Human Relationships

There is only so much you can do by yourself

Until now, this book has focused on how you are and what you do. However, what you can do as an individual will always be limited both in terms of actual output and in terms of the joy you encounter.

The key to greater meaning in relationships is better people, not more interactions

We live in a time when most people feel lonely and long for more meaningful interactions with others. Imagine what it would be like to experience one or more orders of magnitude greater meaning in the interactions you experience with others.

For the few willing to believe that significantly greater meaning in relationships is possible, most would guess that the answer lies in having more interactions with more people. This is completely false, and that’s why those who attempt it end up even more lonely than before.

All human interactions are not the same

People are as different from one another as are their fingerprints. Most people treat nearly all human interactions the same, and then wonder why interactions with others are such a stressful and taxing part of their lives.

Elsewhere in this book, the vast difference in the outcomes of different decisions is discussed with reference to the Pareto distribution. If human decisions yield Pareto differences in production, such that 20% of people produce 80% of results, why should you expect that the fruitfulness of your relationships with different people should produce uniform outcomes?

Understand that the usefulness of the people in your life will follow the Pareto distribution: 80% of the meaning will come from 20% of the people with whom you interact. If you don’t distribute your time accordingly—spending 80% of your time with 20% of the people who are truly most important—you will experience a massive deficit in both what you are able to accomplish in life and the joy you experience in doing so.

And the pattern isn’t limited to differences between people. It also holds in interactions with specific people. Of 100 interactions with a given person, you will find that 80% of the meaning and usefulness occurs in just 20 of them. To maximize the value of your relationship with any given person, you need to learn to recognize and make the most of the most valuable moments. If you treat the 20% most valuable interactions the same as the 80% less valuable interactions, you will absolutely miss out on almost all of the potential value in the relationship.

Remember the lessons from goals and tasks: the best things don’t compete with placeholders. If you fill your time and life with people and interactions that don’t matter, don’t expect someone or something better to interrupt you. You must actively curate who you spend your time with and how you spend it.

If you want to maximize meaning and utility in your life, you need to increase the number of twenty percent people in your life, and you need to concentrate your time on the twenty percent interactions with them. Doing both of these will geometrically increase the interpersonal meaning you experience in life.

How to focus on 20% interactions

The most valuable interactions with a given person are limited to about twenty percent of what a normal person would do. How can you make more of your interactions with others into those of the highest quality?

Avoid the trap of seeking fulfillment in busyness. Seek what you do and who you do it with based on what you actually value instead of what is easy or available.

Be more vocal about what matters to you. If someone asks you to do something that you don’t care about, don’t just do it or make up some excuse; tell them that you won’t do it because you don’t care.

Ask the important people in your life what you do that matters most to them, and tell them what matters to you. It is exceedingly likely that what is most important to you is not what is most important to them, and vice-versa. Don’t guess their 20%, and don’t expect them to guess yours. Do this in your romantic relationships, your family, your friendships, and your work connections. While there are some people who know what is most important to their supervisor at work, many don’t, and hardly anyone has had this conversation in families or friendships. How many parents are spending enormous time on extra curricular activities or expensive gifts for a child who might strongly prefer a little one-on-one time at home?

Focus your actions on what matters most. Cut out all small talk. Cut out optional interactions with people that don’t matter. Stop going to meetings or doing things that don’t contribute to what you or someone you care about cares about.

Stop making yourself equally available to all people. Stop checking your email at all times of the day. Make an auto response that indicates you will check email once per business day. Pare down marketing emails by unsubscribing. Stop answering your phone when it’s someone you don’t want to talk to.

Stop making an effort with people who don’t care about you. Implement a rule that defines how many times you will contact someone without being contacted back. At the extreme, you can make your motto: “I will treat those who ghost me as if they were dead.”

How to find 20% people

The most valuable human interactions will only be experienced with about 20% of people. How will you find these people? What are they like?

These people will not waste time on uninteresting people. Those who seek what matters most in life are seeking improvement. They have little regard for conventional practices and conventional wisdom. They march to the beat of their own drum. They say what they really think, and they do what they really believe. They are always learning, and prefer to spend their time with people who have something new and interesting to say. They appreciate what has deep meaning, and abhor shallow experiences and small talk.

How to prioritize 20% people amidst the demands of life

How do you balance your daily toil and the people who are important to you? Do the people important to you get the energy they need from you, or do they just get what’s left?

