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In this essay (12 min. read)
Why talking about California was my secret weapon in customer service
What driving an airport shuttle bus taught me about belonging
Why the kindest thing you can do is care about small, overlooked things
How you can be authentic while changing how you reach people
How paying more attention is the cure for cynicism
Why sometimes it’s okay to pretend to care
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1
Don’t make me use my California Card
When I started working in online education, I was only 20 years old. It was my first full-time office job.
Since we were a startup division of our parent organization, there were just two of us in the office. And then about 20 contractors who worked remotely.
Thankfully, my boss and I were able to split things pretty evenly down the middle. She liked spreadsheets and systems. I liked marketing and big ideas.
And since, I was slightly less introverted, and since she had seniority, it fell to me to take most of the phone calls.
Especially the nasty ones.
It was a common occurrence for my boss to see the number of a parent come through on her caller ID and shout, “This one is for you!”
So, I’d go down the hall, close my door, pick up the phone, and work my magic.
This often involved using what my boss called my “California Card.”
Here’s the thing about California. For a long time, there were as many homeschoolers living in California as the rest of the U.S.A.
So, since we worked with a lot of homeschoolers, I had a pretty good chance of talking to someone who was living in California, had been to California, or wanted to go to California.
Occasionally, I’d even get someone who wanted California to break off and sink into the ocean. (Et tu, John Donne? Maybe some people do end up as islands unto themselves.)
I could work with that too.
It was kind of like Elvis’ manager selling both “I love Elvis” and “I hate Elvis” pins.
Something for everyone.
I can’t even tell you the number of times I had a parent call and shout at me, lecture me, threaten to sue me, or otherwise complain about our program.
(If you’re wondering why parents would get so upset on the phone, you need to understand that the first wave of homeschoolers were basically people willing to go to jail to teach their kids what they wanted. These moms could have stormed the beaches at Normandy. No one is more punk rock than an 80’s or 90’s era homeschool mom.).
But, most of the time, I was able to get them to calm down, be happy, and often stick with our program rather than demanding a refund.
All it took was a little patience, a little charm, and finding some common ground.
“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness.”
— Seneca, On the Happy Life
Everything is about belonging. Even this awkward bus ride.
So how did I learn the trick of relating to people?
Well, I worked a few months as a hotel doorman. More on that later, because it’s a Christmas story.
For now, I’ll share that one of my main responsibilities, aside from opening doors and parking cars, was to drive people to and from the airport about 20 minutes away.
When you work for tips, and you only have 5 minutes getting someone’s bag, or you have 20 minutes driving them from the airport, you know that time is of the essence.
The thing is, I had just graduated college as a baby-faced child. I didn’t have any real life experience, or real job experience. And I was incredibly shy.
I really only had one thing in my favor. I’m very curious, and I will learn about anything. I got that from my parents.
If you read widely and get good at asking questions, you can pretty much talk about anything.
When I look back on the few months when I drove that airport shuttle bus, a few conversations stand out to me.
I remember talking to an older woman about socialized medicine, a businessman about surfing in California, a doctor about learning piano, and a party girl about Montessori schools.
Most of the time, I had a really different background from all of the people I drove on the bus. Most of the time, we didn’t agree on our political views, our religious views, or our lifestyle.
But, I learned pretty quickly that people are people everywhere, and everyone just wants to belong.
So, all you really need to do is show them that you have the tiniest bit in common, and that’s enough to build that sense of belonging.
That’s why all the best sales frameworks include listening as one of the first steps.
Listening first. Not selling.
You don’t make money by groveling for tips. You build connections by making people feel less alone.
“...that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.”
— William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
Meet people where they are. Don’t forget the details.
When it comes to making people feel less alone, it all comes down to the details.
Nothing makes someone feel more appreciated than when someone else notices something small and decides to care about it.
While I refined my customer service skills working as a doorman, I learned the art of paying attention to details from my dad.
My dad is a very private person. I’ve had this essay sitting on the back burner since January 2026, because I wasn’t sure exactly what to write about him.
But I’ll share what I can.
I think what I like most about my dad is his ability to relate to basically anyone.
