Want to Go Far? Make This Your Goal

If you were on your deathbed and you had to offer a single bit of wisdom to your children, what would it be?

At the ripe old age of 66, I worry about how long I’ll be around to advise my 10-year-old son as he negotiates life’s trials and opportunities. So I asked several sage friends and colleagues to share two or three kernels of wisdom I could pass on to him. The people I asked have all lived rich, fulfilling lives, and most have already raised children of their own. My sample included several prominent positive psychologists, a few authors of well-known books on human behavior, a couple of especially insightful clinicians, a handful of pioneering researchers who have pondered human behavior in light of evolutionary biology, and several non-academic friends whose personalities and sense of humor have had an inspiring and positive effect on those around them.

In a recent post, I invited readers to guess what gem of wisdom my sage advisors would mention most frequently. I further invited readers to pass along any advice they might have gotten from someone who was not a modern urban hipster intellectual, such as a grandmother. Several were nice enough to pass on thoughtful advice from elders who’d grown up in places as scattered as Bulgaria, Ireland, New Zealand, and the rural American heartland. (See the comments on "What Are the 3 Most Useful Bits of Wisdom for Life? Part 1.")

In all, this search netted well over 100 gems of sagacity from these diverse experts, covering topics including friendship, love, work, moral choices, coping, play, learning, and self-care. I was struck by the fact that one bit of simple wisdom came up again and again, in one form or another. The most frequently mentioned gem of wisdom was simply this:

“Be kind.”

There were several variations on the theme—here are two comments posted on my earlier piece:

• "My grandfather (who emigrated to Long Island after a childhood in rural Ireland) always used to say, 'It's nice to be nice.' …. Choosing to be nice (or kind, or polite, or generally pleasant to another person) takes very little effort on your part, but can make a world of difference in how people receive you, and how you are treated in return." (from Coral)
• "The one that seems to stick out always is, 'Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.' It seems to encapsulate everything that is the basis of being a social being in a social environment." (from Neil)

UBC professor Mark Schaller expressed it slightly differently, and spelled out the rationale for being kind:

• "Try to do things to other people, and for other people, that make those other people happy. (Because: Doing so will usually lead those people to like you, and to want you for a friend, and stuff like that; which will have all kinds of benefits—in ways you can't even imagine right now—throughout your whole life.)

As Schaller points out, there are numerous payoffs that follow making other people feel good. The golden rule cuts both ways: If you treat people as you would like them to treat you, they are in fact likely to treat you as you’d like to be treated in return. Conversely, there are severe costs for treating others unkindly.

My amigo Luis Gomez-Jacinto of the University of Malaga noted that economists have a term called “social capital” which can be very roughly translated into: “Friendship is money.” I know from personal experience that both Schaller and Gomez-Jacinto practice what they preach—each of them has put me up in their homes when I have visited their universities. (I described Prof. Gomez-Jacinto’s heartwarming hospitality in an earlier post on Spanish versus American culture.)

Not only do other people want to work and play with you when you are nice, but our own nervous systems are wired to make us feel good when we are nice to others. I’ve previously described Liz Dunn’s research showing that although most of us think we will be happy spending money on ourselves, we are actually happier when we spend money on other people. (See "Are You Spending Money in Ways That Make You Unhappy?")

So...be nice. Sounds painfully simple and obvious—it feels good to be nice, and it is obviously a great formula for success. End of story?

Alas, proverbial wisdom always sounds great, but the devil is in the details, or in this case, the detours. As my son Dave observed about proverbs like the Golden Rule, they are often the equivalent of saying to a baseball player, "Hit a lot of home runs.” Indeed, one of Raquel D’Apice’s “13 Pieces of Good Advice Written on the Skins of Bananas” is, “Be kind to people,” but her bananagram adds the qualification, “(this is harder than it sounds).”

Wisdom Essential Reads

Do We Get Wiser as We Age?

A World Without Grandmothers: What Would We Lose?

Why is it so hard to be nice?

