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fire crazy people from your life
- tl;dr: Fire crazy people from your life, because you cannot change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.
- This is based on a true story.
- On [[May 26th, 2020]] I had a FaceTime call with a wonderful human being, her name is Franziska.
- She asked me: “What’s your most valuable lesson learned?”. – Pause – I made sure we’re both on the same page, so I rephrased it, so I could answer: “What’s one of your biggest learnings?”.
- Until then, I didn’t keep my biggest learnings in readiness to quick-fire answer on such a question. I had to look it up in my notes.
- I scrolled up and down through my notes from the last years. I tried to quickly reference each note to a real life example making sure it’s not something out of thin air.
- It felt like an eternity searching my memory. The next moment she wanted to declare I can answer it the next day, I came up with my lesson learned example: you cannot change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.
- It took her a second, as I didn’t pronounce it the way I marked the words above bold.
- Until here ~2mins have passed in which I did the following:
- opened my notes app
- searched for my “Learnings” topic
- skim read through all the notes
- continued the conversation to make sure it’s no awkward silence
- referenced the most compelling ones to a real world example
- decided for “you cannot change the people around you, but you can change the people around you“
- clarified the real world example in my mind to make sure I could properly explain it to her.
the actual learning here was clear by now: you cannot change people’s way of living, doings or how you like them to (be)have. but you can change the people who surround you.
my real world example
- Back in 2018 I was on a trip in Spain with a friend. After a couple of days I noticed heavy misalignment in the behavior of his actions and my values:
- actions speak louder than words || he preached about can pollution and littering – the next minute he threw his cigarette tips on the ground == a hypocrite.
- deeply care for your friends || he didn’t care for his peers: we had our equipment outdoor. when a storm came up, he only took his stuff inside. his reply: “I didn’t want to touch your property.”
- be positive, have fun, enjoy life || he was upset about the wind, waves and sun. each of these was either too intense or too lousy.
… well, people change, so that’s fine, too.
Photo by Callie Gibson on Unsplash
Published on March 7, 2021