and we’re thinking, Oh dear.
Note that I said “normal” meals, not “regular” meals. This isn’t about missing any mealtimes, oh no. It’s more about restaurant food, eating at the airport, and half a metric ton more French fries than we’d normally eat in a year. This is what happened. We moved into our new apartment, literally were unpacking boxes until 11:00 PM the night before we went to the airport, and then left the country. When we came home, it was a lot like walking in the door of our new home for the first time. We walked in, and we were both at our highest weight of 2019. Not everyone cares about this, and if you personally don’t have to care for health or financial reasons, well bully for you. In both our cases, we’re at the point where we either need to replace our ENTIRE WARDROBES or we need to slow our roll. Since we just moved and went on vacation, we’re not in any hurry to spend money on anything that isn’t a strict necessity. I don’t enjoy the feeling of the waistband of my pants trying to do stage magic and saw me in half, so the sooner we can make some changes, the better. The good news is that we’re benefitting from three things. One, we both know we want to have good news to report in four months for the New Year, so we’re intrinsically motivated. Two, we’ve collectively lost 100 pounds and we know what to do. Three, and probably most important, we are structurally supported by our new kitchen. One of the main reasons we moved is because we were both sick and tired of the tiny kitchen in our old studio apartment. We could only be in the room one at a time. We had one square foot for meal prep. It was hard to reach anything and removing one item, like a bowl or a pan, required moving other stuff out of the way. As a consequence, we started relying on a lot of frozen food. The new kitchen is woefully short on drawers, there is only one cabinet deep enough to hold a lot of bigger stuff like baking pans, and we still don’t have enough space for a pantry cupboard. The spice rack is on top of the fridge. BUT! There is plenty of counter space, it has a full-size dishwasher, the sink is deeper and it has a sprayer, it’s better lit, and it looks much nicer all around. We basically went from 1980s kitchen to modern overnight. For the first time in our marriage, my husband can find ingredients and utensils without having to ask me where they are. That is momentous. He cooked a proper meal the second night. I had already unpacked the kitchen well enough that it was functional. In fact I had managed to heat up a can of soup for lunch while the movers were still hauling things in. We were both more interested in getting the kitchen in order than we were in anything else, at least once the bed and shower were operational. When you enjoy cooking, it’s relaxing and fun. When you walk into an inviting kitchen space, the first thing you think is, What would I cook in here? I often cook at my parents’ house and sometimes I cook with friends, too. It’s a lot like how musicians display their instruments, and sometimes their friends ask to pick one up. It’s also a lot like Sewing Room Envy. We were still in the unpacking process and we were already stacking carefully labeled leftovers in the freezer. There is nothing like eating home cooking after a long absence. DANG this is good! We had been consciously eating down our provisions for a couple of months before the move, planning to avoid leftovers and finish off containers without replacing them. Our fridge and freezer were almost completely empty the day of the move. This left us with a more or less clean slate in the new place. Right now the fridge is full of a bunch of chard, a head of cauliflower, and the biggest cabbage that we’ve ever seen, almost the size of a watermelon! When I say “full,” I mean that the main compartment is mostly produce. This is fairly typical for us; we’ll eat the chard and the cauliflower over two meals. The cabbage might take three. What happens when two good cooks share a kitchen is that they start working to outdo one another. A particularly fine meal inspires a follow-up. As bachelors, we both would occasionally eat cereal for dinner, and of course we could do that any time we like, but it seems really depressing now. Why settle when you have the time, space, and resources to make something better? We were at the grocery store, stocking up, when I noticed a new kind of frozen pizza. I pointed it out. We both shook our heads, Nahhh. We also walked right past the mini corndogs. Most people don’t have functional kitchens. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main three are: at least twice as much stuff as necessary, power struggles, and lack of a system. People with far larger and better equipped kitchens than ours are not appreciating them at all! My suggestion would be to rate your mood and energy level against what meals are actually emerging from your kitchen, and then reevaluate all the stuff on your countertops. It doesn’t take actually relocating to get yourself both a new kitchen and a new dinner! Here we are in our new apartment! Just us, our pets, and every material object we own. There is nothing like the post-move to bring to your attention just how much stuff you have.
