The Not To Do List E-Book

Rolf Dobelli

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 266

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

PERFECT FOR FANS OF Mel Robbins' THE LET THEM THEORY and THE COURAGE TO BE DISLIKED The new book from the multi-million-copy bestselling author of The Art of Thinking Clearly Have you ever: Got stuck in your career? Said 'yes, sure' when you should have said 'sorry, no'? Tried to change someone? Listened to your inner voice? These are all examples of habits, decisions and behaviours that will derail your efforts to build a life of success - of better decisions, career and relationships; of happier and healthier living. In his new international bestseller, Rolf Dobelli reveals 52 of life's biggest mistakes, and shows why the key to living well is so much simpler than you might think. Just understand what the pitfalls are... then avoid them.

Leseprobe

Praise for Rolf Dobelli

‘I don’t just read Rolf Dobelli’s books; I savour every word.’ Frank Elstner, German TV host

‘One of Europe’s finest minds.’ Matt Ridley, bestselling author

‘Rolf Dobelli is a virtuosic synthesizer of ideas. With wit, grace and precision, he melds science and art in his joyful pursuit of wisdom.’ Joshua Greene, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Moral Tribes

‘Rolf Dobelli has a gift for identifying the best ideas in the world and then putting them together in ways that make the whole even more valuable than the sum of the parts. He’s done it for the art of thinking. Now he does it for the art of living.’ Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership, NYU Stern School of Business, and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Righteous Mind

‘Rolf Dobelli is brilliant at converting evidence from scientific research into practical steps that improve personal outcomes.’ Robert B. Cialdini, author of bestsellers Influence and Pre-Suasion

‘Rolf Dobelli has done it again! Not only does he open our eyes, now he wakes us up. Because of his rigorous scientific analysis combined with his shattering philosophical approach, he is never satisfied with the superficial. So, grab Rolf’s book and don’t let it go!’ Tenley E. Albright, Director, MIT Collaborative Initiatives, and Professor Emeritus, Harvard Medical School

‘Rolf Dobelli gives us as valuable advice about how to live as he did about how to think.’ James R. Flynn, Professor Emeritus, University of Otago, and discoverer of the Flynn Effect

‘Rolf Dobelli possesses the fascinating knack to present modern scientific insights in an inspiring and thrilling way.’ Bruno S. Frey, Professor of Economics, University of Basel, and founder of the field of economic happiness research

‘Three pages in, and you’ve already learned something else.’ Franz Himpsel, Süddeutsche Zeitung

‘This book will change the way you think.’ Professor Dan Goldstein, London Business School

‘This book provides a truly fresh perspective. It is intelligent, informative and witty. Rolf Dobelli’s clear prose illuminates how we think.’ Dr Christoph Franz, former CEO, Lufthansa; Global Chairman, Roche

‘Do you have to read this book? Definitely. It’s extremely entertaining and offers a fundamentally sound introduction to the nature of human thought.’ Professor Dr (h. c.) Roland Berger, Founder and Honorary Chairman of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants

‘Brimming with insights! Anybody who’s sick of constantly stumbling into mental traps has got to read this book.’ Professor Iris Bohnet, Harvard Kennedy School

Also by Rolf Dobelli

The Art of Thinking Clearly

The Art of the Good Life

Stop Reading the News

Originally published in Germany in 2024 by Piper Verlag GmbH, München / Berlin.

First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2025 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Rolf Dobelli, 2025

Translation copyright © Isabel Adey, 2025

The moral right of Rolf Dobelli to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 328 3

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 422 8

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 329 0

Printed in Great Britain

Allen & Unwin

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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CONTENTS

