Order a bunch of pizzas to their house.
This is my Mom’s favorite response to difficult and irritating scenarios.
Professor being unfair? Order a bunch of pizzas to their house.
Customer being unreasonable? Order a bunch of pizzas to their house.
Coworker being irritating? Order a bunch of pizzas to their house.
She’s so fond of saying this that one day, in the middle of a lecture on Computer Science, someone actually ordered a bunch of pizzas to her class. That wasn’t actually the point of the advice, but we agreed that it was pretty darn funny.
The point was pretty much that there was no good solution so just suck it up and deal. People are annoying and difficult, what are you gonna do? Order a bunch of pizzas to everyone’s houses? But, after years of telling this nugget of wisdom to hundreds of college students, it’s not too surprising someone took it literally one year, and did it to her!
Her other best loved advice include:
- Expect the worst, then be pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t happen
- Don’t trust anyone
But, most of the time she doesn’t give advice at all. She listens and asks probing questions, then relates a similar story that demonstrates some point she’d like me to understand. She prefers that I perform some introspective thinking and come up with the answers myself. That’s good parenting, I think.
EDIT:
Just to clarify, my mom and I would not order pizzas to someone’s house. We both recognize that’s not nice behavior. The literal translation of her advice would be something like “Life isn’t fair. You can’t take it out on other people.”
Read other answers by Miranda Marcus on Quora:
- Would you take an online parenting course that would make you into a great mom or a great dad?
- How can one tell whether one's kid would benefit more from a stay-at-home mom or from a having a working mother?
- What are some of the worst things about being a working mother or father?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2gbsy6e
No comments:
Post a Comment