Category: Life lessons — 218
Truth without a cult of candour
Public morality offers a simple ideal: an honest person always tells the whole truth. That formula fails to distinguish lying, privacy, confidentiality, tact and protection from danger. You have to…
Homework
School folklore in families counts as a good parent the one who saves the child from a bad mark. As a result the homework improves the adult’s skills, while the…
School Is Not a Monopoly
The education system necessarily behaves as if knowledge fits inside a syllabus and ends on the last page of the textbook. A textbook does set a useful minimum route, but…
Work Begins Before the Work
Before starting, prepare not only the tool but also the space around it. Worth checking: whether there is enough room; whether there is light and ventilation; where the material will…
A Conversation with a Purpose
Before an important conversation it helps to work out what it is for. In “Getting to Yes,” Roger Fisher and William Ury proposed separating people from the problem, interests from…
“That’s Subtle”
Honesty does not oblige you to report every opinion, especially one that will help nobody. Someone shows you a new haircut, a painting, their child at the school concert or…
Read the Problem First
A bad solution is often a flawless answer to a misread problem. Before any calculation or action it is worth establishing: what is known; what has to be found; which…
What is left after the working day
The final verdict on a profession does not appear at the moment of promotion or in the job title on record. It shows up in who a person becomes after…
Managing agreements
People cannot be reliably programmed. You can create conditions in which the required action becomes clear, possible and worthwhile. This is not necessarily manipulation. Any cooperation is built this way:…
Trust in Portions
Expecting hostility from others shapes your own behaviour. Someone convinced that the people around them want to cheat them asks questions like an investigator, distrusts ordinary explanations and constantly tests…
Polite and inconvenient
Society often pictures a well-brought-up person as a convenient one: he does not refuse, does not put others in an awkward spot, and explains every “no” in detail. Politeness quietly…
First to the Board
Waiting rarely reduces fear. Usually it gives it time to prepare a presentation. When several people have to do the same unpleasant thing — speak, answer, sit an interview, take…
A good job
A good job is hard to define by a single feature. Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham tied internal motivation not to one “thing you love” but to how the work…
When words no longer fit
Sometimes the other person is not listening. He waits for a pause to reply, repeats the accusation, rejects every clarification and uses each of your lines as fresh material against…
An Investment in a Person Does Not Come Back as a Person
When we help someone, we start to value the relationship more. Time, money, care and part of our own biography have already gone into it. Walking away is hard not…
Before the Bell
A brief look at the material before a class noticeably changes the lesson itself. You don’t need to understand everything in advance. It is enough to look through the main…
A Profession Is Not the Whole Biography
Society meets a person with the question “what do you do” and quickly takes the answer for a description of the personality. A profession really does change how you see…
Advice by Invitation
Society respects a person who has the right advice for everyone. The recipient usually hears a different message inside the unrequested wisdom: “I understand your life better than you do.”…
A group breaks up into people
Collective hostility looks like a solid wall. In one-to-one contact the wall sometimes breaks up into individual people, each of them less certain than the group as a whole. A…
Help Without a Lifetime Subscription
A culture of closeness easily turns help into an open-ended obligation: if you managed it once, you owe it from now on. But not every expectation becomes a duty just…