pprof’s 2008 website

“It’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice.” I guess you may have already heard that before. One thing, though, that this saying fails to tell you is that there are other things which can be just as important (or perhaps even more) than being nice.

I’m a nice guy. Everybody knows that, right? But I’m well over my initial feel-good niceness to others. Why? Simply because it gets you nowhere. And even worse, it gets no one else anywhere.

Imagine a situation where you need to deal with a problem. One person complains about another person (let’s call them “the bully”), who is making the lives of others at your workplace miserable. You’ve heard of this before, so you nod along. You nod along because you want to be nice.

The person leaves your office. And life goes on. You were nice to them. But you also want to be nice to the bully. You talk to them. And life goes on.

Summary: the problem does not go away by itself. You have not solved it by “being nice”. People are still feeling miserable. So the point is: It’s nice to be nice, but it’s nicer to be efficient. If you’ve been in the situation, you know what I’m talking about.