One trick to squeeze out more energy when you feel depleted is to make use of your ability to plan for that time while you still feel energized. It is much easier to execute while depleted than it is to plan and execute.

If you find yourself lacking the energy you need for the people who are important to you, try changing your schedule around. It’s different, but there is no rule against spending early morning time with your family or friends, either in person or on the phone, in addition to or instead of evening time.

Instead of making new time, you can also make slight adjustments to how you carry out your present activities. Are there opportunities to merge the activities that are important to you and the people who are important to you? Could you work together on what needs to be done? If not, could you reduce the spatial distance between where you are working and where they are working? Spouses can work in the same area to facilitate lunches together or joint commutes, parents can bring children along when doing errands, people can work from home, and parents can homeschool. Smaller changes can also have an outsized impact, like scheduling a short recurring phone call in the middle of the day or occasionally bringing a child to work.

Good people inspire you; bad people degrade you

The people and situations with which you hesitate to engage can significantly affect your ability to know and achieve your potential. Some people can inspire you so much that you are able to do what you didn’t even think was possible before. Some people can degrade you so much that they make it nearly impossible to even survive.

Emotional friction can wear you down to the point where it significantly affects your quality of life. Though most cases are painfully obvious, it is possible that the undesirable people or situations are so subtle or so longstanding that you don’t notice them. Do you avoid, procrastinate, or dread certain interactions or situations? If so, you might be caught up in emotional friction.

The presence or absence of certain kinds of people in our lives has such strong effects that it begs the question of why so many are surrounded by such toxic people, and why so few leverage the benefits of those who would inspire them to be better. The answer is simple, but sad.

First, people don’t realize they have a choice. No one is obligated to drag along a person who constantly wears them down. Whether it’s a family member, friend, neighbor, or even coworker, everyone has the ability to change their circumstances. When you honestly communicate your expectations and boundaries, as previously recommended, you give others the ability to choose whether or not you will maintain the relationship without immaturely ghosting them.

Second, people are not naturally inclined towards the kinds of people who inspire them to be the best they can be. Some toxic people are obviously unpleasant, but a toxic person can also be quite fun to be around. Do your associates inspire and push you or do they encourage you to do less than your best? Ironically, the kind of person who will bring out the best in you is often confused for a toxic person who causes you emotional friction. To discern between these, ask whether the person is inclining you toward or away from improvement.

When someone’s actions or words make you feel bad, take some time alone to think and write about what is causing you grief. Try to ask yourself what bothers you so much about it. Sometimes, these situations bother us because of undesirable qualities they reveal or emphasize in us. In this case, use the tools in this book to enumerate what you can do to improve in ways that make the person or scenario less difficult.

Seek out those who catalyze your growth, not those who comfort you in your present state. Those who want to be the best they can be will find and spend time with those who help them do just that.

Friction and drag from other people

Previously, the principles of friction and drag were discussed. Each of these has an application in your interpersonal interactions.

People can produce friction. For example, you want to start a business, but your significant other keeps emphasizing the reasons against it. Friction reduces with velocity. The best way to reduce friction with people is to be a better person. The less often you disappoint or offend others because of your faults, the less often you will have to deal with the friction caused by their reactions. In the business example, if you are a highly successful person with a stellar track record and surplus income, your spouse will probably be less worried about you starting a business than if you are none of those things.

People can produce drag. Drag describes resistance against your purpose. An example of drag is when you are progressing through a project at work that is pushing you to the limits of what you are able to think, feel, and do, while also being confronted on a regular basis with someone at home who is unwilling to meet the very minimal expectations upon them, causing an even greater deficit of emotional and mental resources left for work.

There are several ways to reduce interpersonal drag, and they fall into two categories: what you can change about yourself, and what you can change about the other people you spend time with.

The changes you can make to yourself to reduce interpersonal drag consist of who you are and what you do in relationship to others. You can change yourself to reduce interpersonal drag by becoming stronger, for example by being less reactive to others and less needy. You can also fight interpersonal drag by reducing the resistance you produce by avoiding the triggers of other people on situations that are not worth the results that would ensue.

The changes you can make to the people you spend time with consist of focusing your time on better people. You can fight interpersonal drag by changing the medium, which is to say through choosing to spend your time with people who provide much more benefit than cost. Finally, you can reduce interpersonal drag through spending more time with fewer people, choosing to maximize your time with the 20% of people who provide 80% of your meaning.

