David Epstein

And it often comes to the fact that they were not trying to slight me as much as they felt, right?

There's this thing called the spotlight effect in psychology where you think there's a spotlight on you.

you think everyone's looking at you and thinking about you, but they're all busy looking and thinking at themselves, right?

And so that kind of recognition that when someone did something that's really hurtful to you, that they really weren't thinking about you.

Maybe that sounds bad, but I think it's good because it means they were more careless than really like evil.

Right.

And I think that's an important sort of adult thing to recognize.

And then I think you got to try to.

I've experienced that.

It's not fun.

Not be working with those people if you can.

Exactly.

And were you able to forgive those, those people eventually?

I think that's really insightful.

I think we need to do these things explicitly.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten a lot more explicit about, it maybe even sounds silly, but writing down what are the values that are important?

Again, these narrative values.

What are lines that can be crossed, which means...

This isn't somebody that I'm going to work with, or this isn't somebody that I'm going to have a sustainable friendship with.

That doesn't mean they're bad, but just understanding myself better.