Sort of off topic but this post reminded me of something.

I used to live in a very low socioeconomic area of Australia. When I was in highschool I had never had a bad experience with Aboriginal people but I was always on edge around them. Walking home from school one day I passed a group of Aboriginal people who I had seen in that same spot many times before. This time an Aboriginal lady approached me. I remember thinking to myself “well it’s finally happened. Guess I’ll find out shortly if I’m a fight or flight kinda guy.” She stopped in front of me, no shoes, tattered clothes, missing teeth… but the most beautiful smile I have ever seen. She made a gesture to my hair and said, " I like your hair, it’s so pretty." Being a guy I had never gotten a compliment from a stranger like that. I thanked her and smiled back.

Very few moments do I consider to have changed my life but that one definitely did. I felt ashamed of how I had thought of this person before ever interacting with them and I felt ashamed of the country I live in that so often complains of how much we’ve given these people despite the reality of taking from them everything of worth and leaving them destitute.

I’ve been harassed in public for my red hair so many times. I’ve been harassed in public for dressing feminine many times again. But that one time I wasn’t and I felt beautiful.

Back when I was managing a team, we had a new guy that I was on-boarding. I’d run the. Through all standard procedures and then get them to shadow others in the team, then swap so they are being shadowed and guided.

One day I told him to pair with someone in the team for an afternoon. At the end of the day I took him into the training room and asked him how things had gone. He had a big smirk on his face and said “I know why you had me shadow R”, and with a returning smile I said “and why was that?”, “because you wanted me to see how not to do the job.”

The new guy had hit the nail on the head, the person he was shadowing was a huge under performer and was due to go on a performance improvement plan after repeated attempts to give guidance. Anyway I didn’t confirm that is why I did it, but I’m glad that the new guy had come away thinking that, it showed that the training up to that point had been working.

My grandfather’s lessons were always about how he fucked up so we shouldn’t do what he did… It kinda worked actually. He died working two deadend jobs and no retirement plan and it’a always kept me motivated to figure out my future

Maybe many people do, but there must be some people that are just boring and don’t teach you anything.

This realization is the key to getting so much more out of life