Dealing with difficult people
Difficult people
There is someone who makes the day harder. Rude, or obstructive, or dishonest, or simply incompetent in a way that lands on you. You have tried reason. You have tried patience. What you have not managed is to stop being surprised by them.
This is the subject Marcus returns to most often. He was surrounded by people he could not choose and could not leave, and the second book of Meditations opens with what he told himself before the day began.
Marcus Aurelius
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
He starts by expecting them. The list is not a complaint; it is a forecast, made so that nothing on it will arrive as a surprise. Then two claims that do the work. Such people act from not knowing what is good, which is an explanation rather than an excuse. And they are kin, made of the same stuff as you, so that being vexed by them is one hand working against the other.
Marcus Aurelius
Whatever man thou meetest with, immediately say to thyself: What opinions has this man about good and bad? For if with respect to pleasure and pain and the causes of each, and with respect to fame and ignominy, death and life, he has such and such opinions, it will seem nothing wonderful or strange to me, if he does such and such things; and I shall bear in mind that he is compelled to do so.
A practical version of the same idea. Before you deal with anyone, ask what they believe about good and bad, about pleasure, reputation and the rest. Their conduct follows from their beliefs, and once you see the beliefs the conduct stops being strange. He adds something harder: they are compelled by those beliefs, as you are by yours.
Marcus Aurelius
Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.
Fifteen words, and the whole of his position. There are two things you can do with a difficult person, and resentment is not one of them.
One question
What does this person believe about what is good, such that what they did made sense to them?
Meditations is quoted from George Long's translation of 1862, which is in the public domain. The passages are chosen by hand, shown as written, and never paraphrased.