The morning rehearsal

Marcus begins one of his notes with a strange morning ritual: telling himself, before the day starts, that he will meet people who are interfering, ungrateful, arrogant and ill-tempered.

It reads as pessimism until you notice what it is for. He is not lowering his opinion of people; the rest of the passage argues they act that way from ignorance, not malice, and that he is built to work with them anyway. He is removing one specific thing: the surprise.

Surprise is the multiplier. A difficult colleague costs something on any day; a difficult colleague you had implicitly ruled out costs double, because you spend the first response recovering from the fact that it happened at all.

A practice for today

One sentence before the day

1. Before the first meeting or message, say: today I will probably meet at least one difficult moment or difficult person.
2. Decide the standard you will hold regardless: one sentence, e.g. I will answer slowly and once.
3. When it happens, note it: there it is. Expected.
4. Respond by the standard you set, not by the surprise you skipped.

If the difficult moment never arrives, the sentence cost ten seconds. The practice is not a prediction that people are bad. It is a decision about who you plan to be when one of them, occasionally, is.