How to Suck Less

You Can’t Not Suck

An invigorating fresh-air lecture with George Wythe!

You can’t not suck, but this is not a terrible thing.  It just means nothing any of us ever does will be considered the Right Thing to have done by everyone who encounters it. Just yesterday, Founding Father George Wythe imparted similar wise counsel to the Relationship Ghostwriter during an outdoor lecture (pictured at right): “No matter how wondrous the speech you give, there will inevitably be someone for whom it didn’t strike a fancy, even if just for the reason that you dressed in blue pantaloons on a Tuesday.”

Some Relationship Ghostreaders might prefer it if, instead of saying, “You can’t not suck,” the Relationship Ghostwriter took a more encouraging tone and said, “Don’t strive for impossible perfection—be the best you can be!”  But that’s a little too unoriginal and touchy-feely for the Relationship Ghostwriter, who wants to give you a fresh, memorable way to think about things… and who doesn’t actually want to touch or feel you at all.

So, perfection in human behavior does not exist.  You can’t not suck.  We shouldn’t waste our time thinking we are already perfect or waste our energy trying to become perfect.  Those are two failing strategies, because “perfect” doesn’t exist in human behavior.  “Perfect" violates the rules of Relationship Alchemy, like trying to divide a number by zero.

Most of us already know we can’t be perfect—at least intellectually.  We know it just like we know, “You can’t buy happiness.”  The words are very familiar to us, but most of us have not internalized their meaning to the point that they make a positive difference in the way we make small choices throughout the day.  But there’s good news!  It’s true that you can’t not suck...

But You Can Suck Less!

Awareness—making time to simply notice your own thoughts and behaviors without getting lost in the thoughts and behaviors of others—is the first and most important part of sucking less.  True awareness is surprisingly difficult for most of us.  It means being fully honest with yourself about your perceptions, your goals and intentions, your virtues and your flaws.  It is challenging to see our own selves so clearly.  Trusted loved ones or a therapist can help “hold up the mirror,” so to speak, so you can get a clearer view.

Thinking errors are the things that stand between you and candid self-awareness.  They shield you from taking personal responsibility for thoughts and behaviors that are destructive to you or others.  Thinking errors enable you to suck (friendly translation: to do worse than your best!) because they distance you from an honest appraisal of yourself.  Here are a few very normal, natural, and common examples of thinking errors that all of us rely on from time to time:

• Blaming someone or something else when you don’t like how things go

For example, during an argument, let’s say you make an accusation that hurts your brother’s feelings.  He becomes upset and says something hurtful back to you, and you yell at him.  Later you think, “He makes me so mad, I just lost control.  I couldn’t help it!”  What do you get out of framing it this way?  It lets you shake off any personal responsibility for your actions and reactions.  What do you stand to lose?  Blaming only external circumstances obstructs your ability to learn something positive from a negative experience—it limits your opportunities to suck less.  Consider this: no one else has 100% control over what you do, or even what emotion you experience—if you calmly reframe what happened, you can probably imagine yourself or someone else having a different and equally valid reaction.  This is not to say your emotion was Wrong or Unjustified, or that it is easy to change the way you react to external circumstances.  But, you do have the power to improve yourself, and you play the defining role in whatever actions you take or reactions you have, regardless of how much the external circumstances suck.


INSTEAD:  Take a personal moment to focus on just you, not the others involved.  What came from within you that contributed to the situation escalating and later seeming unconstructive to you?  You give yourself the most power to make things better by looking inward, and it is an ownership cop-out to blame all that happened on external circumstances.

• Assuming and over-generalizing, or seeing things as black or white

The Relationship Ghostwriter knows as well

as anyone how easy it is to make Seventh

Vice President John C. Calhoun seem like a

“black and white” caricature of an antagonist!

For example, after you had an argument with your brother in which you became angry, you say, “He always makes me angry.  He deliberately tries to provoke me.  He knows I’ll lose control and that’s exactly what he wants.”  These black-and-white characterizations oversimplify the situation and make it easy for you to feel defeated instead of taking ownership of your choices in the matter.  It is easy to justify and rationalize your anger if it is directed toward a caricature of your brother who is “always” a manipulative antagonist.

