I discovered this blog from James Altucher and some of the advice he gives is real eye-opening.
I feel like sharing this because it might be inspiring for some of you as well.
Just click the links, it's a lot less readable here.
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/06/how-to-deal-with-crappy-people/
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/05/can-we-change-our-lives/
Share any life advice you've read or heard.
I feel like sharing this because it might be inspiring for some of you as well.
Just click the links, it's a lot less readable here.
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/06/how-to-deal-with-crappy-people/
How to Deal With Crappy People
There are only four types of people. If you understand in advance how to deal with each of these four types you will be infinitely happier. Ultimately, interacting with the four types in the way I describe below will make one fit firmly into the first type, however difficult it is. That’s the goal. You don’t want to go through life unhappy.
In an earlier article I gave the Daily Practice that has helped me out of every tough situation in my life for the past 15 years (when I’ve been disciplined enough to apply it). It has 4 legs. Many of us focus in our daily lives on only one of the legs (Physical, Emotional, Mental, or Spiritual) but we need all the legs in balance to really sit down at the dinner table without falling.
The Practice works and brings one from the brink to success and then more success. I believe in it more than I’ve ever believed in any hocus-pocus anything ever.
But to develop the emotional leg of that practice takes a lot of work and I’ve written nothing on this. Probably because it’s the hardest. In my talks people ask about the Mental side, the idea muscle. But the Emotional side, equally as important, is much harder.
The key is to identify the FOUR types of people and discipline yourself on how you should approach these people.
The Four Types of People
#1 Happy. There are people who are genuinely happy in the world. Sure they have their suffering. Everyone does. But a lot of people really are pretty satisfied with their lives at this very moment.
A natural reflex (not for everyone, but certainly for some people) is to resent people for being happy. Who doesn’t do that some of the time? Raise your hand!
Let’s say someone lives in 20,000 square foot house in Connecticut, has a sexy wife (or sexy husband), and is genuinely happy. It’s hard not to resent such a person. This resentment will block the Daily Practice from having beneficial outcomes in your life. In 2002 when I was pitching hedge fund managers to invest money with me I often ran into the exact person described above. And their families. The sexy wives in short shorts. The hedge fund managers served gourmet meals for lunchtime by loving cooks.
You can’t fake resentment. You can’t put on a mask. If someone is at a costume ball, you can easily see they are wearing a mask. You have to genuinely be happy for these people.
It’s so hard to grab a single ounce of happiness in this world, please be happy for the ones who are happy today. Train your mind to be sincerely happy for their happiness. Catch your resentments and jealousies before they turn into monsters.
Carrie Fisher once said, “nobody wants to read about a good looking happy person”. She was making a commentary on comedy screenwriting and she’s probably right about that. But for you to go from success to success you must first be sincerely happy for the people who are happy around you. Like attracts. Picture all the people you might resent. Spend five minutes a day training your brain to be happy for them. You’ll die lonely in the jungle if you don’t do this and everyone will forget you ever existed.
#2 People in pain. I’ve been unhappy often. Particularly in the past decade. Sometimes things just don’t work out. Sometimes people die. I think the level of unhappiness and pain I’ve had in the past decade (versus prior decades) has taught me compassion towards others in a similar boat. Try to cultivate that compassion. It doesn’t mean you have to drain yourself to help those less fortunate.
But even showing compassion and doing what you can goes a long way. If you can share what you have, all the better. If you can give a word of advice, do it.
Unhappy person can easily turn into category #4 below. You always have to protect yourself first. Be compassionate but keep your boundaries. Your goal is your own peace of mind throughout the day, so you can focus on your own success. The fastest way to do that is show compassion to those less fortunate. What you give, comes back tenfold. Try this exercise: picture everyone in your life who is unhappy or in pain, spend five minutes picturing them in a happier state. This trains your mind.
#3 Good people. This is different from “Happy”. Good people don’t always have ulterior motives. Some people legitimately want to help others. There’s an initial impulse (at least with me) to suspect them. To resent them. Maybe even to envy them. I envy Bill Gates being able to donate $100 billion to charity. But the best thing for me is to catch myself doing that (almost a meditation in itself) and say, “this guy is good. I wish I could be as good as him. I hope I can help him in any way I can.” Be grateful for all the people good to you. Five minutes a day. Doesn’t have to be with incense burning and in the lotus position. On a bus, smile and think of the people you are grateful for.
