The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt

The most valuable and admirable people care deeply about and give everything they’ve got to help their colleagues, fellow volunteers, customers, clients, and such.

the protective power of perceived impermanence.

most people are more optimistic about the future than the present. So they expect that things in their lives will be better down the road, including what is upsetting them right now.

“Humans have a unique capacity for mental time travel. We can transcend the here-and-now by both envisioning the past and imagining the future.”

But it was the more skilled workers, the highly paid ones (like my relative) who were “the subject of constant abuse and under threat of termination and replacement by a lower-wage worker.”

“dismissive but not abusive toward low-wage workers with minimum skills who were loyal to him and worked tirelessly for him.”

they take perverse pleasure in insisting that project managers like her commit to timetables and budgets that are impossible to meet—and then berate and bad-mouth them when the project begins to fail, even when the project manager had warned them that their goals were impossible to achieve (and the client insisted on charging forward despite the ex

when students maintained eye contact during the debates, they made far fewer threats or other hostile comments—whether the duo had spent time getting to know each other beforehand (or not) didn’t matter.

a lack of eye contact