First rule of life, cut everyone out of your life who isn't either:
A. Encouraging you
Or
B. Offering constructive criticism
But there's one catch to this, you have to be sure you're adding value back or else it's not fair to judge others and cut them out, right?
You’ve got to practice what you preach but this rule is so powerful that nobody applies it.
You're going to find a lot of people in your life called, "free riders", that's the economics term for it, and they want something but they give nothing. They want value from you but they don't offer any value first.
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Encouragement or constructive criticism are the two most powerful forms of value anybody can add to a person's social life, right?
Follow this rule: If somebody's annoying, it doesn't mean you should cut them off because they might be offering constructive criticism into your life. It might be painful but it might be helpful. At the end of the day, it's value for value. They call this reciprocal altruism. It’s the scientific term for it and you always want to be in reciprocal win/win type situations.
Ask yourself about the closest people to you. Are they offering one of those two on a continual basis? Also, what are you offering? You might need to offer it first. I often say before I want to cut somebody off, let me try to offer value and see if they reciprocate because maybe they're not offering constructive criticism or encouragement because I'm not doing it first. The chicken or the egg, right? What comes first? Them encouraging you or you encouraging them?
You can only control yourself, so you must take action on yourself and next thing you know about half the people you come across will reciprocate and half the people show you their true colors AKA they don't want to offer value. Sometimes you can cut them off immediately. If they're family members or bosses or somebody you're dating… hopefully you're not married to them, you can slowly phase them out. It doesn't always have to be abrupt but you can move toward that goal. That's the best social advice I've ever followed for myself.
Value for value: It's funny, so many people like on Instagram will comment and be like, "Dude, I want you to just post this motivational thing all the time." Sometimes I use Instagram just to share with my friends what I'm doing. I don't always want to add value, I don't always have to post the inspirational meme, I don't always have to add a YouTube video that's for somebody and I want to comment back, I never do. I want to be like well, what are you doing for me? Like you're on my Instagram. What have you done for me? I'm not on yours.
Those are the type of people that are takers and the other scientific term for that is Welfare Trade-off Ratios (WTR). They want to take from my welfare but add no value back to my welfare.
Dr. David Buss once said,
"Watch people who have a skewed WTR ratio." It's bad. He said, "You almost always end up regretting knowing them and spending time with them." Smoke them out is what I call it. Do stuff that kind of smokes out the haters, then you know that they're people that don't add value, and they just want to take.
Let’s say you throw something out and they say, "Hey, I don't think you should do that because x, y, z." They give you a nice logical reply, that's constructive, that's like look, we're all going to the same place together, we're trying to improve incrementally. They say, “I don't see this getting you what you want, so why don't you tweak it?”
They might be rough, they might be rude, but who cares? They're still offering value so don't cut them off because sometimes you see people cutting off people that are offering value just because they're a little rude and abrupt. Sometimes abrupt works, sometimes we all need abrupt.