Spend most of your time with people better than you

Those who surround you have a much greater effect on so much more of you than you might believe. Motivational speaker Jim Rohn would often repeat the adage: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” He also claimed: “show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future.” The wisdom of these ideas has played out across countless lives, and been echoed in statements by more recent thinkers, such as author and speaker Tim Ferriss. It’s actually a very old idea. The ancient Stoic Epictetus wrote:

“It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis...that you will grow to be like them. Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite.”

The differences between any two people create a gravitational pull towards a sort of multi-person equilibrium. The differences between individuals are so extensive that it is essentially impossible that any person will be significantly like you. The people around you will draw you up in the ways they are better than you, and down in the ways they are worse. You will do the same to them. You can fight the influence, but its constancy will always have a long-term effect.

When someone is better than you in something, they will raise your standards for that thing on yourself, whether you like it or not. Most people are more than capable of excusing themselves for thoughts about the possibility of being better, but this all changes in the face of a living example of improvement. In order to maintain a feeling of ease, a person exposed to an example of what is better must change—either by becoming more like the example, or by at least increasing the value they appraise in that person. Human nature would prefer to do neither, as the first requires work and the second requires adopting a lower selfvaluation. Most people respond to examples of improvement by removing them—either through ignoring the invitation, ghosting the individual, or artificially reducing their example through intentionally misrepresenting their character to others.

The best friends you can have are the best people you can find who will tolerate you. These people don’t have to live in your area. In fact, they don’t need to be living at all. Modern technology and media gives all people the opportunity to connect with people who live far away in time and space through biographies, videos, and interactive settings.

Your efforts to find and befriend those who are better than you will have a greater effect on improving yourself than any direct efforts you make to do the same. Whatever temporary discomfort you experience in their presence is merely a signal of ways in which you can improve.

The second best kinds of friends you can have are those who can receive the greatest good from your own example, but you have to realize the cost that this incurs to you. In the best case, they will create a great deal of friction in your life as they present constant mental and emotional costs to you as you attempt to tactfully encourage them toward improvement. In the worst case, they will respond to your efforts by doing to you and saying about you terrible things that are far worse than you deserve. Since the odds of benefit are low and the risks of maltreatment are high, you may ask why anyone would bother being a friend to someone who might benefit from their example.¹ The answer is that while great joy comes from improvement of self, the only joy greater comes from improving others at cost to self.

If you want to be better, you have to be different

The prioritization of each day by importance is going to require you to arrange your day differently than you did before, and differently than others would. As you begin paying more attention to what you do and why you do it, you are going to notice that there is an awful lot that we all do in our lives without any good reason to, as well as a lot that we do not do although we have every reason to. So much of our lives are based on unspoken rules that everyone adopts without really thinking about them, and very few of those rules actually help us get to where we want to go in life.

While most people are confident in what they do because everyone else is doing it or because others expect it of them, this kind of false confidence evaporates the moment its negative consequences suddenly appear. When your confidence is based on a rational process of thinking about everything you could do and choosing the actions that best align with what you actually want the most, you will feel confident and content no matter what kind of obstacles present themselves. This true internally-produced confidence surpass the limits of those who do what they do only because of external examples or expectations.

The fact that others do things a certain way does not provide evidence in itself that this is the best way to do things. You have to ask why, and there has to be a good reason. You have to move past the comfort of conventions. Conventional wisdom can only generate conventional results, and conventional results are embarrassingly terrible.

Intentional people will do things that other people are unwilling to do because they are willing to submit to reason instead of being beholden to the desire to be comfortable, popular, or ignorant.

Intentional people will also abstain from things that other people readily do. They won’t do things just because other people are doing them or because others expect them to. They won’t act contrary to their principles, even if everyone else does.

If you are going to live with intention, you are going to have to get used to being different than you were before. In fact, you are going to need to get used to never getting used to anything. This is both possible and incredibly useful, but it also requires those around you to do the same, and some prior relationships simply can’t endure the changes that will become a permanent part of who and how you are.

When you set out for the things you truly want in life, you are going to find that either you will want different things than others want, or you want to actually obtain what others claim they desire but do not get. In either case, you have to realize that in order to get what others do not have, you have to be willing to do differently than what they are willing to do.