INSTEAD:  Work through your strong emotions in a healthy way.  When you feel calmer, try your best to embrace an honest and nuanced view of the situation.  In other words, let yourself perceive the situation in all its real complexity—for example: you are annoyed at someone you love and respect, and even though you respect each other, you sometimes disagree.  Perhaps it helps to remember the last time you really enjoyed an interaction with this person.  Now you have succeeded in finding a much healthier starting point for processing what happened.

• Rationalizing destructive behavior by placing yourself in the role of the victim

For example, after engaging in an argument with your brother, you portray what happened as, “He has spent our whole lives controlling me and making me feel miserable, so I have no choice but to get angry.  He makes me look bad so that he looks good.”  It is entirely normal and natural to feel very difficult emotions that have nothing to do with facts or logic when all is said and done after a conflict.  When you are calmer, be mindful that emotions seem much simpler to deal with when you envision yourself as a persecuted party. Though it may be comforting in the short-term to imagine yourself as powerless, you will feel no motivation to take personal responsibility for any destructive choices you may have made.  There is no room for long-term growth or progress if you imagine yourself to be powerless.

One of the Relationship Ghostwriter’s

favorite advisors describes healthy

ways to work through angry emotions

in this video.

INSTEAD:  Again, it’s valid and normal to feel hurt.  Allow yourself to experience your real emotions and work through them in healthy ways.  But also be mindful that true victimization is a grave and horrendous condition.  No one likes to believe that they have no power.  In a calm moment, take another look.  Let the objective observer inside you assess the situation—does your most honest self tell you that you were truly powerless and someone violated you?  If so, there are many resources in your community, but this website will not be your solution.  Your local police department can connect you to better resources.

Perhaps you arrive at a different conclusion.  Now that the storm has passed, your internal observer may nudge you out of the strict role of victim, urging you to think about what role you yourself played in what happened—what power you held, or what you brought to the table that contributed to the outcome.  Thankfully, most times you will have this second response.  If so, you have given yourself an opportunity to make something positive happen after a difficult event.  Start by envisioning ways in which you could have contributed to a better outcome, regardless of what the other person tried or how wrong they may have been.  If you come up blank, seek ideas from trusted friends or a counselor.  You are definitely dealing with other people who suck (because we can’t not suck!)—but that’s not the point.  The point is this: the power for you to improve yourself—and, thereby, to improve the outcome of any external circumstances that come your way—is automatically in place.  You have only to seek the motivation and the know-how to get started using it.

Thinking errors make it harder to
take an honest look at yourself.

These were just a few examples to give you a sense of the way thinking errors inhibit self-improvement.  In fact, thinking errors can shield you from noticing your bad habits and also your virtues, contributing to low self-esteem.  For instance, perfectionist students often over-generalize the meaning of one bad grade when they have a hundred good grades, focusing on the one negative to the extent that they feel like a failure—a conclusion no objective observer would draw.  Similarly, if the student achieves a high grade, perhaps they blame this success, so to speak, on external circumstances—say, they only succeeded because they were assigned an easy topic.

Notice and challenge thinking errors

to give yourself a clearer outlook!

Thinking errors are stealthy, acting like friends on the surface by making things seem easier to deal with in the short-term, but they ultimately sabotage your efforts at true introspection and personal improvement.  It is completely natural to rely on thinking errors from time to time—it is impossible (and arguably unhealthy) to get rid of them altogether.  It’s okay that we can’t not suck!

All you should try to do is nip thinking errors in the bud by practicing self-awareness.  Just like conditioning yourself to run a marathon, you’ll get better at it the more you try, and it will become easier and easier.  Once you simply notice a bad habit, you are immediately empowered to make an effective change—unlike if you only expend energy noticing what sucks about the world around you.  If an event from your day lingers and nags at you, that may be a red flag.  Take five minutes of the time you are already spending analyzing what happened to take a deep breath and step back from your emotions.  Become aware of any thinking errors that may be stopping you from sucking less—from being the best, most mature, most honest and gracious version of yourself you can be.