Be careful when you are using someone, that person could be using you. The origin, my mom told me this after my dad had died. So let’s paint a picture of the mindset my mom was in. She had just lost her husband. She has a little black boy. She was white. She had two older daughters. Well, I had two older sisters. So she was kind of alone in the world. My dad’s family lived in the same city, but no one from her family so she was kind of. Her family lived more on the West Coast and she was in North Carolina alone. A lot of the friends that she had when my parents were both alive disappeared. That would be the best way to put it, disappeared.
So she was kind of giving me knowledge of kind of like be careful when you’re using someone because that person could be using you. I don’t remember the exact instance that it was. I kind of remember like the era, I kind of remember where we were, but I don’t remember exactly what the subject was about why she told me that. But she stressed to just be careful, basically look both ways when you cross the street, right? So just because you might be super hyper-focused on what you’re trying to get, let’s never forget that the other person is also super hyper-focused on what they can get, right? So be careful when you’re trying to use someone because that person could be using you at the same time.
Does Not Understand The Dynamics Of Relationships. Arrogant, believe they control every angle of every situation. Self-centered, blind to the world around. Naive, does not check and double check leaves things to fate. Too busy to notice obvious signs.
Arrogant, believes they can control every angle of every situation. We’re going to talk about not understanding the dynamics of relationships when we’re discussing this type of arrogance. An arrogant person, we all know him. We’ve probably all been arrogant at one point and another. But when it comes to using people and being careful when they may be using you. We’re talking about arrogance in regards to thinking that you’re in control of everyone and everything around you.
You might be able to train your dog to come, roll over, sit down, go over there, but that dog is still going to be a dog when you’re not around. Does that make sense? So you can’t control every aspect of every situation, right? So when you’re in a relationship, it doesn’t have to be a love relationship, it can be a work relationship, it can be a business relationship, a relationship, period. It could be a relationship between you and your mom. It could be a relationship between you and your brother. It could be relationship between you and your animals. It doesn’t matter. Arrogance in that relationship causes us to believe that we’re in control of that situation. When we do that, we tend to forget that other people have opinions and other people have motives, right? So if you think that you can control every situation, you’re setting yourself up for failure because you’re not in the minds of other people. You’re only in the mind of yourself, right? Hope that makes sense.
So let’s give a quick example. When I was younger in middle school, right? No, no, no, no. This is high school. Now, we’re in high school. We’re at Menlo. So this is before I get kicked out or go to my wilderness programs and everything else. It’s that small amount of time where my grades went bad and I got kicked off the football team or taken off the football team and kicked off the basketball team for academic probation. Now, during this time, I was very arrogant. I was a freshman on the varsity football team. So all the juniors and seniors were hanging around me, But then at the same time, I also had a girlfriend in my grade, which was ninth grade. Now, I was very arrogant and I believed that I could control every angle of this situation. So I had two girlfriends in one school.
Now, why would you have two girlfriends in one school? Not sure. Because my girlfriend’s brother was also a junior and he played football with me and he was in the same class as my second girlfriend. Now, my second girlfriend would come over to the house and we’d go swimming. Because at that time I had a pool and jacuzzi at the house and basically a pool house. So we had two houses on the property. So she was my at home girlfriend and weekend girlfriend, while the other one was just my girlfriend. Well, I could not control every angle of that situation and I ended up losing both of them. Because when the younger one found out about the older one, she told who? Her brother. Well, the brother was in the same grade as the older one. So he made a point to make her look bad so she distanced herself away from me. But then my girlfriend also distanced herself away from me.
So in the end, I thought I was controlling both situations because I was very arrogant. But in actuality, I was controlling neither one. There were parts I could not control. So an arrogant person that doesn’t understand the dynamics of relationships believes they’re in control of every angle of all the situations, which as you just heard, I was not.
Self-centered, blind to the world around. I’ve been around hot self-centered people, and I almost would have to say, I’ve been very self-centered at times. It’s blind to the world around. A person that doesn’t understand the dynamics of relationships who’s self-centered is kind of… I don’t know how to put this. They’re a taker, right? They’re not understanding that it goes both ways. Now, this self-centered person, you got to be very careful around a self-centered person because your whole world will be consumed by theirs, right? A self-centered person needs all the attention and needs everything about your life incorporated into theirs. Does that make sense?
So in any healthy relationship, there’s give and there’s take. Well, in a self-centered relationship, it’s kind of like an arrogant person, right? An arrogant person believes they can control all situations, as we just heard. I just explained that story. Well, a self-centered person is a little different. A self-centered person controls everything in their environment and you can’t enter their environment unless you adhere to their self-centeredness. They live in an island and you cannot enter unless you cross the drawbridge into their island. They are not concerned about the world around them. They’re only concerned about their particular world.