And finally, the most important category of all. The category that wastes a quadrillion brain cycles a day around the world. What man can say he is Jesus and not fall prey to the ongoing anger and pain of dealing with this next category:
#4 Crappy people: People who will do you harm, no matter what you do, for no reason at all. They never will get it. They will say and do things to you and they will never ever understand how evil they are.
And you will hate them. HATE THEM. And they knock on the door of your brain at three in the morning and they want to yell at you. And you yell back. And they yell back. And on and on. All day. All afternoon. The ongoing conversation with the shittiest people in the world. They will torture you, kill you, rape your wife and slit the thoughts out of your mind and not even care because they think they are doing the right thing. You know who I’m talking about. Because you have a good 20 or 30 of these in your life just like I do. They might even be former friends, relatives, neighbors, bureaucrats, whatever, whoever, whenever. They swoop down on your life and are just plain crappy and they won’t even know it.
Sometimes, in a weak moment, I think to myself: What if I run into them again? How badly I will hurt and destroy them. Maybe just casually walk up to them and smash a glass over their head so their nose is broken, glasses broken on the floor, blood all over their face. Arm broken after I hold the elbow and stomp on it.
STOP!
Similarly, I was talking to someone the other day who couldn’t stop talking about someone who had wronged her fourteen years ago. Stop! You are an idiot. And it’s boring already. It was your fault anyway!
This is the worst category. I’ll tell you one more anecdote. Two seconds ago someone posted a horrible comment on my blog. I won’t repeat it. Racist, mean, rude to me, whatever. I deleted the post, blocked the user, blocked his IP address. And then I was going to send him an email telling him what I thought of him. I was angry. Then I stopped myself. You have to stop yourself.
Remember this:
When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig gets happy.
There is only ONE only way to deal with these people in a way that will make you happier instead of sadder. ONE WAY. And it always works. This is the most important part of the Emotional leg of the Daily Practice. COMPLETELY IGNORE THE EVIL PEOPLE:
Completely ignore them.
Don’t think about them.
Don’t talk to them.
Don’t write them.
Most important: Don’t give them advice. They will NEVER listen to your advice. It’s arrogant and stupid to think they will. It will only lead to more cycles of pain for you. The goal for me is to stop all cycles that cause me any pain at all. Giving advice to crappy people will only result in more pain for you. That’s the only possible result. Much better to be happy than to flush knotted up brown advice down a toilet that caused you agony to push out. This is hard.
Most important: Never gossip about them behind their backs. Just completely disregard. We don’t care about their happiness or how evil they are. We only care about you. Its hard to do. Never ever talk about them behind their backs. Repeat this 500 times. This is hard also. Because it’s an addiction.
This isn’t easy. It’s a daily discipline. Much easier to do a 1000 pushups. I had an article recently on the Wall St Journal site that had 971 comments. No exaggeration when I say 950 of the smartest anonymous trolls on the internet called me an idiot moron and worse. I ignored all the comments. Great. I could care less. I was the winner there.
Then I put another article up on a supposedly peaceful site about Buddhism and yoga, the Elephant Journal. Great site. I post there regularly. The topic of my post was that 18 year olds should basically not be sent into war. I like peace. Better to send 40 year olds. They are closer to death anyway. The most hateful responses popped up. People comparing me to Hitler. I was so shocked I wasted one whole night until 2 in the morning responding to these people but ignoring the many emails I get that genuinely support me and that I want to be friends with. Why did I do that? I wanted my haters to like me. I wanted them to agree with me and love me. Its like putting a gun to your head and saying, “unless you do what I say, I will kill myself”. You’re going to end up firing that gun.
I lost my discipline for a whole night and then I slept late and it took at least 36 hours to get back on track. What a waste. For nothing! Its hard to keep up this practice. But you fail and die unhappy if you don’t.
And did I win a trophy for doing this? Was it a huge trophy made of gold? For responding to all of those comments? Did everyone/anyone write back and say, “you’re right. I’m sorry. Now I LOVE you! Let’s all be lovers!” Of course not! They just want to fight. I got in the mud with pigs. I got dirty.
If someone says, “what do you think of so-and-so”, your worst enemy, you say back, “So-and-so who?” And that’s it. No explanation. Nothing more. “So and so who?” Change subject right then. This is the emotional leg of the Daily Practice and must be balanced with the other three legs. Any deviation will set you back. Any addiction to the opposite of the above behaviors will eat you alive like cockroaches feasting on your heart. Have a good night.
