About @ianbennettalas

Based in San Francisco, I manage special projects for Reid Hoffman.

Stomping grounds

• Goodreads for 📚
• Instagram for ❤️
• Twitter for 📰
• LinkedIn for 🤝
• Facebook Messenger for 💬

About was originally published in ianbennettalas.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve never regretted being loving, but there are plenty of times I’ve regretted being right.

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, in a New York Times interview:

Among many things that [my mentor Ray Chambers] has taught me are five rules for happiness. So the first one is living in the moment. The second is that it’s better to be loving than to be right, and if you’re in a relationship, you know how challenging that can be. The third one is to be a spectator to your own thoughts, especially when you become emotional, which is almost impossible to do. The fourth is to be grateful for at least one thing every day, and the last is to help others every chance you get.

The second rule stopped me: Is it really better to be loving than to be right?

Ideally we would like to be both loving and right, but in a heated discussion, when our irrationality is heightened and we’re compelled to lose sight of one for the other, which is more sacred?

In my experience, I’ve never regretted being loving, but there are plenty of times I’ve regretted being right. When I prioritize being right, I become singularly focused on getting someone to agree with me, which means I stop listening to what they’re saying, because they are obviously wrong. I may hear what they’re saying, their obviously wrong words, but what’s missing is empathy, a consideration of their motivations and concerns.

Instead, I hear only disagreement, which can lead to a frustration that, at its worst, can reduce others to “the idiot that needs to know how wrong they are” or “the asshole that needs to be put in their place”. There are other, subtler things that can be missed, too. Maybe I don’t notice bystanders tuning out, annoyed. Or I don’t realize my “opponent” isn’t even interested in arguing. Or that there isn’t any upside to “winning” the argument.

I find I make this mistake most often with people I’m comfortable with, those closest to me. I’m reminded of something Ryan Holiday wrote:

We give the benefit of courtesy to everybody but the people who earned it. Think of how much patience we have for total strangers and acquaintances. But what a short fuse we have for the actual people in our life. In the course of our everyday lives, our priorities are so very backwards. We do our best to impress people we’ll never see again and take for granted people we see all the time. We’re respectful in our business lives, casual and careless in our personal. We punish closeness with criticism, reward unfamiliarity with politeness. […] Sure, be friendly to everyone but bend over backwards—because they’ve earned it—for the people who put up with your shit on a daily basis.

When I’m careless with loved ones, it’s because I know them so well. Those relationships feel, to some degree, predictable, and I develop an intuition for what they will tolerate. There’s no need to watch my words because I think I know the potential consequences and I’m okay with them.

…Until I’m wrong and misjudge the consequences. And that’s the thing about prioritizing being right: I’m not always going to be right. There’s a book called The Half-life of Facts that is, crudely summarized, about why half of today’s “facts” will eventually be proven wrong. What’s right today won’t necessarily be right tomorrow, and so it’s important to humble myself, especially when the universe has taken a break from doing it for me.

If being loving is better than being right, what exactly does that mean? Does it mean no longer standing up for what I believe? Does it mean always being “nice”, even when someone could be harmfully wrong? Not to me.

To me, the opposite of being loving is disrespecting someone — cutting them down or refusing to consider their perspective. Once I feel the need to disrespect someone, that’s a leading indicator that I’m at the brink of losing — of not persuading anyone of anything — and it’s time to take a step back and reevaluate the situation.

There’s nothing to gain by disrespecting someone I’m trying to persuade. Doing so risks losing not just the current conversation but future ones, which will be undermined if the person no longer respects me nor wants to listen to me. This is all assuming the person in question needs to be persuaded. Because if not, if the person is harmless or inconsequential or unpersuadable, then why bother?

Is it better to be loving than to be right? was originally published in ianbennettalas.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A reflection on physics, symmetry, and unfathomable luck.

The Nobel laureate Philip Warren Anderson once said, “It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry.” Because physics is the study of the behavior of the universe, Anderson’s statement implies that the universe is, to some degree, symmetrical.

But what does that even mean?

Symmetry, as scientists use the term, describes something that remains unaffected by transformations, like changes in time, place, or orientation. For example, consider the act of throwing a ball in the air. Assuming you throw the ball the same way under the same conditions, does it matter if you throw that ball on a Wednesday versus a Friday? Nope. That’s a symmetry of time. The shift in time alone has no effect on the trajectory of the ball.

The symmetry principles of the universe allow us to study it. Because the laws of physics are the same everywhere in space and time, scientists are able to make conclusions about things unseen by observing what they can. But for all the wonders that symmetry affords us, asymmetry is what allows us to exist.

You see, just after the Big Bang, the universe was a primordial soup made of light. When light is at a high enough energy, it creates matter. But when matter is born, so is its twin: antimatter. Every time a particle of matter is created, an antiparticle is created. But an interesting thing happens when matter and antimatter meet: they annihilate each other.

Since we are made of matter, this means we shouldn’t exist.

The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, resulting in a neutral universe without either. Instead, at the beginning of time when matter was popping in and out of existence at an unfathomable rate, an imperfection happened. And for every billion antiparticles, there was a billion and one particles. That tiny surplus of matter led to the universe as we know it. That tiny surplus of matter is you.

And yet no one knows why this happened. This asymmetry of matter and antimatter remains one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics.

In A Perfect Universe, You Wouldn’t Exist was originally published in ianbennettalas.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A lesson on gratitude from hardboiled eggs.