Foreword

1Let Things Fall Apart

2Feed Your Weaker Self

3Be Unreliable

4Be an Asshole

5Have High Expectations

6Drift Through the Day

7Mess Up Your Marriage

8Be a Quitter

9Be Hypocritical

10Cling to Your Bad Habits

11Set the Wrong Goals

12Drink Yourself Miserable

13Get Involved in Other People’s Drama

14Only Learn from Your Own Experience

15Be Hyperactive on Social Media

16Indulge in Road Rage

17Surround Yourself with Negative People

18Micromanage Your Neighbours

19Say Yes to Drugs

20Get Stuck in Your Career

21Never Be Playful

22Feel Guilty

23Practise Ingratitude

24Trust Your Banker

25Be Paranoid

26Make Other People Feel Unimportant

27Live in the Past

28Listen to Your Inner Voice

29Expect Rationality

30Get Nihilistic

31Catastrophize

32Consider Money Unimportant

33Cultivate a Victim Mentality

34Become a Lapdog

35Get Rich Quick, Get Smart Quick

36Ruminate

37Trade Your Reputation for Money

38Never Suffer

39Let Your Emotions Define You

40Try to End It All

41Marry the Wrong Person – and Stay with Them

42Celebrate Your Resentment

43Join a Cult

44Try to Change People

45Say Everything You Think

46Spin Multiple Plates

47Do Only Shallow Work

48Invite Bad People into Your Life

49Go Where the Competition is Strong

50Say Yes to Everything

51Crowd Your Life with Gadgets

52Fall into the Content Trap

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

The Dobelli-Disclaimer

Appendix

For my wife Clara Maria Bagus and our sons

FOREWORD

Some people collect vinyl, video game consoles or vintage clothes. For years, I’ve been accumulating stories of failure – botched attempts at work, family life, marriage and life in general.

Leo Tolstoy’s monumental novel Anna Karenina opens with the line ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Meaning: unadulterated joy makes for a dull read. Happiness is bland and one-dimensional, smooth like Teflon. Unhappiness, on the other hand, tells us more about the world. Misery is textured. And it teaches us lessons. That’s why I’m an avid collector of woe and misfortune.

On graduation day, colleges and universities invite a guest speaker to share their insights and wisdom with the fledglings being released into the world of work. These speakers are usually former students of the institution who have excelled in their chosen career. This was the case on 13 June 1986, when Charlie Munger, then aged 62, was invited to deliver the commencement speech at the Harvard School in Los Angeles. The American investor, together with Warren Buffett, had built arguably the most successful holding company in history: Berkshire Hathaway. Munger’s speech was most extraordinary. Even the title had a bizarre ring to it: ‘How to Guarantee a Life of Misery’. Instead of imparting insights to help his audience achieve better personal outcomes, he shared four failsafe ways to achieve zero success in life. He simply flipped the whole thing on its head. It was a brilliant stroke of inspiration; after all, negative rules are more powerful than their positive counterparts, more concrete and memorable. Despite all the research into happiness, for example, we still don’t know exactly what makes us happy. We certainly know what destroys happiness, though. We can’t pinpoint what leads to success, but we know for sure what makes it an impossibility. The key is to keep the killer in your sights and give him the slip, then the right path will automatically open up ahead.

Munger’s idea was by no means new. The Prussian mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi applied this approach back in the nineteenth century. Sometimes, he realized, the only way to solve an academic problem is to turn it around completely. The technical term is ‘inversion’. This is what led Einstein to adapt Newton’s theory of gravity to Maxwell’s electromagnetism, instead of approaching the problem the other way round like everyone else had done before him. Long-term investors ask themselves how best to run a company into the ground, then they invest in indestructible prospects. Munger’s witty one-liner sums up this approach perfectly: ‘All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.’ In addition to being a brilliant investor, Charlie Munger was an equally ingenious thinker who was never one to hold back. As the source of so many incisive remarks, he is someone I quote often. He sadly passed away at the age of 99 while I was writing this book.

Back to the subject at hand: inversion. We tend to dissect successes, but not failures, in our own life or in the media. There is an additional bias here: in the case of success, we systematically overestimate the role of skills, decisions and actions, and underestimate the role of chance, luck, randomness. Why? Because we hear about successful companies, projects and people in the media. Flops, on the other hand – no one wants to know about them. Deadbeats don’t usually write autobiographies. And in the rare event that they do, they fail to find a publisher, let alone an audience. So we study these shining examples and delude ourselves into thinking that achievements are the result of a series of carefully orchestrated success factors, when really what matters is steering clear of common pitfalls. Tip: visit the graveyards of failed companies, projects, people, marriages and families. That’s where you’ll learn the most – namely, what to avoid.

