Laurel van der Toorn

And an insult, he says, which still seems to be accurate.

is not giving people their due regard, and that is not meeting what the norms and expectations are about how you should treat someone, right?

And so if the norm is you should give people a birthday card and you don't do it, it looks bad.

If the norm is you hold doors open for people behind you and you don't do it, you look like a jerk, right?

So it is sort of in context, social context.

And in this case here with birthday cards, it is a kind of social context.

It's not just what goes on in this organization.

However, it has a special twist here because they have a policy of doing this, right?

Aristotle came to that because he was excluded from a Google Calendar invite in the office back then, something like that.

The solution here, is it really as simple as if you're a business owner, a manager, or a teammate looking out for their coworkers, just like get the birthday card on the desk on time?

Is it really that simple?

Can that really avoid problems like this?

Well, it avoids this problem for sure.

I think the broader lesson is think about it from their perspective, right?

Which is always a simple thing to say, but if you just stop and do it for a minute, it works reasonably well.

Or for people who are older, you just say, could you imagine, remember back when you were a new hire?

And how did you think about your boss then?

Boss was like this sort of godlike figure, right?

And they're ignoring you.

They speak to everybody but you in the morning.