When I visited Seattle for the first time, I stayed with a friend of a friend named Jesse. It was kind of him to take in a stranger on such short notice, without knowing things like whether I shower ever. I’d decided to go to Seattle only a few days before and had no idea where I was going to stay. I half-seriously considered sleeping on park benches, thinking it would make a good story one day. I’m glad I didn’t do that because it rained.

I arrived on a Friday, so when Jesse got off work, he showed me around town, acting as a voluntary tour guide and impressing me with his knowledge of a city he didn’t even grow up in. The only fact I know about Glendale, California — my hometown since 1995 — is that it’s one of the largest Armenian communities outside of Armenia. Given that I’ve never fact-checked that, it’s possible that I, in fact, do not know anything about my hometown.

At some point the conversation drifted toward relationships. I find that relationship talk is a good way to size people up. You find out a lot about a person’s maturity, like how they handle their emotions, what they do to get what they want, and whether they cry at night. So we began talking about relationships and Jesse mentioned that he’d been single for over a year.

“Do you miss being in a relationship?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, do you ever feel lonely, or miss the company, or consider getting back with your ex?”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t wish to subscribe to the thought that I need someone to complete me. It implies that I was born incomplete and destined to live my life searching for that person to finish me. No person is born in two halves and so no person should feel lesser for not having someone to reflect and reciprocate them daily.”

Over a hundred eighty days have passed since this conversation, and yet his response has stayed with me, outlasting thousands of memories created in that time. I mean, sure, I knew what he said in theory, but I’d never met someone who believed it and lived it and said it with such conviction. It became something I aspired to, though I always fell short. Until recently.

Some parents pressure their kids about their careers. Others pressure their kids to get married. Mine gently encouraged me to move back home. But I didn’t want to. I’d been living in Downtown L.A. with friends for two years and enjoyed my self-reliance, my social life, and my curved shower rod.

Plus, I was afraid of regressing. My parents spoiled me and my brother growing up. There were few things we couldn’t do or have because, like all well-meaning parents, they wanted us to be happy. But having a spoiled, comfortable life is a risk: chances are you’ll become a lazy slob, an entitled brat, or some hybrid slobbrat. So when I finally moved out, I had a lot to prove, especially to myself.

Living on my own, I experienced my first true hardship when I struggled to find a job for months, tapping my savings to pay rent. Finally, when my savings ran out and I was at the brink of desperation, I landed a job through a friend. Grateful for the stroke of luck and steady income, I immediately learned how to manage my finances, paying off $2,500 in credit card debt, raising my credit score from the low 600s to just shy of 800, and saving up a healthy five digits—all in a year and a half. I also learned that I actually enjoy washing dishes and I finally, finally learned how to do my own laundry.

As 2010 was coming to an end, so was my lease, and my mom once again suggested I move back home. Except this time I agreed. There were a couple of reasons for the change of heart, which I won’t get into here, but all in all it just felt right. But still the worry remained at the back of my mind that all my progress could come undone the moment I felt comfortable at home again.

The weekend I moved back, my mom asked me what I eat for breakfast.

“Two hard-boiled eggs,” I told her.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Nothing else.”

And the next morning I awoke to find three hard-boiled eggs, already peeled. And again the next morning. And the next morning. And every morning since.

So what does my spoiled upbringing have to do with relationships? Or Valentine’s Day? Or anything else for that matter?

It was the weekend before Valentine’s Day, and after a long day of cleaning and unpacking, I lay in bed feeling accomplished and let my thoughts wander. I began thinking about a couple girls I’d been interested in: Would I be happier with this person or that person…or some other person I haven’t even met yet? Should I date one of my exes again, even though there are some serious concerns, just because I’m that attracted to her? How would my life be different if I was in a relationship?

That last question got me thinking: how would my life be different if I was in a relationship?

I remembered what my life was like in past relationships—how distracted I was, how little time I spent on myself—and I realized that yes, things would be different, definitely better in some ways, but what would I be giving up for it? I thought about my life as it is right now and, in a moment of sudden clarity, it dawned on me: I’m already happy.

I’m happy that I have the time and energy to invest in myself—to exercise, to read, to teach myself programming, to learn the Beatles anthology on the piano. I’m happy that I have friends who enrich me and reciprocate my love. I’m happy that I like and respect my coworkers, that every one of them is friendly and honest and good. I’m happy that I got a brand new 27” iMac for work. I’m happy that I’m going to Japan for the first time next month. I’m happy that my nutrition and genetic tests came back positive. I’m happy that I’m saving so much money living at home. I’m happy that my longer commute allows me to listen to shows I love. I’m happy that I finally learned how to make two machines wash and dry my clothes.

And yes, I’m happy that my parents spoil me.

Because spoiling me is how they show their love for me. And I’m so, so thankful that they love me this much. When I eventually move out, my relationship with them will never be like this again. And one day, when they pass away, I’m going to look back at these moments as the time I spent with them when I was most like myself. When that day comes, when I’m grasping for memories I can no longer make with the people who never stopped loving me unconditionally, I want to be able to remember because I was paying attention. I wasn’t sitting at breakfast eating my pre-peeled hard-boiled eggs, distracted by thoughts of some girl and the hope that she might love me as much as my parents already do.

Written on February 21, 2011, in Los Angeles, CA.

Singles Awareness Day was originally published in ianbennettalas.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.