Of the twelve books I’ve written, three were major successes and a handful were veritable flops. I have no idea what made The Art of Thinking Clearly an international bestseller, but I know exactly where the others went wrong. If you view the world from a negative perspective, you bring light into the darkness.

My previous books employed the same approach as the conventional graduation speech. They offer advice on how to think clearly, act wisely and live a better life. But in this book, I’m turning the tables. I give you a whole catalogue of habits, behaviours and thought patterns that are best avoided – a ‘not-to-do list’, if you will, a sort of encyclopaedia of foolishness. Some of them may even remind you of advice you’ve encountered from celebrity life coaches, self-help gurus or online influencers. If you know what they are, you can also steer clear of them. Each chapter then offers, as an antidote, a gentle word from the quiet voice of reason.

My sons were in the back of my mind the whole time I was writing this book. One day, when they’re fully grown, I picture myself handing them a copy and saying, ‘Hopefully this will spare you a few problems in life. If you avoid these 52 things, you can look forward to a bright future.’ No doubt they’ll just laugh at me and say, ‘That’s nice of you, Dad, but we were really hoping for a car or some money for a round-the-world trip!’

Rolf Dobelli

1

LET THINGS FALL APART

There once was a man who lived in an old house with a leaky roof. It was never the right time to fix the roof: when it rained it was too wet, and when the skies were clear he saw no need. If you want to do badly in life, follow the old man’s example. Systematically neglect the upkeep of your house, your car, your body, your mind, your relationships, your business – your entire life. It’s the only way to guarantee that it’ll all go to pieces.

The quiet voice of reason

On a stormy Tuesday in August 2018, the Morandi Bridge in Genoa collapsed. It had been completed in 1967 and formed part of a major arterial road linking the Italian Riviera with the French coast. Designed by Italian engineer Riccardo Morandi, the viaduct was innovative in its construction: three reinforced concrete pylons supporting several pre-stressed concrete stays. Long before it collapsed, experts had voiced concerns about the corrosion of the concrete and these structural elements. No remedial action was taken. When the middle section of the bridge gave way, dozens of cars plummeted 40 metres to the ground. A frantic rescue operation immediately ensued in a desperate bid to help the survivors and recover the bodies. In a remarkable feat, the bridge was speedily rebuilt and reopened in August 2020. The heroic rescuers and star architect Renzo Piano, who rebuilt the bridge, were celebrated for their efforts.

On 14 August 2018, that same stormy Tuesday, the Felsenau Viaduct in Bern did not collapse. Completed in 1974 and located just a few kilometres from my office, this particular bridge forms part of Switzerland’s A1 motorway, our country’s most important transport axis. It is comparable to the Morandi Bridge in Genoa in terms of age, construction, materials, length and traffic volume. But here in Bern, no one was celebrated. There is no monument to the specialists responsible for the ongoing maintenance of the bridge; they received no medals for their work, not even an article in the local newspaper.

Maintenance is by no means a heroic deed. It is boring and unsexy, and most of it goes unseen. But that’s not to say it’s any less important than heroism – in fact, quite the opposite. While we systematically overestimate the value of a grand design or a brave rescue mission, we systematically underestimate the value of quiet ongoing maintenance. Not just on public buildings, but also in the private sphere. We heap praise on the surgeon who saved us from a fatal heart attack, but not the GP we regularly visit for check-ups, even though those check-ups have kept us from dying of bowel cancer thus far. We glorify the moment when our Mr or Mrs Right proposed to us, but we underestimate the value of the monotonous, time-devouring daily maintenance of the relationship. As the German comedian Hape Kerkeling says, ‘Love is work, work, work.’

The maintenance people of the business world get overlooked, too. Company founders and turnaround CEOS are applauded. But who celebrates the millions of middle managers who keep thousands of business operations, data centres, power grids and warehouses up and running – everything through to waste removal? David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, rightly describes these invisible middle managers as ‘the unsung heroes of our age’. Still, no one writes about them.

In geopolitics, the true heroes are not the generals who lead an army (and their country) to victory. The real heroes are the individuals who prevent a war from happening in the first place: the politicians, diplomats and civil servants who keep the international lines of communication open and establish an effective deterrent. But are diplomats rewarded for wars that never take place? Does anyone read their memoirs?