Now, that’s fine in certain situations. If you’re hyper-focused, that’s fine. But what is not fine about this is if you’re self-centered and you have that ideology about yourself and you’d carry that on, because in this, you become king and others become servants or slaves, right? So if you’re the self-centered person and you have your whole bunch of servants and slaves, congratulations. Good for you. However, those people that are your servants and your slaves are going to build a resentment against you. Remember, be careful when you’re using someone because that person could be using you. So if you’re a self-centered person and you’re blind to the world around you, you’re not paying attention to the needs of your servants. You are only thinking of the needs of you.
Now, if you forget about the needs of your servants, your slaves, whatever it is that you in your mind call them, then that will be the detriment to you. It is going to build a lot of resentment and a lot of passive-aggressiveness towards you which leads to you not being able to trust anyone. Because no matter what someone tells you, if they have a resentment towards you, it’s going to be ill-advised. It’s not going to be good advice because it’s going to be geared in a way that’s detrimental to you.
Naive, does not check and double-check, leaves things to fate. Does not understand the dynamics of relationships. Be careful when you’re using someone because that person could be using you. If you do not double-check and triple-check and quadruple-check, and you’re just leaving things to fate, then you’re leaving things in the hope of goodwill. There has been a numerous amounts of stories to where famous actors, basketball players have been naive and left their money in control of somebody else and they trusted that person. They didn’t understand the dynamics of relationships. They didn’t understand, be careful when you’re using someone because that person could be using you. So they were using the lawyer, the banker, whoever it is, they were using their services.
They were not understanding and they did not double-check and triple-check and left everything to fate. They were not paying attention to the minute details that they were being robbed blind because they weren’t worried about it. They did not understand people. Now, a lot of people are going to be like, “Erik, that’s not true. People are good.” Yeah. Until they’re not!!!! So what if you get away with skimming a penny, right? Now, you’re going to be like, “I don’t steal.” Okay, well you’re on a diet and you say no sugar, and you break your diet just a little bit and you have one small little candy bar. Well, that’s the same thing as taking that small little penny from your client, because eventually you’re going to continuously break your morals, habits, disciplines. If you keep doing it, by the end of it, you’re not going to have just a small candy bar, you’re going to eat a king-size candy bar.
The same as someone who’s managing your money and they get away with taking $5, in the end, if they can get away with taking $10,000 and you still don’t notice, They buy something fancy and are like, “Oh, this is easy money.” They don’t realize. Well, they know it’s bad. But the second to third to fourth to fifth to sixth time, oh, now it becomes second nature. Now, it’s habitual. They’re habitually stealing from you, and if you don’t pay attention because you’re naive, you will not know because you don’t understand the dynamics of relationships.
So you can believe in the faith of people, right? You can be that naive person if you want to and argue everything I’m saying. You could be arrogant and not understand the dynamics and you think that you control everybody. You can be self-centered where you’re on your own little island. Go ahead. But there will be consequences to that if you don’t double-check. But if you don’t want to, that’s on you.
Too busy to notice obvious signs. We have arrogant. We have self-centered. We have naive. Then we have too busy. They don’t pay attention to the little things. In the book Fuck You Make Money, a quote is little shit will kill you. It’s not the big things. The big things are obvious. They’re too big not to notice, right? They’re staring at you right in front of your face blocking you from being able to do anything. Those are not the signs I’m talking about. I’m talking about the very obvious small signs in a relationship. You got to pay attention to the small signs, the obvious ones, the ones that it’s telling you this is not a good idea. That gut feeling you get where you’re like, “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t think this is a good idea,” but you do it anyways. You’re not understanding the dynamics of relationships.
Your whole body was trying to tell you it’s not a good idea, but you went with it anyways, right? If you’re with somebody, it doesn’t matter how attracted you are to this person. If you take this person out to dinner and you like seafood and they do not, that’s a pretty obvious small sign, but our emotions and our attraction doesn’t register to us that we’re kind of two different people. But you’re like, “Oh, I want this person. I’m attracted to this person. So I’m not going to pay attention to the obvious signs that we probably will not get along because I’m attracted to this person.” Well, go ahead. Go down that road and see where it takes you.
You might waste 10 years of your life with the wrong person. You don’t understand the dynamics of relationships. You need to find somebody that is like you in all aspects. I understand, well, opposites attract. Yeah. Kind of, not really. They’re fun for a little bit, but if someone is opposite of everything I like, well, I might as well just be by myself. There’s nothing wrong with being by yourself, just letting you know. But too busy to notice the obvious signs. Let’s talk about with the money. If you are getting a overdraft warning, that’s an obvious sign that you need to stop spending money because you’re spending $35 for every overdraft. That’s an obvious sign you’re being irresponsible with the relationship that you have with the bank.
