This is a super random post that I just felt like doing based on a few things. It won’t be well structured and it won’t be well thought out. It’s just some thoughts based on one particular external stimulus that I found interesting. Hospitality Persona The creation of my hospitality persona occurred in late 2007 working at Davies Grand Central in Launceston. I was working 8 hours at a cherry orchard every day and rocked the 6pm - 12am shift at Davies three or four times a week. It fairly well busted me, but I had a specific goal in mind ($18,500 in 18 months to qualify for Youth Allowance), and I was intent on achieving it. The owners were kind of hard arses, but I was on the right side of them from the start. I had a generally positive attitude towards work, but hadn’t worked in customer service before. One thing the bosses forced on to me (or encouraged to the point where if I didn’t do it, I would no longer be on their good side) was saying hello to every single person who walked in the door. The checkout was right there as customers walked in, and the whole place was set up to make it easy to interact with customers. So I had to do it. No questions, say hi to everyone. And I knew that a glum hi was worth nothing. I didn’t want to be a guy that did a glum hi. So I did a happy hi, how’s it going, and I even threw in a smile. Every time. After a 70 hour week, you’re tired. Cherry picking was literally every day, so there was no day off to recover. Hot days in the orchard, drive into down, smash some food, sleep in the car for an hour, start at Davies. Drive home, sleep 5 hours, get up, go to the orchard. I’d wake up in my car at 5:45pm, walk into Davies and clock on, kind of like a zombie. I wasn’t necessarily in a bad mood, but I certainly didn’t have the energy to be in a good one. 6:00pm, put in the till. 6:05pm, first hi. All of a sudden it’s 6:30pm and I’m in a good mood. The hi’s perked me right up, every time, all summer, and the next one. So when I got to pouring beers and waiting tables in London, tired, frustrated, whatever, I smiled, pretended I was happy and I became happy. Ever since, any service time thing that I’m doing, I have a habit of smiling and being genuinely happy that I’m doing that thing, because I know I’ll end up being happy just based on the action. A barback shift is way harder than a bar shift, because you don’t have to pretend be happy for a barback shift, so you don’t and you’re not. The first few interactions with a customer on a hospo shift may well be dishonest from me, but interactions half an hour later aren’t. Hell yeah I’ll go out of my way to annoy the chef so I can put cream in your coffee! Interactions with customers don’t always go deep, but you can tweak a happy hospo persona to suit you. The serve is hi, how’s it going, the return is nearly always good and you. They expect you to stay deep and try to hit deep, but I like to serve-volley. I can have a superficial conversation and be happy but gain nothing, but if I either keep asking why or even mention something real about my day, I can be happy and gain. And people respond to that. Being interested is an attractive quality. Sharing something that’s happened in my day had having the other person appear interested makes them feel attractive. [I just thought of the tennis analogy now, it’s not actually the way I think about interactions with people, but I think I might keep using it. I guess right now I’m just hitting a ball up against a wall. Distraction vs Boredom
I need a break from podcasts and audiobooks. I love cycling to work because it allows me to consume media while I’m doing something, but I miss cycling the old way. I didn’t listen to podcasts on the trip that initiated this blog. Showerthoughts is a thing because when you’re in the shower, you’re often on autopilot and you’re mind starts going random places. Cycling is my shower (gross). The openness of mind while cycling is rad. But I don’t do it any more. I’m literally either doing a thing that requires thinking, or listening to something. I’m always distracted. I’m never bored. Boredom is when you can be creative. Now when I’m bored, I distract myself. I liked being bored. I’m going to try to be bored more. Step one on The Road To Boredom is to be less impulsive. Do I enjoy watching AP Bio, or does it just distract me? Is it worth spending 20 minutes watching an It’s Always Sunny ep another time, or do I just know that it’ll get me 20 minutes into the future and I’ll obtain some shallow lols? Do you think of all the time you could have better spent as a kid and teenager doing things that weren’t productive at all when you could have been learning something and then now you’d know it and it would be a skill? I do, all the time. If I could have the time back I spent playing Kirby, or a random mod of Warcraft III, and I could have spent it on reading some classics or learning French, I would be way better off now (not playing Pokemon though, that was worth every god damn second). Well then Chris you genius, what about today?! By my estimation, I spend two hours a day on useless things. Not podcasts or books, they aren’t totally useless. I’m talking about re-watching eps, watching youtube, scrolling deep in a stupid reddit thread. I’m not against down time, I’m happy with my Westworld on a Monday evening, watching a debate on the ‘Tube, or reading every top comment in a CMV about whether it’s OK for a white girl to rap the N-word on stage with Kendrick. But for someone who acts like they don’t spend much time wasting time, I sure do spend a lot of my time wasting time. So in that time for the next few days, I’m going to try to be bored. No headphones on the bike or around the house. No eps. No AskReddit threads like “Minimum wage workers, what is something that is against the rules for customers to do but you aren’t paid enough to actually care?” or “What are obvious things you’ve just become aware of?”. I bet I don’t last a day. Discipline By the way, if you join the army and it gives you some discipline because there’s a guy shouting in your face, I don’t think that goes away once you’re back in real life. You learn a mental habit of going from “I should do that thing” to actually doing the thing, so you just do things. Sure, that habit can change over time, even fairly rapidly if you don’t have any structure in your life, but it’s not because the guy isn’t yelling at you, it’s because everything else has changed. You can’t increase your intellect, but you can increase your effective conscientiousness. Not because your ability to overcome impulsiveness is higher by itself, more that you now have a habit to overcome it. Lose the habit, then you’re in trouble. I’m planning on reading some Jocko Willink stuff about discipline, maybe that will help. I’m so “the kind of guy that has read too many self improvement books”.
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