Bottom line: there are no medals to be won for diligent maintenance. That being said, this kind of work is still more important than any other. My advice for a good life: don’t wait for things to fall apart. Remain careful and watchful – like the engineers entrusted with the upkeep of state-of-the-art jet engines. As well as carrying out continuous maintenance work, they rely on sophisticated performance monitoring processes. In the event of even the tiniest fluctuation (temperature, pressure, vibration) from the normal range, the plane is immediately taken out of service until the issue has been rectified. You should get into a similar habit. Are you finding it harder to get up the stairs these days? Then make an appointment with your doctor. Is your husband or wife chronically irritable? Have a conversation, find out what’s bothering them. Is there woodworm in your roof beams? Call a specialist before the roof caves in on you. Better to be an unsung hero than someone who tries to save the day and fails dramatically.

SEE ALSO Drink Yourself Miserable (ch. 12); Only Learn from Your Own Experience (ch. 14); Get Rich Quick, Get Smart Quick (ch. 35); Do Only Shallow Work (ch. 47)

2

FEED YOUR WEAKER SELF

There’s an epidemic of self-discipline happening. Every other self-help book preaches self-motivation, with titles like The Mountain is You and Discipline: the Power of Self-Control regularly featuring on the bestseller lists. Beware: don’t let this pseudo-religion sink its teeth into you. These writers just want to make money. If you can’t be bothered doing something, your central nervous system is clearly trying to tell you that it couldn’t possibly be worth your while. Why else would human beings have developed this complex feeling over millions of years of evolution? Trust your inner sloth; he’s your loyal companion. If he squeaks, stroke his head, ruffle his fur and give him a couple of treats.

Motivation has to come from the outside, not – as these authors would all have you believe – from within. It’s not your fault if you’re in the doldrums; the world en masse is to blame. Unless the universe gives you a reason to get out of bed and deal with all the irksome things in life, what else are you supposed to do? That’s right: just stay in bed. Self-motivation is about as natural as plastic or pesticides. Consider how animals behave in their natural habitat. Gorillas, for example: they just sit around scratching themselves and digesting food. Stress and bad moods? Not a chance. We share 98 per cent of our genes with gorillas, so we should really be looking to them to lead the way. Advocates of strict discipline have forgotten what comes naturally to us. Disinclination is disinclination – our evolutionary forebears knew that much.

Here’s a new motto for you to live by: put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Ideally you should get together with a whole mob of like-minded people and collectively deride the excesses of self-motivation. Maybe you could even start an international procrastination movement? Actually, maybe not – that would take up too much of your time.

The quiet voice of reason

The German-speaking world has a great term for this weaker self: innere Schweinehund, which literally means ‘inner pigdog’. A bit like a sloth, but with malicious intent. This creature made its way into common parlance after World War II, when gym teachers would yell at the top of their voices and urge their students to conquer the slovenly creature, i.e., to overcome their innate idleness by force of discipline and willpower. It’s an evolutionary fact that we all have our own pigdog dwelling within us. In hunter-gatherer communities, it was counterproductive to use one’s energy for anything other than survival. Highly motivated individuals who roused themselves for non-essential activities burned valuable calories, leaving them with a deficit when the next famine hit. Their genes consequently disappeared from the gene pool, which makes us the successors of the undermotivated survivors.

Our ancestors were perfectly active when it came to hunger, danger or mating. But once their bellies were full, lazing around was the most rational thing for them to do. They didn’t have freezers where they could store excess game, or bank accounts where they could deposit surplus berries. Other people’s bodies were the only answer to a fridge. In those days, if you killed a bison, you wouldn’t be advised to gorge on it and leave the scraps for the hyenas. No, you’d do well to be generous and share the meat with your kin – preferably with the neighbouring tribes, too. That way, if the gods of hunting failed to smile on you for a few days, you’d at least be able to rely on others for food.

Nowadays, however, the demands we face are exactly the opposite. We’ve created an entire infrastructure of accumulation – everything from warehouses to pension funds, performance records, technological expertise, publications and social media likes. Almost everything we do and consume can be amassed and accumulated for later use. But what happens when our inner pigdog suddenly appears, blocking our path? How do we turn a deaf ear to his whimpering?