If you are not paying attention to how much a credit card will charge you for interest, you’re not paying attention to the obvious signs. You’re too busy. If you’re going to a check cashing place and you’re not paying attention to how much money they’re charging you, you’re too busy to notice the obvious signs. I know. The consequences of what I’m saying, you’re going to be like, “Well, I have to.” No, no, you don’t. You have to be more responsible and not buy things you can’t afford. Understand the relationship that you have with yourself. Understand the dynamics of relationships with you and yourself. You need to have self-discipline and let yourself know that maybe I shouldn’t do this. Pay attention to the obvious signs.
ALL RIGHT. NOW, THIS IS
A Person Who Understands The Dynamics Of Relationships. Can only control two things, attitude and action. Plays chess, not checkers, understands each piece/ person has their own value and responsibilities. Is self-sufficient, does not delegate what he can do himself. Patience is a virtue, understands the truth will always reveal itself over time.
Can only control two things, attitude and action. When you understand the dynamics of relationships, then you understand that there’s only one person in any relationship that you can control and that is yourself.
Now, there’s two different things. there’s a whole bunch of other things that you can control, but there’s two main things that you can control in any situation. It’s the attitude that you have in that situation and it’s the action of what you do with that attitude that you have. That is in any relationship, whether it’s a financial relationship that you have with yourself, the attitude that you have about your relationship with your finances is going to dictate the actions that you take. Those are the two things that you can control. If you are unhappy, there are only two things that you can do. You can change your attitude and change your actions, one or the other.
Well, actually you need both. Sorry, not one or the other. You need to start with one. Either you need to change your actions and with changing your attitude or change your attitude and change your actions. They’re kind of one and the same. But it’s the two things that you can control. When you understand that, no matter if your significant other, your boss, your banker, it does not matter, your dog comes up to you and they’re screaming and ranting and raving and putting you in a intense situation, there’s only two things that you can control in that moment, it’s your attitude and what are you going to do. So if you have an attitude that’s defensive, what’s your action going to be? Defend yourself and get riled up as well. But if you have an attitude of, let me listen to, let me try to decipher what’s really the problem, then once you’re actually going to be? Seek first to understand then to be understood.
Does that make sense? So your attitude, your first response, right, like 911 first responder, right? Your first response is going to dictate your actions. All right? So if you have a positive attitude, it doesn’t matter how negative or how positive, because some people are negative at positive things, and some people are positive at negative things. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or negative. However it affects you depending on your attitude. What you’re going to do in that situation depends on your attitude, nobody else’s. Your attitude dictates your action.
Plays chess, not checkers. Now, you could play checkers. It’s just a headline. Give me a break. All right, understands each piece or person has their own value and responsibilities, all right? That’s why I say chess because each chess piece has a different responsibility and value, right? So we’re not saying this in a negative way, right? It’s in a understanding way. So each person in your life, if you haven’t thought about this, then you need to think about it. Each person plays a particular role in your life just like on chess.
You have to strategically interact with each player or piece in a different manner. You can’t go willy-nilly and just deal with each piece the same way because they’re different pieces, different people. You have to understand their value and then maximize that value. You have to understand the responsibility of each individual person. So for example, my uncle, his value comes in the intellectual conversations that I can have with him. His value does not come from the actual doing of the intellectual conversation. Does that make sense? If I were to look at my uncle and be like, “I need your help doing something that’s not intellectually inspiring for the two of us,” he’s the worst person in the world to ask, because all I will get is frustration. However, by understanding which role and responsibility that this one particular entity has in my life, I can maximize the value of that piece. Does that make sense?
Here’s another example. A friend of mine, nobody understands this relationship. She’s my motivator, right? She does things that motivates me and she’s been doing it for five years. Does it work? Well, look where I am. I have what I want and I’m getting more. So it works. I understand what responsibility she has on my chess board. That’s why I can maneuver in a way that’s beneficial for me. Now, again, remember the title of his chapter is be careful when you’re using someone because that person could be using you. So if you remember that, then you have to understand why you’re playing chess and not checkers, that each of these pieces are going to be using you as well as you using them. So you have to understand what value do you have for each individual person.