He’s held his own at fancy dinners with lawyers and $1,000 bills. He and my mom have met more Hollywood celebrities than anyone else I know. (This was a lot easier to do if you lived in California a long time ago).
But as much as it’s cool that he knows how to hold his own in posh environments, that’s not my favorite thing about him.
My favorite thing about my dad is that he treats no one like they’re beneath him.
I remember one time about a decade ago, we went to Wal-Mart late at night, and he greeted the employee by name. The employee could only speak broken English, but she smiled. Clearly, she knew my dad.
I asked him, “Dad, why do you know the name of the greeter at Wal-Mart?”
He just said, “I know everybody.”
And he kind of does. In another life, I think my dad would have made a good mayor of a small town.
All throughout my life, my dad remembered things about people and made a big deal of those small things. He’d save newspaper clippings and articles for people and then give them a folder of ideas he thought they’d like. Or, if one of my friends told him they liked a certain topic, he’d go to the thrift store and buy them a book about that topic.
There was a time I ordered pizza for one of my friends and added on cheesy bread on the side. He asked why, and I said, “A few months ago, you said it was your favorite.” He was completely shocked I remembered that.
But to me it felt totally normal. I’d seen my dad do things like that a hundred times.
My very favorite story about my dad comes from when I played soccer as a little kid.
One year, my dad was the team coach. I played in a local community league, and there was a kid on my team whose mom was a single mom. To help her out, my dad would sometimes give her son a ride to practice.
At the end of the year, we all got medals. Just for participation. You know, the American way. Well, this kid didn’t show up to get his medal.
No problem. My dad got his medal and said he’d drop it off at the kid’s house. Well, for whatever reason, that kid and his mom moved away suddenly. No explanation why. And my dad didn’t actually have her phone number.
So, he just drove around for years with that kid’s medal in the glove box of his car, hoping that one day he’d run into them.
I remember my 8 or 10 year old self thinking, Who cares? It’s just a participation trophy. What’s the point of keeping it in your car? That kid probably doesn’t even miss it!
My dad never did run into them again.
But I was proud of him for caring about the small things.
“I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”
— St. Paul, 1st Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 9, verse 22
Yes, you can stay true to yourself while changing how you connect with others.
I think the best example of relating to people on a deep, fundamental level comes from a 1st-century legal scholar.
You may have heard of Saul of Tarsus. Or, as he later became known, St. Paul.
Paul was essentially a legal scholar who became a street preacher and was responsible for spreading Christianity across the Mediterranean around 30 to 60 A.D.
No matter your religious views, I think we all can learn a little from Paul about how to relate to people. The guy had top tier communication skills.
You see, Paul was known for being a Jewish legal scholar. But he also was known for being a Roman citizen and an expert on Roman laws, Greek philosophy, and pop culture.
If you study him hard enough, you realize his writing is full of references to Greek stoicism, the Olympic games, weird Turkish cults (shoutout to the historian Tom Holland!), Roman cultural practices, Jewish scriptures, and all kinds of other topics.
The dude knew a lot. And he knew exactly when to pull out that knowledge to relate to his audience.
Paul was a bit of a chameleon. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Nobody likes a hypocrite. But Paul wasn’t a hypocrite. He didn’t actually change his beliefs for anyone. In that sense, he was remarkably consistent.
But he changed his approach for everyone.
And whether you’re taking customer service calls, driving a bus to the airport, or simply trying to be a better friend, I think there’s a lesson here.
You can be authentic and relatable at the same time.
I think a lot of times modern society makes it seem like that’s not true. In the name of being authentic, we often give ourselves permission to be abrasive and cut off anyone who doesn’t agree with us.
Modern society makes this pretty easy.
We can use Spotify to listen to our own weird music instead of the Top 40 on the radio. We can befriend only liberals or conservatives on Facebook so that we never have to hear anyone else’s opinions. We can live in the wealthy neighborhood and pretend there aren’t people down the street trying to figure out how to feed their kids tonight.
We tell ourselves that sticking to our inner circle of comrades isn’t selfish. It’s self care.
Sounds lonely.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil
Humanity is beautiful. Humans are annoying.
