my residual joy from being an a***ole
I footnoted a recent post with a reminder that “I can be an asshole.”
When I remember that, it makes me smile.
For a long time, my work involved emailing leadership and motivational content to subscribers. In one of those emails, I opened with a thought on risk, positioning it as if I was quoting someone else. It said…
° One benefit of risking failure ... the risk of success.
Sam Parker | Asshole
I followed it by discussing the importance of minimizing a concept called Learned Helplessness.1 This is when someone tries to do something, fails several times, and then stops trying. They learn to be helpless.
In the postscript of that email, I explained my asshole attribution as an illustration of taking a risk. We rarely published edgy words like that.2 I pointed out only a self-absorbed asshole would quote themselves and then explained how the world might be a better place if more of us acknowledged our occasional assholery.3 It might help us be more patient and forgiving with each other—get us back to now faster.
° I think I play a much nicer, more empathetic person on the radio than I am in real life.
Ira Glass | American public radio producer & personality | 1959 -
So why do I smile when I think about all of that?
We had some subscribers’ email and call thinking we had a disgruntled teammate who changed the attribution before we sent the email. They were looking out for us. I thought it was so kind. Still makes me smile.
That’s residual joy—a gift from others that keeps showing up. Good stuff we can all plant.
With awareness, comes opportunity.
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More residual joy…
Seinfeld went off the air in 1998.
Sometimes, when it’s hot, I can be walking on the street and suddenly see Kramer sitting on a bench in a sauna and hear him say, “It’s like a sauna in here.” Over a quarter century later, it still makes me smile and sometimes laugh out loud just thinking of it. Kramer as the Assman—same thing. That’s some good work with a helluva half-life.
All kinds of other residual joy is available to us everywhere if we look for it.
Like that thing that your friend said that time that makes you smile, laugh, or feel good about that friend or some time in your past.
Or the vibe of that night showing up in your thoughts out of nowhere.
Martin Seligman (psychologist) is the name most attached to the idea.
It’s not very edgy. It’s been around forever and well before Kurt Vonnegut had fun with it in Breakfast of Champions (1973)—another example of residual joy—the asterisk.
Assholery isn’t a dictionaried word. Neither is dictionaried. But if enough of us use those words often enough, eventually they'll get added. Dictionaries report on our usage of words. They don’t create words.
This makes me wonder who’s been paying off the lexicographers to keep out the word alot while they literally added a formal definition for literally that literally means one can literally be speaking figuratively rather than literally when using the word literally.
Was it you, Big Pharma, with all your anxiety meds to sell?
Assholery—I like to say it with Sean Connery’s accent.