So if you are just the do-boy or if you’re somebody who is getting taken advantage of and you’re not using that person in a beneficial way, then that’s probably a negative relationship for you to be in. Now, if you’re using that person and they’re using you and it’s leveling out, you guys are using each other equally, then that might be a good relationship for you. Let me explain. The same relationship with my uncle. How he is utilized, I utilize him in a specific way, right? He’s benefiting something from me, so he’s using me as I’m using him. Remember, I said if I ask him to do something different, then it’s the waste of my time, because we’ll just end in frustration. So if I were trying to use him in a way that didn’t serve him, right, that he couldn’t use me back, then we wouldn’t have an established relationship. Does that make sense?
Now, with the other person. I have no idea what she uses me for. However, she’s still here. So she’s obviously getting some benefit out of me being in her life. Or maybe I’m just using her and she hasn’t figured out how to play chess and she’s just using checkers, because if she feels that it’s not a mutual benefit, because I feel like I’m benefiting, it’s a weird way how I’m benefiting, but I’m benefiting. But if she’s not benefiting, then she’s not playing chess. She hasn’t figured out how to utilize me. Does that make sense? You see the difference? All right, let’s move forward.
Self-sufficient, does not delegate what he can do for himself. It could be a girl too. All right. A self-sufficient person does everything first, everything. They don’t delegate anything in the beginning until they first understand it. Because if you don’t understand something, how do you know if someone’s taking advantage of you? If you don’t understand a little bit of accounting, then you won’t be able to account if something’s missing. If you don’t know a little bit about sociology, then it might be a little difficult for you to understand how people interact with other people. If you don’t understand a little bit about neurology, then you won’t understand fight or flight. You won’t understand the reptilian part of the brain, and you sure as hell won’t understand the creativity.
So being self-sufficient means being self-sufficient, understanding your body, not just being self-sufficient as, oh, I got a job and I got my own car. I’m self-sufficient. No. That is playing checkers. Playing chess is being fully self-sufficient, understanding how your brain works in each individual situation, right? Now, of course you don’t know everything because it’s impossible. We haven’t been in every single circumstance that there’s possibly could be. However, you can test yourself. In a very high stress environment, how do you react? Do you fold? Do you turn the gears up and work harder? Being self-sufficient knows how you would react.
When you have absolutely nothing to do. You just finished the project, right? So you’ve been working really difficult on this project you had just finished. What do you do? Are you one of those people that needs the whole world to acknowledge it? Or did you do it for a personal reason? Are you going to take a break? Or do you automatically have another project in mind? To be self-sufficient you need to know this about yourself. Does that make sense? So the more self-sufficient that you are, the less susceptible to bullshit that you become. Does that make sense?
Patience is a virtue, understands the truth will always reveal itself over time, right? This is someone who understands the dynamics of relationships. I don’t have any kids right now, but patience is a virtue. I understand the truth will reveal itself over time. I don’t talk to a single girl that I was talking to in my twenties. I’m 37 now. So if I would have had a baby with any of those girls, it would have been a bad decision because they’re not in my life right now. Does that make sense? Over time, people reveal themselves. I’ve had best friends for two, three years, but then over 15 years, I haven’t really talked to them.
I met my biological family when I was 22, right? At the end of these 12 years, I can’t tell this story. I’m going to tell you a brief little story. Over the time since I met my biological family, a lot of truth has been revealed, right? So the mentality I had towards them when this story that… These are the 12 things I learned while I was in hell, all right, so we’re jumping forward into the next story, but let me just give a little bit, the beginning is not the end. It took time for everything to be revealed to me, right? So when you approach life and you understand the dynamics of relationships, be slow, take time, be patient, and understand that everything that you want to know will be revealed to you whether you ask or not if you’re patient enough just to wait.
If you want to know how someone acts in a stressful environment, don’t ask them. They’re going to tell you a lie. It’s not their fault. Maybe they don’t even understand that they’re telling you a lie. All you got to do is just wait. Because eventually, a stressful situation will arise and then you can see how this person reacts. Does that make sense? When we don’t fully understand somebody else or ourselves, we can never make an accurate decision. It goes along with if you’re paying attention to, does it hurt yet with the native Americans, patience is a virtue. Take time, let things reveal themselves. That’s a person who understands the dynamics of relationships. They understand they can only control two things. They play chess, not checkers. They’re self-sufficient and they understand that patience is a virtue. All right. Onto the next one. Hope you enjoyed that chapter and talk to you in a minute.
Table Of Contents
- Live In The Here And Now
- Walk With A Purpose
- All You Need Is 2 Dollars
- A Man Can’t Be A Man Without A Plan
- Does It Hurt Yet
- Be Careful When You Are Using Someone That Person Could Be Using You
- Use Em, Abuse Em & Lose Em: A Zero Sum Game
- Picking your own shit
- I hate people – people are stuupid
- I stay ready It keeps me from having to get ready
- Be Selfish
- Either You Do Or You Don’t