Net Positive, Net Neutral & Net Negative
Business & personal relationship dynamics aren't that different
Greetings, thinkers!
You might not have noticed, but I've been diligently sending out this newsletter every week without fail. No pause whatsoever.
What do you mean you didn't get any for a while? Must be a glitch in your inbox. I totally sent more than 3 newsletters in the past 6 months.
Anyway, let's dive right back into the swing of things as if nothing ever happened. Seamless, right?
Today’s exercise:
Imagine an abandoned house that seems to have a light on every night at exactly 10 PM, even though it's not connected to any electricity and has been long deserted.
Every night, without fail, a glow emanates from within, creating an eerie yet consistent spectacle.
What could be causing this nightly illumination?
As always, an answer at the end.
Initial joke aside, appreciate the patience you all have had with this newsletter over the past years.
Despite not posting at all in the past (many) months, there are 200 more lateral thinkers here, up to 3,500 in total.
Net Positive, Net Neutral & Net Negative
In life and business, I’ve found that most relationships can be categorized into three types: Net Positive, Net Neutral, and Net Negative.
Understanding where a relationship falls in these categories can help you decide how much time you should invest in each relationship to either maintain or fix it.
Net Positive Relationships
These are pretty easy to identify. They’re relationships (again, business or personal) where you almost feel a debt of gratitude towards the other person.
You’ll probably have a couple of relationships like this, and if you can count more than 5 people who fall into this category for you, please immediately write back and tell me what lottery numbers you think will win this week.
To keep things short, even though it sounds transactional, you should have some benefit when interacting with people who fall into this category - you can simply leave more energized, with a new idea, with a new business deal, doesn’t matter. But you should never feel you’ve wasted time or energy when interacting with them.
Net Neutral Relationships
I recently read somewhere that a below average, but not horrible, employee can sometimes be more difficult to manage than an absolutely abysmal hire. Why? The one that is clearly not contributing anything to the company will be pretty quickly laid off. Someone who’s definitely not thriving, but is sometimes able to put their head above water, will be more difficult to manage.
There’s no single powerful reason to take decisive action to change something, so things usually remain flat.
Net Neutral can easily become Net Negative or Net Positive, so you need to be wary of these relationships. These interactions don’t particularly drain you, nor do they significantly uplift you. They’re a filler episode and a lot of the time, that’s fine.
Normally, the majority of your friends & business partners will fall under this category, which, again, is totally normal.
Net Negative Relationships
Then we have the Net Negative relationships.
Keep in mind we’re not only talking about the obvious here - a friend always asking for money or a business partnership that’s totally one sided (and not in your favor).
These are the interactions that consistently leave you feeling drained, undervalued, or stressed. More importantly, you have little to show after all that stress.
From my experience, most net negative relationships start off as HIGHLY net positive, but they have a short shelf life. Because they burn so brightly, they usually end up burning themselves out and becoming net negative in the long run.
On the opposite side, the best net positive relationships I have stayed in the net neutral category for a long time, but slowly shifted in the right direction.
One caveat:
Life is definitely not rational or technical enough to be able to treat every single interaction like an excel spreadsheet. While there’s a lot of intuition involved, having these categories in mind will help you save time or spend more time on the interactions that matter.
PS: Thanks to everyone who checked in during my leave of absence. I’ve been well, just super busy at Blindspot. I hope I finally get the green light to share some exciting news on that front soon.
Answer: The "light" seen in the house is actually the moon's reflection. At 10 PM, the position of the moon is such that its light passes through a window, reflecting off something inside the house, perhaps a mirror or a shiny surface. This creates the illusion of a lit room visible from the outside.
I'm glad you're back, Matei!
Today's solution doesn't seem to hold water. The moon changes it's position. So the hour when the moon is seen as a reflection would vary during a month.