Why It's Good to Be Hard to Please
In The Law of Success, a
very, very good book by Napoleon Hill - perhaps one of my favorites all
time, in fact - Hill discusses, as one of the 16 tenets of success, the
necessity of having a pleasing
personality. Part of his recommendation is for listeners to be
agreeable.
If you look at most people in Western society, I don't think this aspect of a pleasing personality - being agreeable - is much of a problem for them. In fact, I think one of the overriding problems for Westerners is in being too agreeable - so much so that anyone willing to be a bit less agreeable is able to easily steamroll them into uncomfortable submission.
But, that's a topic for another time. What I want to discuss in this article is why it's a good thing to be a little hard to please... at least some of the time.
Because if you've long made a habit of being overly agreeable - and there really can be too much of a good thing - a little dose of pickiness may just be in order.
Something I've noticed that a number of individuals
untrained in
relationship management theory tend to engage in is arbitrary (that is,
seemingly random) punishment and reward inside of relationships. These
sort of variable reward and punishment structures inside relationships
generally lead to a host of negative outcomes for the person who's
subject to arbitrary treatment, including:
In
"
We've had a handful of commenters write in recently to
ask about 
We’ve
all faced judgments and 
One
of
the series I introduced on here a while back - only to ever
do two real articles in it - was on girl types... some of the different
A
couple
of fellas have asked on here about 
On
the