Self-motivation is like a muscle. If you overexert yourself, the muscle will get tired and you’ll find your willpower waning. But by making demands on that muscle, you are simultaneously training it. As the months and years go by, your willpower will grow and you’ll find it increasingly easy to conquer your inner pigdog. Self-motivation might be strenuous, but it is learnable.

One thing that doesn’t work particularly well, though, is trying to motivate other people. You can use the carrot-and-stick approach (in other words, incentives) to spur on your significant other, children or staff, but this is not the same as motivation. You see, true motivation can only come from within. If, as the one in charge, you have to motivate your staff, the fact is that you’re already fighting a losing battle. It makes much more sense to employ highly motivated individuals from the get-go – and to be one, too. Incidentally: if you happen to have bagged yourself an apathetic life partner, it’s wiser to get a divorce than to try to motivate them.

SEE ALSO Cling to Your Bad Habits (ch. 10); Feel Guilty (ch. 22); Live in the Past (ch. 27); Let Your Emotions Define You (ch. 39); Try to Change People (ch. 44); Spin Multiple Plates (ch. 46)

3

BE UNRELIABLE

The Germans have a saying: ‘Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich ganz ungeniert.’ Roughly translated, it means ‘Once your reputation is in tatters, how you live doesn’t matter.’ If you want to live a deeply unhappy life, the imminent ruin of your reputation should be one of your top priorities. Rule one: never keep your promises! If you want to be excluded from all the most important circles, complete unreliability is the main trait you need. As the American investor Charlie Munger said in his commencement address at the Harvard School in Los Angeles, ‘First, be unreliable … If you will only master this one habit, you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great.’

I recommend taking this unreliability to the next level. Instead of just failing to deliver what can be reasonably expected of you, why not promise the moon and the stars, then immediately forget all about it. Over time, you won’t even have to make promises any more. Everyone will already know to expect nothing but hot air from you. People will let themselves be fooled once, maybe twice. Then they’ll be through with you. As a seasoned fraud, you’ll just have to keep finding new victims. Eventually this may prove difficult, because people are bound to talk. You’ll become the subject of gossip; your reputation will go down the drain, and for the rest of your life that’s where it’ll stay. Take my advice: treat your promises like toilet paper.

The quiet voice of reason

I’m constantly amazed at what people can achieve by being reliable, even if they don’t have an exceptional IQ and aren’t particularly creative. When it comes to success, reliability is the most underrated factor at play. In fact, I think it’s the most powerful tool there is. Intellectual brilliance won’t save you from falling flat on your face. Think about the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998. Every single member of the management team had an exceptionally high IQ; two were even Nobel Prize winners. Creativity, athleticism and charisma are no guarantee of success either. Reliability, on the other hand, is. If you’re reliable, you don’t have to worry about falling, because there’s no web of lies waiting to unravel beneath your feet. Even if your IQ is sky-high or you’re a galactic talent, why not top it off by being reliable to boot? It won’t cost a thing. Yes, all the brilliant, creative people I know – from big-name architects to Nobel Prize winners and world-class musicians – are extremely reliable. That doesn’t make them any less cool; quite the opposite. Being unreliable is what’s uncool.

The eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith, known as the father of modern economics, attributed prosperity to the division of labour. The role of innovation came later. But again, here in the economic arena, the secret key to success (reliability) is often overlooked. Eight billion consumers on the planet, a hundred million companies, ten million different products, trillions of goods flows. None of this would be possible without exceptional reliability. On a large scale, contracts are what regulate reliability. If a company fails to deliver on time or if the quality is lacking, they may face legal action. But on a smaller scale, reliability is a matter of reputation. And in the digital age, reputations are easily tarnished. It takes ten years to build a reputation, but just ten seconds to ruin it.

In the old days, when someone squandered their reputation, they could just move to another city and start again. Not any more. You can only gamble away your reputation once. In financial terms, your reliability’s worth is the ‘total discounted cash flow’ of the rest of your professional life. Go on, do the maths – we’re soon talking millions here. Small emotional perk: it’s not only better for everyone else if you’re reliable; it’s also better for you. The satisfaction of keeping your word is one of the best feelings there is. Being unreliable belongs firmly on your not-to-do list.

