Low-Stakes Advice Can Still Be Valuable

In need of something of a break from current events, I was happy about advice columnist Eric Thomas's recent decision to help a pub patron improve the quality of his favorite establishment's fries:

... A simple path: Just tell the owner what your experience has been and what you'd like to see coming out of the kitchen. They'd surely appreciate a direct conversation with a customer willing to give them another chance more than a stranger leaving a scathing online review.

A good way into this conversation, and others like it, is to ask, "Are you open to some feedback?" Now, sometimes the answer is "No, thank you." But the restaurant industry lives on word-of-mouth (pun partially intended)...

In today's cultural climate, it can be easy to forget that one's self-interest quite often -- arguably normally -- aligns with that of others. I have no appetite for delving into the myriad reasons this is not always obvious to one or both parties, or that it is thus so easy to forget.

The lesson I am taking from this is that it can be surprisingly easy to: (a) find simple examples of this, (b) improve one's immediate world in a small way, and (c) gain the relief of the resulting small affirmation of the benevolent universe premise.

While it may be true that anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today, that fight can certainly bring the occasional small, but still meaningful victory today.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: If one thinks carefully enough, one can see, as Ayn Rand once so eloquently pointed out, "There are no conflicts of interests among rational men." (See "The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests" in The Virtue of Selfishness.)