The multiplicative effect of reliable people

Trustworthiness is a simple trait with outsized effects. A person who does what they say they will do should not be hard to find, but they are. Whenever you deal with normal people, you have to carry the overhead of the possibility that they fail to do what they said they would. When they disappoint you, you will need to allocate the resources required to recover from their failure while enduring the emotional hurt of their choice to prioritize something over that for which you depended upon them. Reliable people allow you to do much more than you otherwise would because you can consider whatever they commit to as good as done. Every existing task you hand to a reliable person is one more new task you can complete yourself. Be a reliable person, and surround yourself with the same.

Reduce interruptions that take away from your purpose

Interruptions were historically limited to often-significant dangers or opportunities. If you are farming and a lightning storm approaches, you need to interrupt your plan and seek shelter. If you are walking through the forest and are rushed by a grizzly bear, it suddenly doesn’t matter where you were headed. In the modern world, we are inundated by an unbroken stream of interruptions, and very few of them are worth paying attention to.

Our modern world is not designed around unbroken concentration. We have email, phones, common work areas, and all sorts of other ubiquitous sources of interruption.

As you attempt to focus on each subsequent highest priority task until it is complete, you’ll have to tenaciously protect yourself from interruptions. In every case, ask whether the interruption will better advance your purpose than the task at hand.

Realize that interruptions are the mortal enemy to productivity. Fragmented work is low-efficiency work. Every interruption will significantly reduce the amount of resources you have to focus on the task at hand, and will continue on as a residual attention parasite even after the interruption is completed.

Some changes you can make on your own. For example, you can adopt a habit of refusing to check your email, the news, or social media as a gap-filler. Instead, set times for these activities. You can check your email at the end of the day instead of the beginning. You can check your phone or catch up on the news while eating lunch. When on task, you’ll want to remove these distractions: close your email window, turn off your phone, and do whatever else you need to do to isolate your concerns to the intentionally chosen task at hand. You’ll find that there are very few actual emergencies. Almost nothing will be very different if it needs to wait a few hours, and your overall capability to do nearly everything will vastly improve by putting in these protections. If absolutely necessary, you can create a specific channel to provide a way of getting through, as long as you only share that with people who will respect your specific instructions that it is only for emergencies. This might be an app on your phone that you leave on while everything else is on silent, or even a special email address whose window you leave open on your computer.

Other changes are going to require the support of others. For example, you might be in an office culture where others like to stop by and socialize. You’ll have to explain to people that you are trying to be more efficient, that you’re going to start shutting your door, that you’d like them to only knock in the event of an emergency, and to send an email if it can wait. You might place a sign on your door: “Please contact me by email and set up an appointment unless you need my immediate attention, in which case you should call or knock. I will respond to your email within one business day.” You might do something similar on your phone voicemail: “If this is not an ” emergency, please reach me by email at TOOOOOOOOOOOO.

As you set up barriers for others to engage with you, you may find that there is a lot of resistance, particularly from low productivity people, who will struggle to disentangle your valuation of what they are interrupting you with for your valuation of them personally. You will have to be firm with people. The productivity you gain will make it worth whatever pushback you encounter. In a work environment, you might respond to strong resistance by changing jobs, where you will earn greater peace and pay in an environment that knows what is most valuable. In a friend relationship, you might need to find a new friend. In a family relationship, you might need to ease into the adjustments and allow the evidence of the benefits to provide further support for further changes.

Increase interruptions that serve your purpose

As a rule, while you should remove yourself from the interruptions of others, you should also be more willing to interrupt others. This might seem contradictory, but it isn’t. It is the focus on purpose that drives both changes. Never let the task at hand promote itself beyond the goal you are working on or your transcendent purpose. Interrupt anything your priorities require you to.

An intentional person has to merge their own prioritization with the world around them, and the more they have thought about and lived up to their own prioritization, the more often their own prioritization will be better than that of those around them. If someone is babbling about something that doesn’t matter, interrupt them. If you need something from someone and they are busy with something that is truly less important, interrupt them. And interrupt yourself, if that’s what your priorities require: If you encounter new information during your day that needs to be attended to, interrupt what you are doing.

Boosting productivity while working with others

Every person has different capabilities and willingness. To generate the greatest productivity, each person ought to be in the place where they can make the greatest positive contribution. Whoever is willing and able to do what is difficult should delegate anything that isn’t to others who are not.

Often, work with others entails unpredictably long times while you wait for them to respond or complete a dependent task. Your prioritized to do list will enable you to keep making progress in other tasks while awaiting those dependent on others. When you are waiting on other people, you will move on with the next item in the priority queue, following up with the person as a separate task, and while being ready to interrupt whatever you move onto as appropriate in the event they get back to you.