A Simple Guide to Choosing The Right People: Top Three Red Flags
A guide built from 10,000+ interactions with people from 100+ countries.
It is absolutely CRITICAL that we build the right tribe.
Yet, so many of us fail.
There have been times in my life when I’ve invested in the wrong people, and they’ve always ended up painful.
The people you choose to spend time with define you, whether you like it or not.
I wish it weren't true, but it is.
You're not the average of the five people you spend the most time with; you're the average of everyone you spend time with.
Now, if you’ve been reading my writing for a while, you know that I like to stay on the optimistic side of things.
But today, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the gross. I’ll tell you what to avoid, like the plague, when you’re out there seeking friends and lovers.
In the last decade, I’ve interacted with more than 10,000 people from more than 100 countries. I’ve talked to people from every career field, culture, and social class that you can imagine.
Let me tell you: People are people, and no one country has a monopoly on idiots.
Looking back on all those interactions, there were several people I should have avoided and several I didn’t avoid. I’ve spent hours thinking and journaling about red flags.
From all of that mining of my personal experience, these are the top three that I’ve distilled.
If anyone you meet exhibits any of the below traits and behaviors, run! Trust me, you’ll be better off.
Red Flags
They want you to know that they don't care what you or anyone else thinks of them.
I've met hundreds of people who claim they "don't care what other people think." It's a very trendy thing to say!
In ten years of travel, after meeting more than more than ten thousand new people, I've never met someone who made that claim with any validity.
Because if they're saying that out loud, they care that you know that they don't care what other people think.
It's a paradox: you cannot say out loud that you don't care what other people think without caring what they think.
Not caring what others think and honestly living your truth is a lifestyle. It's not something that you say.
What they're really saying is this:
I don't care what you think (please, please, love me). That’s the kind of needy energy that you don’t need in your life.
There's nothing sexy or interesting in saying you don't care.
Building quality relationships means choosing whose opinions we care deeply about, not broadcasting that we don't care about anyone's.
They tell stories in which they are always the victim
We've all met them. The people whose exes are all monsters. The people who have only worked for bad bosses. The people who have only been friends with narcissists.
My Grandpa gave me a piece of advice when I was young that stuck with me for years:
“If every room you go into is full of only assholes, there’s a good chance you’re the asshole.”
There's a phenomenon here. I call it the One Star Life.
When I used to work in a family-owned steakhouse, we worked our butts off to provide amazing experiences for people because we were a small business. We had to!
Sometimes, we would still get the most inane 1-star reviews imaginable. When we looked at these people’s Google/Yelp review pages, they'd almost always given every other experience they'd reviewed two stars or less.
They were living one-star lives. Every experience they had fell short of their standards.
People like that deserve empathy, certainly. They deserve a helping hand. But do they deserve your friendship? HELL NO. These are the critics. You should avoid them at all costs.
“Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.”
―Jean Sibelius
These people have suppressed their creative energy to the point of convincing themselves that all creative output is sub-par.
The easiest way to spot these people is if they tell their stories with a lack of nuance.
"He was a total narcissist."
"She was just a b*tch."
Avoid these people at all costs. They'll make your life miserable, then go on to tell other people about what a one-dimensionally horrible piece of crap you are.
They can't make fun of themselves (or admit that they’re wrong)
There's a line with self-deprecating humor. It's a delicate balance. If someone is always tearing themselves down, that could be self-hatred, another red flag.
When it's done well, however, it's a powerful tool.
It might seem paradoxical, but appropriately making fun of yourself is a sign of self-awareness and high self-esteem. It's actually the inability to make fun of yourself that's a sign of self-consciousness.
As human beings, we are ridiculous creatures. There's no escaping this.
We iterate to make life easier for ourselves and then complain that it isn't easy enough.
We build entire buildings (gyms) filled with heavy things for us to lift because we hardly ever encounter heavy things in life.
We remove struggle from our lives to the point that we must pay other people to put struggle back into them.
We are absurd. This is ok! It’s part of the human experience. But pretending that every decision you make is justified is batsh*t.
As one of my favorite yoga teachers, an Argentinian musician/clown told me:
“Never forget. We are ridiculous.”
As human beings, we are finite creatures. Because we have limited time, our brains are wired to constantly explain ourselves to ourselves. We justify the way we've spent our time. It's natural!
However, some of the things we do are irrational and stupid. Personally, I take my phone with me into the bathroom. I often try to carry all the groceries in one trip and fail.
Not being able to see that these things are ridiculous is going to cause stagnation. Because what is self-improvement if not the ability to see and remove the ridiculous in your life?
You have to know you have a problem in order to fix it. The beginning of this journey is realizing that some of the things you do are stupid and that you'd like there to be less stupidity in your life.
The perfect mix is someone who can see what is ridiculous in their lives and laugh about it without embracing it as an unchangeable quality of themselves.