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/05/can-we-change-our-lives/
CAN WE CHANGE OUR LIFE
Emeric Caron ‏@CaEmeric: hey James, a little question. I work in a bank that I hate, do you think we can change our lives for the better?
ANSWER:
The worst is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to do the exact same horrible things you did today and have been doing for maybe years.
Where will you find the strength for these incompetent people around you, for the running runing RUNNING, all over the place and getting nowhere, despite attempts to escape the crushing necessity, the sickening feeling that destiny won’t change, that every night you will be down and out, crushed by the dread of even more sordid and more insecure tomorrows?
But right now it’s over. Starting this second. You might have feelings about the past (“I did nothing with my life”, “I hate that I took a job at the bank”, etc) but those are just feelings. The past is gone. Yes, you have feelings about it. Say hi to them. That’s it.
The future is wide open. The music in you hasn’t died just yet. We’re always afraid that the ever-closer old age will threaten the worst, ending with cruelty and malice, ending with NOTHING, but it never has to threaten the music. Instead we’re going to finetune the instrument. Make it more melodic, make it more symphonic, make it sing with beauty.
How can you bring about a better future? I’ve been in unhappy jobs. I’ve been broke. I’ve been in an unhappy marriage. I’ve been depressed, medicated, lying on hotel hallways passed out with people walking over me. Lying on the corner of 52nd and Lexington at 2 in the morning passed out drunk while cars that could barely see me swerved around me. Making it home just in time to vomit, just in time to wake up to meet with investors the next day. Could I change?
It’s not fun to be unhappy.
But that changes today. Right this second. Are you breathing? Take a second and check. Take two deep breaths. Are you breathing? Ok, now you can change completely.
You need to get your body back in shape. Not just your body but everything inside of you. Your brain. Your soul. Your emotions. Your angers. Your worries.
Make four goals for today. Just four.
One goal to make your body physically better (don’t drink, don’t eat carbs, sleep 9 hours, exercise, walk around the block, CLEAN YOURSELF, etc – that’s all. Just pick one of those goals. Or two, or three. Whatever you want).
Make one goal emotionally: Be grateful for someone in your life. Tell them. Connect two people who should meet. Read a book you love. Be nice to someone you know. Say “no” to someone you don’t like, someone who brings you down. Again, just pick one goal. Maybe even this: everytime you think about the past that brought you here just say, “I acknowledge I have bad feelings about the past” but stop the blame that you caused it. It’s done. Make that your one emotional goal of the day. The past is one arrow that has been shot at you. But blaming yourself is the second arrow. Don’t kill yourself with the second arrow.
Make one goal mentally. I always suggest coming up with ideas but it doesn’t have to be that. Read a book. Underline things you like in the book. Memorize a list of 7 letter words for Scrabble. Here’s one for today: every article in the newspaper think about how that article is lying to you. Because they all are. Not on purpose but because they don’t know better. Just think. A simple goal. Later you can add to your mental goals.You can list ideas for companies you want to start. You will start a company. You will break free from the bank. But you need the other three categories to do that. And you need to build up your mental body first the way you would build up your physical body.
Spiritual. Surrender. Accept the past. Here you are in the present. It’s happened. There’s nothing you can do. So accept it. And accept the future. Why accept the future? Because you know the music is not going to die. Because if you do these four goals every day life is going to get better and better. Surrender to that. Because doing these goals begin to unlock the mysteries inside of you. They want to come out and play.
Every week add one more goal in each category. You will be the lighthouse of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health and all of the other lost boats will seek you out. Your light will shine through all the fog until you can see all the shores around you.
Use tdp.me to track your goals (Again: the developer, Jay Shirley, is going to kill me for giving out the URL before final features are in but it’s a great tool for monitoring and tracking these goals). Put your goals in there. Make sure you check the box on them each day this week. Each goal is in a different color. It’s pretty when you see a week’s worth of goals checked.
Note: this is not “The Secret”. There’s no visualization here. There’s no future that we create. Today is about TODAY. Do what you need to do today. Surrender to it. Tomorrow will take care of itself once you do that.
Your life is going to change with such blinding speed you won’t believe it. It will feel like magic coming out of your fingertips and your eyes. But change will happen. Do these goals today. Surrender to them.
Share any life advice you've read or heard.
