There’s a sentence people use to describe you and I bet you’ve heard it more than once.
He’s a good guy. Easy to work with. No trouble at all.
Great compliment, right?
Yeah probably not. At least not the way they mean it.
Because the good guy, the easy one who never makes a fuss, is usually the same guy nobody comes to when something important actually needs deciding.
Sure, they’re glad you’re around. They just don’t take you all that seriously. Being liked and being respected are two very different things and most guys never think about it long enough to realize it.
Years ago, when I was married to my ex-wife Cheryl, my stepdaughter Brittany had a horse. When we moved from Tennessee up to Rhode Island, Brittany didn’t want to give it up, and Cheryl decided she wasn’t going to make her. That meant we needed to find a place with a barn. Even though the very reason we were even moving up to Rhode Island was because we were bankrupt and couldn’t really afford that kind of place, we rented a house with one and I didn’t say a word about it. Going along with it felt like being a good husband.
Brittany took care of that horse for about a year. Then she did what teenagers do and lost interest. The horse, of course, didn’t go anywhere, though. And guess who ended up out in that barn every single morning, shoveling shit for an animal that was never mine, was never my idea, and that I never once said yes to out loud? Me.
There’s one thing that took me way too many years to figure out though. All that going along with things and being easy didn’t earn me a single thing in that marriage. It sure as shit didn’t make Cheryl value my opinion more. All it did was reinforce her belief that I didn’t have a spine and could be walked over.
We get handed a set of instructions for life early: Be agreeable and people will appreciate you. Make yourself easy to deal with and you’ll be valued. Don’t cause problems and good things come back around.
For a while that plan holds up ok. People do like you. They find you pleasant.
What they don’t do is listen. At least not when it counts. They don’t bring you the big decisions and they don’t even argue with you, because they already know your position is up for grabs the second they push on it.
Machiavelli was pretty blunt about this 500 years ago in The Prince. A guy seen as purely accommodating gets taken advantage of, every time. People read an absence of friction as an absence of conviction. And a guy with no conviction is a guy nobody takes seriously, no matter how much they happen to like him.
Harsh? A little. That doesn’t make it wrong though.
Think about who actually gets deferred to in the situations you’ve been in. It’s not the most agreeable guy. It’s the one who’ll hold his position and say the uncomfortable thing and not flinch when somebody pushes back. People take him seriously because he gave them no other choice.
Most guys never really even see this coming. They stay the agreeable, easy, no-trouble guy their whole lives and go out thinking it was the right play.
The ones who do see it tend to split into two camps. Some get bitter, decide the whole thing was bullshit and rigged against the good guys and then that bitterness becomes its own little prison. The rest do the uncomfortable work. They start holding their positions and saying what they actually think and they stop apologizing for the friction it causes.
Not everybody likes that. Some people will like you a little less. But for the first time, some of them will start actually listening.
If this series is hitting something for you, go back to where it all started.
Nice Guy Syndrome in Midlife: The Tax Nobody Warned You About
Being the easiest, most accommodating guy in the room isn’t the same as being the most valuable one. You can be liked by everybody and yet still trusted with nothing. Chew on that this week.
Hit reply and tell me the times where you’ve been the most “helpful” and accommodating and the least listened to. I read them all.