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