Lunch and it's time to get out of the comfort zone
Kia Ora Friend,
I want to tell you a story about how a normal lunch with friends turned into confidence building exercise.
No, it didn't involve swinging from high wires or what dramatic scenes you might be thinking.
We were ordering lunch in a cafe. My friends ordered beers to go with their food, and to be slightly different, I ordered a coffee to go alongside mine.
After a decent wait, my warm coffee arrives. My friends, however, were still waiting on their beverages.
I was happily caffeinated, but my friends were slightly disgruntled by time lunch came.
Lunch was delivered on a warm plate. I was starving and eager to dig in. On the other hand, there was an escalating unhappiness, as the beers hadn't turned up to the party yet. We had to ask and only then did the beers come after the lunch had been disturbed.
The meal went down a treat but the beers took a bit longer and wasn't as enjoyable.
There was some overall dissatisfaction. The beer came after a meal when it usually comes before.
It's unfortunate that this happens. Most people move on. So why the fuss?
How I take dissatisfaction or my friends', in this case, would usually go in silence. We could leave, complaining only to each other, the staff unaware of what went wrong.
But no! It's time to break normality.
For some time, I've been thinking about building skills that do not require talent. Here is one:
—Daniel Bourke
Our meal didn't come out right. My friends didn't get the true value from those beers. I wanted a discount on the drinks.
I discussed the idea, all the different various outcomes and forest of decision trees that would result. All in all, I was procrastinating. I thought to myself: My fellow lunch-mates were dissatisfied with their meal; the beers came late; I think it would be appropriate to ask for a discount on the drinks.
After talking the talk, I bit the bullet, stood up and walked the walk.
I don't want to paint a false picture. I wasn't that brave to go alone. I had a friend chaperone me as a witness but mainly as a safety if something went wrong!
At the end, I/we did it.
We got a discount of one drink. Instead of being absolutely nasty, we decided to redistribute the amount discounted back into the economy in a form of a tip to the staff.
It may only be one drink and we didn't actually keep the discount but there were many wins and positives:
I went outside my comfort zone to ask an awkward question, going against the grain
I'm working on a skill of asking for what I want
The staff got a tip
The matter will be looked into further, potentially improving their service (they are actually my local and I have enjoyed going there in the past and hopefully well into the future).
The potential negatives:
The business suffered
I'm not only 'embarrassing' myself but my friends as well
What do you think about this situation? Have you been in a similar situation before and what was the outcome? If you were presented in the same situation, how would you act? Reply and let me know!
For the next newsletter, I plan to have a literature review about glaucoma and the cannabis plant. Stay tuned!
Did you find this useful? If you did, please forward this on to family and friends so they can find it useful too.
Thanks for reading and all the best for the week ahead.
Mā te wā,
Shivan :)
Motivating Tweet
My Favourite Things
Audio Book I've started to listen to Becoming by Michele Obama. I'm doing this after listening to The Promised Land by Barack Obama. I enjoyed listening to the self-authored, self-narrated autobiography of the former US president, where he talks about his early life, to his build up to presidency to his time in office.
Blog Post I've started looking at my diet, focusing on exercise all thanks to this post by Daniel Bourke: Six Health Habits you don't need a degree for. Thanks to this post, I've started intermittent fasting (16 hour fast, 8 hours eating - I simply skip breakfast and have a black coffee in the mornings while I do my morning write down). What makes me happy about this post is that Daniel mentions you don't have to follow the rules down to the letter. You can break the rules sometimes. Also, he encourages readers to be skeptical and not take advice as it is presented.
Film I'm a big fan of Christopher Nolan. His movies are some of my favourites, Memento (2000), The Prestige (2006) the Batman trilogy (2005, 2008, 2012), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017). And now we have Tenet (2020). Nolan definetely integrates time with keeping the audience thinking with his ambiguous and hidden endings. His latest movies poses more questions about how we think about time travel and pre-destination. So I would highly recommend this as a serious watch.
Kindle Highlight of the Week
The one who boasts does so only out of a feeling of inferiority.
Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, The Courage to be Disliked