These closets, they are crammed! Our new place is fifty square feet bigger, which is like a parking space, and in that sense it feels bright and roomy. On the other hand, we have half the closet space, half the bathroom drawer space, and less than one-third the kitchen drawer space. If you’ve ever been embarrassed about your kitchen junk drawer, now you can be grateful that at least you have a drawer! Whatever you have in your junk drawer - rubber bands, scissors, batteries, a screwdriver and a flashlight, all that stuff - we have it too. It just has to go somewhere else. One of the first things you notice when moving into a new place is that not all the “organizers” that you relied on will fit. My drawer organizers are too wide - and too many. The shower caddy doesn’t fit on the new shower head. We have a towel rack we don’t need. There are a few bins and boxes and power strips standing by to see if they can be repurposed somewhere, but inevitably most of those will go, too. Those who have a garage, a storage unit, or an extra bedroom will probably tend to keep these things, because they’re WORTH SOMETHING and I MIGHT NEED THEM LATER. We know better. We’re not spending thousands of dollars extra every year just to have a big enough place to store extra stuff. Where we live, having a single extra room or a garage could easily add up to a million dollars over a lifetime. Going from a one-bedroom to a two-bedroom unit would cost us at least an extra $1100 a month, we know because we ritually price it out every time we have this conversation. Multiply it out. $13,200 a year, not including higher utility bills or the extra housework. Even a small storage unit here is $200 a month. Which, seriously? I’m going to spend my vacation money on a storage unit just so I don’t have to feel the pain of the sunk cost fallacy over donating an extra towel rack? The typical response is to hide all this extra stuff in closets or rooms where people keep the door closed during parties. Don’t go in there! Less common, but certainly common enough that I see it all the time, is to stack it up wherever it will fit. Just stack up some bins and pile some bags around and on top. In the hallway! Next to the front door! On the porch! All over and around the dining table! Living that way isn’t for me. There are lots of reasons but chief among them is, if there is a spider, how will I know?? These are how we see our alternatives. Either live in a bigger place, which either costs more or requires a longer commute; pay extra for storage, which is inconvenient and pointless; be surrounded by clutter and mess; or just get rid of everything that won’t fit. Any other options you can think of? Oh, and a lot of people use the “hoard it at someone else’s house” method, pressuring family members, friends, or past roommates to store their stuff “for a while.” I’m sure my ex-mother-in-law did not enjoy trying to figure out what to do with the old bike I left in her basement. Where we live now, my husband and I are over 500 miles away from relatives, and our nearby friends all have the same storage issues that we do. We’d never ask. The kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom are done. There’s a growing give-away pile in our dining room. The last vestige of the move is the living room, and that is definitely still in a post-move state! What we’re doing is scheduling a housewarming party. That gives us a hard deadline to make the place all pretty for guests. It’s also the way we plan to take care of most of our give-away pile. There are a bunch of engineering-related things that may interest our young people. The other great thing about interns and recent grads is that they tend not to have much in the way of housewares or kitchen gear. Just last night, my husband and I were in the pool, and we saw a young couple hauling a huge desk in through the side door. I whispered, Isn’t that the table that was out on the curb earlier? It’s missing a chunk of veneer off the side. The couple somehow got it through the gate, then came back with cleanser and rags and carefully polished it up. The last we saw, they were trying to figure out how to get it up the stairs, because it wouldn’t fit in the elevator. And that’s how much young people rely on those who are more established to hand stuff down. We try to look at our stuff as just that - stuff. It is not our personality. It is not our bank account. It is not our future hopes or dreams. It is not our talents. It is not our memories. It is just stuff. We don’t owe it anything. We use it while we need it, and then we release it back to the Stuff Place, where it can be used by someone else. In the meantime, we focus on how we want our home to look and feel, the space itself and not all the weird junk we’ve hauled into it. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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