You want to be a nicer person? Then stop being a jerk!

I’m reading What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How successful people become even more successful by Marshal Goldsmith.

Why am I reading it? It was recommended by a source I respect and it’s part of a process of self-discovery and self-improvement I started a few months ago. During this process I’ve read several books and as usual they ranged from the useless (in my opinion) to the excellent (again in my opinion).

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How successful people become even more successful is one of the excellent ones.

I’m not going to give a full book review; you can easily find one online. What I will do is give you an excerpt from one of the early sections entitled Shifting into Neutral. It was while reading this relatively short but most impactful section that I realised this book was for me.

Much of the book is targeted at helping executives and senior managers recognise that the habits that brought them success may in fact be holding them back from achieving greatness.

But this book is not only for executives. I think the fundamental principles of the book are so sound that they would benefit people in all walks of life, and would assist relationships in many forms, with loved-ones, with friends and with colleagues.

The chapters on Apologising, Listening and Thanking were my personal favourites.

The following except is reproduced with the kind permission of Marshall Goldsmith.

We have to stop couching all our behavior in terms of positive or negative. Not all behavior is good or bad. Some of it is simply neutral. Neither good nor bad.

For example, let’s say you’re not regarded as a nice person. You wan’t to change that perception. You decide, “I need to be nicer.”

What do you do?

For many people, that’s a daunting assignment, requiring a long list of positive actions. You have to start complimenting people, saying “please” and “thank you,” listening to people more patiently, treating them with a verbal respect, etc., etc., etc. In effect, you have to convert all of the negative things you do at work into positive actions. That’s asking a lot of most people, requiring a complete personality makeover that is closer to religious conversion than on-the-job improvement. In my experience very few if any people can institute that many positive changes in their interpersonal actions all at once. They can handle one at a time. But a half dozen or more changes? I don’t think so.

Fortunately, there’s a simpler way to achieve the goal of “being nicer.” All you have to do is “stop being a jerk.” It doesn’t require much. You don’t have to think of new ways to be nicer to people. You don’t have to design daily tasks to make over your personality. You don’t have to remember to say nice things and hand out compliments and tell the little white lies that lubricate the gears of the workplace. All you have to do is . . . nothing.

When someone offers a less-than-brilliant idea in a meeting, don’t criticize it. Say nothing.

When someone challenges one of your decisions, don’t argue with them or make excuses. Quietly consider it and say nothing.

When someone makes a helpful suggestion, don’t remind them that you already knew that. Thank them and say nothing.

This is not a semantic game. The beauty of knowing what to stop – of achieving this state of inspired neutrality – is that it is so easy to do.

Given the choice between becoming a nicer person and ceasing to be a jerk, which do you think is easier to do? The former requires a concerted series of positive acts of commission. The latter is nothing more than an act of omission.

Think of it in terms of a box. Being a nicer person requires you to fill up the box with all the small positive acts you perform every day to establish the new you. It takes a long time to fill up the box, and even longer for people to pay attention and notice that your box is full.

On the other hand, ceasing to be a jerk does not require learning new behavior. You don’t have to fill up the box with all your positive achievements; you simply have to leave it empty of any negatives.

Keep that in mind as you go through the list of interpersonal issues in this section and determine if any apply to you. Correcting the behavior, you’ll discover, does not require polished skills, elaborate training, arduous practice, or supernatural creativity. All that’s required is the faint imagination to stop doing what you’ve done in the past – in effect, to do nothing at all.