In this post I describe 6 virtues which are relevant to having great relationships.
Many of these virtues I have learned from AP demonstrating them to me; 多谢 AP!
1. Smoothness
The virtue of smoothness is to just do things. To not break the flow of activities by starting the meta-level activity of discussing which activity should happen next, but to instead intuit that and then just do it.
I think this basically amounts to:
- Trusting that if you’ve chosen the wrong activity path to go down the other person will stop you and tell you.
- Being confident.
One type of smoothness is surprise which will be discussed next. Surprise is smoothness bc you eliminated the meta-level discussion about whether or not you should do the nice thing, where they may try to tell you not to do your act of kindness bc they can do the thing themselves, and you counter.
One perspective on smoothness is “computational kindness”: you are being kind in computing and taking responsibility for the next activity for someone else, instead of making them do this.
2. Surprise
The virtue of surprise is to do nice things for someone unexpectedly Examples: - Take out the trash for someone without telling them. - Send someone a sticky-note with an “artistic” drawing on it. - Get someone sth you think they’ll like without consulting with them first. - Make a crepe for someone. - Getting someone an orange, when they have not asked for one.
Surprises can be risky — that’s part of what makes it fun.
If you get sth for someone, it’s possible that you totally misunderstood the kind of thing that they’d like. But probably they’ll still be touched by the gesture, so it’s maybe not too much lost.
Probably surprise is best when you have a model of the other person that lets you be reasonably confident that they’ll like the thing though. Being understood like this, to a level where someone can get you exactly the thing that you most wanted without needing to communicate about it, is very special.
3. Spontenaity
The virtue of spontenaity is to sieze inspirations to do things, and then boldly execute on them even if it wasn’t originally planned.
It’s great to be open to other peoples’ spontenaity and to have this yourself.
4. Sparsity
The virtue of sparsity is to make some things rare, and in rareness make them more special.
Example:
- Assign special significance to a special shirt. Be careful to only wear the shirt under special conditions.
- It is probably good to optimize for creating really high quality experiences for someone, even if this comes at the cost of the quantity of experiences with them.
5. Succinctness
The virtue of succinctness is to convey what you mean without extra words.
Succinctness doesn’t mean to oversimplify, although it does involve stripping away irrelevant detais.
It means that often if you spend time to meditate on sth yourself, you can find a clear way to explain it.
You are not solving the problem on the fly, CoT exposed to the world, instead you’ve labored over a cogent presentation of the idea.
Two reasons this is good:
- It shows respect for the other party’s time.
- A polished presentation of an idea is beautiful.
Examples of times where succinctness is good:
- Writing a letter to express appreciation for someone. “Thanks for deciding to find my silly story silly. The story was a simple thing, the aliens must have been confused to no end as to how the story merited such a quantity of laughter. But I wasn’t confused, isntead grateful that you would choose to take delight in this simple thing. I’m glad we could share this experience.”
- Expressing a way that you hope your relationship with someone will change. For instance, expressing a preference that your relationship with someone be explicitly romantic.
- Describing a problem with a relationship. “When you did X, I felt not cared about. Does that make sense to you?” Is very good to have a single example. Ideally, if you’re not avoiding talking about problems it’d be the most recent example, and you’re talking about it ~immediately after the fact.
6. Specificness
The virtue of specificness is to be specific.
That which is not specific is fake. For real things, you should be able to write down a concrete example.
Giving specific complements to someone especially about aspects of themselves that they really admire and wish to be admired is great.
Example: You did a great job explaining X. You explained X enthusiasitcally and clearly, I now feel both like I understand X and care about it.
Conclusion
I’ve listed some virtues. I hope that articulating them here will help me better cultivate these virtues.