James' World 2

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The workplace is built for extroverts, says Deb Liu: Your success is often tied to your ability to share, speak up, connect and lead others.

She’d know — Liu, the CEO of $4.7 billion consumer genealogy business Ancestry.com, describes herself as distinctly introverted. She graduated from engineering school with honors “practically without speaking at all,” she tells CNBC Make It. Hard work, Liu says, was enough to get by.

Then, she attended Stanford business school, where class participation was sometimes worth 50% of her grade — mimicking many workplaces, where your ability to make yourself seen or heard can often correlate with your success.

“That’s when I realized I needed to figure this out,” Liu says.

Her solution was to treat extroversion like a practicable skill rather than an unattainable personality trait, she says. At Stanford, that meant setting small goals for herself, like speaking up at least three times per week in a given class. She kept practicing at her first tech job in 2002, as a senior product manager at PayPal.

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Thirteen-year-old April Ajoy had a sense something wasn’t right. It was quiet in her Dallas house. Too quiet. Her brothers were gone. Her parents were gone. On her parent’s bed, a pile of her mother’s clothes signaled something terrifying.

Ajoy’s mind began churning, trying to remember, trying to make plans. When was the last time she had sinned? Should she refuse the mark of the beast? At least, she thought, if she was put to the guillotine during the time of tribulation, it would be a quick death.

From the moment they are old enough to understand, millions of people raised in certain Christian communities are taught that the rapture is something that can happen at any time. Though there are different schools of thought as to how such an event would go, the basic idea is the same: Righteous Christians ascend into heaven, while the rest are left behind to suffer. However it happens, it is something to be both feared and welcomed, to be prayed about and prepared for every moment of a believer’s life.

Ajoy grew up in an evangelical church, surrounded by constant reminders that the rapture was just around the corner. She was taught to never sin since it could be the very last thing she did before Jesus returned to Earth. Dramatic rapture-themed books and movies, created as fiction, were presented as real glimpses into the end of the world.

“When i was probably 8 or 9, I remember my brothers and I spending a good 30 minutes looking out into the sky,” Ajoy tells CNN. “We took turns counting down from 10, and in that time, we were convinced Jesus would come back.”

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Some Christians develop fears related to teachings of the rapture.

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Recently, my truck was stolen, forcing me to get some new wheels. And, for the first time in my life, I’ve been looking to buy a new car. The process has involved hours of searching. Painful haggling. And encounters with many dealerships that, quite frankly, have been downright duplicitous. The whole thing has been kind of a nightmare.

Cars are, of course, expensive, especially with the supply chain fiasco-creating shortages. But it’s more than that. Shopping for cars is not like shopping for most other products. Unlike, say, computers or refrigerators, cars are typically not sold for one standard price. Ten people could go into a dealership and each pay a wildly different amount to buy the same exact vehicle.

Economists call this sort of pricing strategy “price discrimination.” That’s when, instead of charging everyone the same price, sellers charge people different prices based on their willingness to pay. In simpler terms, it means that the seller milks as much money as they can out of you. Not all dealerships engage in this pricing strategy, but many do it aggressively, often with snake oil-style salesmanship, deceptive marketing tactics, hidden fees, and overpriced add-ons, like floor mats, alarm systems, or anti-rust undercoating. Some consumers call the outfits that employ these tactics “stealerships.”

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But I was missing something. Maybe it’s because I watch way too many romantic comedies, but I always thought I would just know when things were right, that I would be confident that I was in love, and that this was the person I would spend my future with. I didn’t feel that with her.

This spring, it felt like each of us was busy doing our own thing, and we were growing apart. I successfully ended things with the understanding that we would stay friends. It seemed to be working and like I was (maybe unfairly) getting to have my cake and eat it too. I mentioned to a friend that I hoped we could be together when we were older and wiser (which makes me think I did actually see a future for us but didn’t realize it until too late).

Staying friends was probably the wrong decision. It lasted a week and unfolded poorly. It did not last, and we’ve had no contact for months, as initiated, understandably, by my ex.

I feel like I’ve lost my favorite, most important person in my life, and I don’t know if that means it was love and I messed up, or if it was co-dependence.

Papi, how do you know something is right? How do you know you’re with someone you have a future with? How do you know you’re in love if you’ve never been in it or even in a relationship before? How do you know if you’re unhappy because you’re unhappy, or if you’re unhappy in your relationship?

Signed,
Bad Brain

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Illustration: Pedro Nekoi

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When we received the stay-at-home order in March 2020 — I live in California — I came out of the gates pretty darn hot.

“Embrace not being so busy,” I wrote. “Take this time at home to get into a new happiness habit.”

That seems hilarious to me now. My pre-pandemic routines fell apart hard and fast. Some days, I would realize at dinnertime that not only had I not showered or gotten dressed that day, I hadn’t even brushed my teeth.

Even though I have coached people for a long time in a very effective, science-based method of habit formation, I struggled. Truth be told, for the first few months of the pandemic I more or less refused to follow my own best advice.

I think this was because I love to set ambitious goals. Adopting little habits is so much less exciting than embracing a big, juicy goal.

Take exercise, for example.

When the pandemic began, I optimistically embraced the idea that I could get back into running outside. I picked a half marathon to train for and spent a week or so meticulously devising a detailed daily training plan. However, I stuck to that plan for only a few weeks — all that planning and preparation led only to a spectacular failure to exercise.

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Avalon Nuovo

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Vidhya Nagarajan

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