Be nicer than necessary to everyone you meet. Everyone is fighting some kind of battle. — Socrates

Be nicer than necessary to everyone you meet. Everyone is fighting some kind of battle.

Author: Socrates

Insight: We move through the world with such limited information about what's actually happening inside other people. The colleague who snapped at you in a meeting might be dealing with a parent's illness. The cashier who seems indifferent might be fighting anxiety or grief. Most of us assume our own struggles are invisible to others while assuming everyone else is fine—when really, the opposite is usually true. This is why the small surplus of kindness matters so much. Not because you're owed credit for being decent, but because you're often the only person showing up that day with a genuine interest in how someone's actually doing. That extra patience, the benefit of the doubt, the willingness to assume the best—these aren't naive. They're realistic. They account for the fact that people are almost always carrying more than what's visible. The interesting part is that this doesn't require you to be endlessly accommodating or lose healthy boundaries. It just means building in a small buffer of generosity before you decide someone's being difficult. It costs almost nothing to offer and changes almost everything for the person receiving it. In a world where most of us are running on fumes in one way or another, that matters.