SEE ALSO Listen to Your Inner Voice (ch. 28); Trade Your Reputation for Money (ch. 37); Say Everything You Think (ch. 45); Say Yes to Everything (ch. 50)

4

BE AN ASSHOLE

Are you already known for your arrogance? Excellent. Then go on, crank it up a notch. Act like an asshole; it’s the quickest route to a miserable life. This works particularly well if your name isn’t Aristotle and you’ve never won a Nobel Prize. But other than that, it doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, important or a nobody, beautiful or ugly – an ass is still an ass. If you want to reach peak asshole, take my advice: when other people are talking, don’t listen to a word – you already know much better than them. If someone gives you feedback, tell them to take a look in the mirror. Never practise gratitude. Make it clear that you’d have made it to exactly where you are without any help from those around you. When working in a team, never let others share in your glory. But do be sure to pass the buck any time things go wrong. It can’t have anything to do with you now, can it?

Celebrate your colossal ego. Have your photo taken by a hotshot photographer and flaunt the images on your office wall. Be your own biggest fan – that way, you can be sure there’ll always be someone who likes you. Get some little statues of yourself made. It’s no longer rocket science, thanks to 3D printers. Proudly place one on your desk. If anyone asks, you can always pretend it’s meant to be ironic. The others make for great gifts if you’ve run out of self-penned books to give away.

Pay attention to your tone of voice and your body language, making sure they’re both as condescending as possible. When communicating, it’s important to always show a degree of disrespect. The odd snide remark here and there should do the trick. Banging on about your legendary successes isn’t enough. I also recommend boasting wildly about even your smallest wins. Never put yourself in anyone else’s shoes; only ever wear your own. But do demand that other people put themselves in your position in order to better understand where you’re coming from. Whether you achieve great things or minuscule triumphs, remain immodest. Remember that success is always down to your absolute competence, whereas failure is always caused by factors beyond your control. And finally: only ever offer your support if you clearly stand to gain something in return.

Charlie Munger tells the story of a priest who called upon mourners at a funeral to say something nice about the deceased. No one came forward. After a very long time, one guy stood up and said, ‘His brother was worse.’ There’s a lesson to be learned from this anecdote. Your aim in life should be for people to attend your funeral for just one reason: to make sure that you’re really dead.

The quiet voice of reason

Arrogance is easy. Modesty is tough, especially when we’ve accomplished something. As human beings, we experience our own achievements more intensely. This means we tend to give them too much weight, which is why arrogance often follows hot on the heels of success. I arrived late when God was handing out the virtue of modesty, so I had to acquire it rationally. If we’re being logical, success is merely the final link in a long chain of coincidences for which we ourselves can take zero credit. So if you really think about it, there’s nothing for us to be proud of.

Moreover, almost all human achievements are the result of cooperation. Alone we achieve nothing, but together we can do almost anything. Look around you. What do you see? Books, pens, shoes, windows, bulbs, smartphones, wall paint? Not one of these things was made by one person alone. Not even you are your own creation; were it not for thousands upon thousands of ancestors, you wouldn’t exist. In short: everything you achieve, you do so with the help of other people, some of whom you know, most of whom you’ve never met. It follows that showing modesty, kindness, gratitude and appreciation is not only tactically advantageous but in fact a sensible, authentic way to live.

The Mayo Clinic is the leading hospital chain in the United States. At every interview – from secretary to star surgeon – the team adds up the instances of the words ‘I’ and ‘we’ in the candidate’s responses. If the word ‘I’ comes out on top, it’s a strong indicator that they aren’t a team player and won’t be the right fit for the hospital. Main takeaway: the smaller your ego, the better your life will be. And yes, if you’re an asshole, you deserve to be treated like one.

SEE ALSO Be Hypocritical (ch. 9); Make Other People Feel Unimportant (ch. 26); Cultivate a Victim Mentality (ch. 33); Try to End It All (ch. 40); Say Everything You Think (ch. 45)

5

HAVE HIGH EXPECTATIONS