5 Devilish Detours

1. Other people aren’t always nice to you. As D’Apice notes, "Sometimes people are really, really mean, either to me or to a person I care about.” She also observes that it can feel good to put a mean person down with a Dorothy Parker-like snide comment. But it’s more than just an issue of emotional retaliation. There’s also the fact that...
2. Some people will exploit your cooperative spirit. If you are repeatedly kind to a psychopath, without regard to how they treat you in return, the psychopath will keep right on taking advantage of you. But this problem may not only apply to clinical psychopaths—many economists see life as a series of repeated "Prisoner’s Dilemma" games, in which cooperative sweetness fails to yield the biggest possible payoff in a world of selfish actors. (Everyone is a sort of psychopath in this model.) This problem is perhaps especially relevant in business contexts when you are dealing with a stranger who stands to profit from taking advantage of your good nature.
3. Our cognitive biases lead us all to overvalue our own contributions and underestimate those of others. When Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly asked people what percentage of the housework they did, the totals from most couples came in at well over 100 percent, so someone is overestimating their contributions. I seem to selectively remember the times I took out the trash or washed the dishes, but not as clearly as those times when my wife did it since I wasn’t around to observe her hard at work. In dealing with people outside our immediate households, we are biased to see ourselves as driven by higher moral principles and to presume that those who disagree with us are either evil or negligently ignorant. (See "Why Are Their Political Views So Blatantly Self-Interested?")
4. There are often costs to being nice. Even if you are dealing with a pleasant non-psychopath, being nice isn’t always free. Other nice people often make perfectly reasonable requests for some of your time, labor, or money.
5. Some people are simply better at being nice. Even when we have the time and inclination to try to get along with another person, we’re not all equally good at pulling it off. Coming from a rough neighborhood in New York, my idea of being friendly was to make a teasing wisecrack. In my old neighborhood, teasing was usually taken to mean someone is interested in playing with you. But when I moved out West I learned (from an occasional painfully hurt look on someone’s face) that my style of being friendly didn’t always have the intended effect. Another part of my Big City background involved talking loudly and boisterously, often over other people trying to talk at the same time. In a neighborhood full of fast-talking Italians and Irishmen, you’d never get a word in edgewise if you didn’t jump into the fray. But oddly enough, when I later met polite people from Minnesota and Montana, they thought that style of conversation was rude. (I attribute my obnoxious, loud-mouthed traits to external, cultural causes, ignoring the fact that many New Yorkers are perfectly polite and socially sensitive).

There are solutions for each of these problems.

For the first two (not everyone is nice, and some people will exploit you) game theorists have come up with the “tit-for-tat” strategy. It works like this: If we have repeated interactions, I am always nice when you are nice, but if you are nasty or uncooperative, I immediately come back with a nasty uncooperative response. But critically, then I switch back to being nice and repeat that until the other person understands the contingency. The strategy tends to promote prolonged cooperative relationships, which are a lot more rewarding than prolonged competitive hostilities.

For the third (self-serving biases), there is Linus Pauling’s correction factor: “Do unto others 25% better than you expect them to do unto you...The 25% is for error.” Dealing with the real costs of kindness is a bit more of a trick, but even if you are busy and not in the market for new social interactions, it still helps to smile pleasantly and respect another person as you clearly say when you can’t come out to play or join a new project at work. Indeed, saying yes when you really wanted or needed, to say no, may lead to interactions down the line that are not so nice.

With regard to the problem that not all of us are as naturally nice, I’ll list below a few bits of advice I got from some of the nicer people I know, which we can call...

The Idiot’s Mini-Guide to Being Nice

1. ASU’s psychology department chair Keith Crnic does a job that includes listening to an endless stream of complaints. A naturally laid-back guy from California, Keith manages to keep smiling and tends to win the affection and admiration of the people who complain to him. His advice? “Give people reasons to like you.” As he observes, "This is a complex thing, though, as it must be genuine, not ingratiating or disingenuous. There are a number of behavioral corollaries....the key premise is to be interested in and thoughtful about others.” Along the same lines, UC Riverside’s Sonja Lyubomirsky (who wrote The How of Happiness) tries to teach her children "the importance of being kind to others and admiring, respecting, supporting, and appreciating rather than judging or criticizing.”
2. My ex-wife Melanie Trost is one of those do-gooders who left the security of a tenured academic job to work as a social worker with dying people. She even gets along with her ex-husband and brings gifts from Montana every time she comes to visit her extensive network of friends in Arizona. In keeping with her life choices, she advises, "Volunteer to benefit others with no expectation of benefit for yourself. (It takes a person out of his/her self-absorption, does something good for the universe, and really feels good, which one could argue is a benefit to oneself, but what the Hell.” Her advice is corroborated by the research on giving and happiness.
3. Here’s a good piece of advice from my friend David Funder, who is likable enough to have been elected department chair at UC Riverside, as well as President of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology: Keep promises. (Again, that can be harder than it sounds).
4. Don’t be a complainer. Certainly, there are problems that need to be addressed, and we all sometimes need social support or actual material help. Asking someone to help you can cement a stronger friendship, especially if you are not demanding, show your appreciation, and later go out of your way to reciprocate the aid. But you should do your best not to become a whiner: Don’t vent about your problems to everyone you run into; most can’t do anything about it. And even when talking to someone in a position to help, like your boss, explain your problem with a smile. There is classic research on the cycle of depression showing that people who talk about their personal problems initially elicit sympathy and support from those around them, but sadly, people begin to avoid you if you chronically express your negative feelings (Joiner, Alfano, & Metalsky, 1992; Segrin & Dillard, 1992). The same holds, and is probably even more pronounced, when the whining is expressed in an angry rather than depressed tone of voice.
5. Prominent positive psychologist David Myers, a notoriously positive human being who wrote The Pursuit of Happiness, advises, “Spend more time asking people about themselves than talking about yourself.” He notes that “every person is, in some way, your superior," and points out that by taking an interest in everyone you meet, you can learn a lot.

Even if you’re not naturally inclined to be nicer to unpleasant people or total strangers, most of us could go a long way toward having a more fulfilling life if we simply reminded ourselves, every day, to be a little bit kinder to our family, friends, and coworkers.