The outcome of being rejected by default.

 Over the last few days and weeks someone close to me has indulged my need for deeper conversation about my behavior and led me to realize something that I've been doing for a while but had not previously nailed down.

 

People often tell me "If you do X thing, you make it unlikely the other person will interact with you again, heed your future advice, etc, and thus reduce your overall success rate in your goals".

 

Ten or twenty years ago I wasn't as much of an asshole as I am today. I wasn't an asshole at all. I don't think I did or said a single thing to anyone in high school that would be described as unfriendly. I can't recall ever driving someone away during college. Moving into adult life, the trend was mostly the same as I started socializing at video game events and geeky conventions.

 

What I do recall is being a social outcast, being bullied, being made fun of, being ignored (at best) by the people I was attracted to, etc. Some of this was due to not being attractive. Some was due to being neuroatypical. Some was due to being short, or white, or always the new kid at school, or other factors outside my control.

 

I think the turning point was when I started taking on responsibility for accomplishing things. I volunteered, then staffed, then directed various events of various sizes. Based on my previous experience, I knew that no matter what I did, most of the people I interacted with would choose not to interact with me again, to ignore what I had to say, etc. This left me making decisions where that variable wasn't relevant; I knew that whether people were happy with my decisions or not wouldn't change how they responded to me personally or in the future.

 

That led to me making decisions where the decision itself made people respond in those ways. As far as they know, it was my decision and action that led to that outcome, and if they are capable of perceiving cause and effect they perceive this as a divergence from the default neutral outcome they would have expected.

 

At this point I have a decade of ingrained habit of basing my world view on this prediction. No matter what I do, people are going to avoid me, disengage from me, ignore my feedback, etc. That means that nothing I do is going to cause those outcomes, even if someone might perceive that to be the case. It means that when someone tells me my efforts are "net negative", they are probably comparing the observed outcome to their default predicted outcome based on neutral default reactions, while I am perceiving my efforts as net positive compared to the default negative outcome.

 

What has changed in the last few years is that I might have an opportunity to surround myself with people who might actually be welcoming IF I behave the way I did twenty years ago. What stops me from doing this is the uncertain timeframe, and my confidence in the continued negative outcomes along the way to that goal. Is it worth a year or a decade of going back to the default-negative results in order to eventually be surrounded by people with whom I have a default-neutral outcome?

Duty, of the fiduciary and other sorts

 https://definitions.uslegal.com/b/breach-of-fiduciary-duty/

 

It has become apparent to me that a lot of people are entirely unaware of this concept. Even among people that I know who are aware of it, they seem to be generally unable to incorporate it into their perception of others' actions.

 

Normally I would be very general in a post like this, but I want to open with an example that is at the forefront of my life right now, in the hopes of giving you something to anchor your thoughts to. That example is as follows:

 

As a board member, I have a **legal obligation** to prioritize the success of the Loophole project over any individual's feelings or the health of my own relationships.

 

I am not going to go into the history of fiduciary law here. If you want more details on that there are plenty of legal resources online. If you object to this duty existing, you will need to take that up with about a thousand years worth of judges and legislators.

 

My purpose in this post is to discuss my approach to obligation and duty and responsibility more generally. Before I had ever heard of fiduciary duty, and before I was mature enough to grasp legal concepts and jargon, I was raised according to what I now recognize are the same core concepts that lead to those laws. The duty that a fiduciary has to their client, I feel to some degree to every person and project to which I apply myself.

 

When I say I'm going to get a project done, I'm going to prioritize it over other things and people that I have not made the same commitment to. When I say I'm going to protect you, it may be at my own expense or harm to myself.

 

This shows even more intensely when the other people have made the same commitment, and I have written about that before. If you and I both commit to getting a project done, I am going to value your feelings less than those of someone else who did not make that commitment, and theirs generally less than our goal.

 

Think of it this way... Before you and I try to hang a painting together, suppose we formed Hanging This Painting LLC and both signed on as board members. As fiduciaries, we would each be required to prioritize the success of the company over other not-illegal outcomes for third parties (such as a neighbor being unhappy). Further, there are effects that would be illegal for us to force on a third party that we might be required to endure ourselves (such as missing work at our day jobs).

 

That imaginary scenario is how I feel about almost every such endeavor, to some degree. This is why I frequently find myself choosing success over failure in a project even when it means making another person involved in the project upset; because that's exactly what I would be required to do if I had officially accepted the duty of getting it done, as I have with the corporations on whose boards I sit.

 

I know most people don't feel this sort of duty or obligation. I occasionally revisit this topic in the hopes I'll learn something new or come to some new realization or understanding. Today I'm just trying to give it a bit more context and framing since the legal aspects are relevant to my life at the moment.