Last weekend, I stayed up late at night listening to David Foster Wallace’s 2005 graduation speech at Kenyon College. I wonder sometimes if he knew it would one day become a famous speech.
In it, he describes two young fishes who come across an older fish.
The older fish says “How’s the water today, boys?”
After he swims away, one of the young fishes asks his friend “What the hell is water?”
DFW’s point was that most of us go through life stuck in our default mode. In short, most of us don’t pay attention to our environment or the people around us.
We go through life being, as he says, “imperially selfish.”
He describes what it’s like to sit in traffic or walk through the grocery store and think something like this.
“The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop.
Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.
And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.”
His point is that you have two main jobs as a human being.
First, pay attention. Then, care.
You either swim in the ocean with the other fishes. Or, you drown in a shallow puddle of self-centered cynicism.
Cut negative people out of your life. Ruthlessly protect your calendar. Say no to anything that’s not a paid opportunity.
Sure, man. At least you have the puddle all to yourself.
By all means, I’m not saying you should keep terrible, abusive people in your life. I’m just saying, haven’t we had enough self-help books telling us we’re the center of the universe?
I already act like I’m the center of the universe. I don’t need a book to encourage me.
Wallace closes out his speech with a reminder that we shouldn’t be striving for the freedom that will get us more money, power, and fame.
He says this,
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day…
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to lose that infinite thing.
That’s why Wallace says you have to keep reminding yourself:
“This is water.”
Very often, the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.” — C.S. Lewis
Let’s pretend.
When I was younger, I was so shy that I had to literally teach myself how to relate to people. I treated getting to know music, books, and other topics like a research project just so I could have something to talk about.
All my friends consider me to be a huge music lover now. I’m the concert guy among a lot of my friends. But, I mostly got into music to start with so that I could relate to people. It was only through that process that I came to really love it.
It’s funny, when you work for tips, or when you take customer service calls, you are essentially pretending to relate to people and care about them so you can make some extra cash.
And on its face, that may sound terrible.
But maybe pretending gets a bad rap. Sometimes, pretending is the only place to start.
I’ve always appreciated C.S. Lewis’s advice that if you want to start believing in something, you should act like you believe in it. As a result of the action, you may end up actually believing.
So, maybe it’s a good time for us all to start pretending to care a bit more.
It might be something small, like smiling at strangers more. Or, actually listening when they talk. Paying attention to details. Remembering things they told you. Finding common ground in talking about California. Keeping a soccer medal in your car glove box for a few years.
Or, maybe it’s something bigger, like Paul learning about the cultures around him so he could relate to them better, right up until the point of his execution.
The thing is, everything we have is going to disappear eventually. So, that little kingdom you built for yourself isn’t going to matter much.
All you really own is your attention.
All you control is what you decide to care about.
And, hey, even if you have to pretend to care about people in order to actually care…
Well, there are worse ways to spend your time.
Want to read more like this?
Here’s a few of my favorites.
I took quite a few things away from this. Mostly a spiral of tangent questions...
Mainly, I wish everyone thought like this, because having assumptions made of you or being boxed in or type checked is a scary and trainwreck path to be on, just because someone didn't realise you both have humanity and you both have a purpose.
There is something worth sitting with in the distinction between humanity and humans. We are capable of extraordinary things, but we are also complicated, inconsistent and imperfect.
I think we sometimes lose sight of our shared humanity when we become too focused on individual differences, behaviours or beliefs.
Understanding people requires curiosity, not assumption. A thoughtful read, and one I'll keep coming back to.
If you want to make a judgement of anyone or or any outcomes, first you must be able to see the individual, the process, the path, the dynamics and know them. In today's ever divergent and detached word - how many people do you actually know?
How many coworkers do you actually understand how they complete their tasks?
How many employees do you actually understand their capabilities, interests, beginnings and aspirations?
Do people even try to connect?
Do they even see it's value?
Colin, the story about your dad keeping that little boy's medal in his car for years is beautiful. He had nothing to gain from remembering, and that's precisely what makes it so meaningful.
We talk so much about building connections, in business and in life, but sometimes it comes down to something as simple as remembering what matters to someone when nobody's watching. I think your dad taught you something quite special.