I barely did anything and it made his day

Yesterday I flew in and a guy named Jason met me at the gate to walk me out to where my ride was picking up.

We had a few minutes together on the way, so I asked him how his day was going.

He said he was happy to be there and happy to have another day, and he sounded like he meant it.

Somewhere on that walk he told me I was kind.

I said you never know what you're going to get in an airport and I was sure he dealt with a lot of people.

He told me about the passenger right before me, an older woman he was helping down the jet bridge who yelled at him the whole way about her bag and where she wanted it put.

Then he said that kindness goes a long way and that being nice is a small thing to do.

By the time we got to the curb he told me I had made his day.

All I had done was ask him a question and listen to the answer for the length of a walk to a pickup zone.

It Took Almost Nothing

I keep coming back to how little it took.

A few minutes I would have otherwise spent looking at my phone, and for him it turned around a morning that somebody else had already ruined.

The woman on the jet bridge had the same few minutes with him that I did.

Same walk, same guy.

She used hers to make his day worse, and I doubt she planned that or thought about it twice afterward.

She was probably tired and running late, and Jason happened to be the person standing closest to her.

That's how most of it happens.

Almost nobody wakes up planning to be unkind.

People are distracted and moving fast, and they treat whoever is in front of them as part of the process rather than as a person having their own day.

Kindness works the same way in reverse.

It usually comes down to deciding that the person in front of you is worth thirty seconds of your actual attention.

You Usually Never Find Out

The other thing worth saying is that you almost never find out what it did.

Jason happened to tell me out loud, which is rare.

Most of the time you say something decent to somebody, you walk away, and you learn nothing about where it landed.

So you can't treat this like a strategy with some measurable return on it.

You do it because you have no idea who is standing in front of you or what kind of day they are already having.

I think about this in the rooms I speak in.

The people who make the strongest impression on me at an event are usually not the ones on stage or sitting at the head of the table.

They're whoever is running the AV in the back that nobody thanked, or the person standing at the door greeting people at seven in the morning.

How somebody treats those people tells me more about them than anything they say into a microphone.

You have people like that around you every day.

Somebody checks you in.

Somebody brings the coffee into the meeting you're running.

There's an employee two levels down who you pass in the hallway without registering that you passed anyone at all.

Every one of those is a few seconds where you get to decide what kind of day another person is having.

Your Ask for Today

So here's my ask for today.

Find one thing, and it can be small, that makes somebody else's day a little better.

Ask a real question and then wait for the answer.

Learn somebody's name.

Say thank you to a person who is used to going unnoticed.

You will probably never find out what it did, and that's fine. Do it anyway.

Talk soon,
Aaron