The next time you find yourself in a tricky situation, try to influence the discussion by anchoring at another reference point.
Time-dependent algorithms usually have one major issue. The starting value heavily decides the outcome. The same applies to your mind’s thinking process.
Anchoring our thinking process
Time-dependent algorithms usually depend on the starting value of a specific variable. Depending on the starting rate, the result can be completely different.
The same is true for your mind. A different starting value can lead to another perception.
This concept is also called anchoring
Anchoring the perception
If you enter a bazaar and the seller starts with a price, he has anchored the price discussion on a specific value. The standard advice is to make a counteroffer with an equally offending low price.
Kahneman suggests that the best approach is not to start with an opposing low number. The contrast principle will lead to a higher price on your part, as the seller has anchored the price. Even if you know the contrast principle as a sales strategy, you will bear the psychological load: you will experience your position as unjustified and amorally.
Resist anchoring by breaking the pattern
Instead, Kahnemann suggests that you should abort any interaction. Make a scene and storm out. You will emotionally brand the initial offer as outlandishly high and attach a negative emotion to it.
When you come back to the store, the emotional charge is on the seller to offer a lower price.
Here is a new method to relate software estimations to a related base rate.
The Holy war
Nothing is as controversial as estimation in software engineering. In one corner are the people that plan endlessly and are stuck in analysis paralysis. In another corner are those that plan intuitively and always underestimate the amount of work.
In yet another area are those that do not want to estimate, as they have been in the other two corners. Ironically, they often fail to update the delivery schedule flexibly.
Everybody has his best estimation process method.
There is a never stopping genesis of new methods to plan engineering work. There are one-point or three-point-based methods. Story points or hours. Some use the Fibonacci number or planning poker.
If your planning sessions often felt like a voodoo gathering or a bazaar-like trade fair, welcome to the club.
Continuous improvement through retrospection
Retrospectives are nowadays often performed in engineering organizations. Root causes for missed deadlines and repeated failures in the development process are analyzed, identified, and solved with some remedy.
How is it then that still many tasks are delivered late?
Self Organization could be the goal.
The work in the software industry is often very complex. Some argue that this complexity must lead to new ways of organizing the work. A possible solution is the rise of the knowledge worker that owns, uses, and improves his productivity tools.
Many large organizations struggle with the realization of less hierarchical structures. It remains to be shown if such a transformation can be done by evolution rather than by revolution.
Many organizations would be better off improving their planning.
Feedback loops in the planning cycle
Planning often happens intuitively. Software engineering breaks down into many tasks. Many of these tasks are usually new to engineers that should perform the job. However, the task is usually not that unique in the engineering world. The standard advice is to have a very experienced developer (architect) comment and influence the estimation of a team. The joint assessment is often better.
In many organizations, there are only a few exchanges on how exactly these plans were.
Many plans still rely on the intuition of the engineers.
Control the engineer’s intuition through a base rate
In the book “Thinking fast and slow,” Kahneman recommends a procedure to reign in our intuitions. He makes the following example.
“Julie read fluently at age four. What is her GPA? For Americans familiar with the grading system, an intuitive answer is close to 3.7.“
This intuitive estimation is based on shared factors influencing reading age and GPA.
However, this estimation completely ignores base rate effects.
Kahneman proposes a correction method
Estimate the average GPA (GPA=3.0)
Make your intuitive judgment (GPA=3.7)
Estimate the shared factors between information and base rate (30%)
Correct the average by the percentage of the distance 3 + 0.7 x 0.3 = 3.21
I wonder if we can apply this approach to software estimation.
A base rate planning algorithm
This is my take on yet another planning algorithm (YAPA). There are some shared factors between tasks.
The first obstacle is the characterization of tasks in categories. Is the task difficult or easy?
My suggestion is to use planning poker to value complexity and work amount.
In the second step, value how long it will take. Everybody is welcome to add his two cents.
Then rate the familiarity of the task and the shared factors for the people performing the task. It should be evident that people perform depending on understanding.
Then use the familiarity to move from the average time of such a task to the intuitive judgment.
On completion of the task, modify the base rate of the task category.
The five YAPA planning steps:
Establish a base rate: use planning poker to give story points. Value complexity and work amount of the task.
Predict how long it will take.
Rate the familiarity with the work (shared factors).
Move the familiarity percentage of the difference to the base rate.
Retrospectively update the base rate data
Has anybody tried such a system?
I have to admit; it seems pretty onerous to establish a base rate for different categories.
Human brains work with stories. If you have read only a handful of articles about this topic, you know that a story is helpful in convincing people. Stories are the second best thing next to the experience. Stories act as a simulator, allowing the reader to live the story mentally.
But what makes a good story, and why are some stories better than others? Extensive literature exists on this topic, for example, the book storytelling animal.
Today I want to write about what makes some stories more appealing than others and the role our mind plays.
Be consistent with the reader
We commonly understand a story’s consistency to be within the story itself. But this is only one-half of the medal. Good stories arise if the consistency stretches from the past experiences of the listener over the entirety of the story.
Long stories usually require a long time to achieve this consistency. Some books feel dull in the beginning. Slow. Nothing seems to happen. But suddenly, you find yourself sucked into it. Characters and actions become consistent.
Bring the reader into the story
Other stories, usually the better ones, directly relate to something in our daily life. Take, for example, Harry Potter. The first few pages of the first book describe the everyday life of many children. Every person can relate to these events. Fantasy elements only start appearing by and by, allowing us to catch up. Wands and flying brooms suddenly seem very consistent in this world.
Start where the people are
Use this gradual approach in your presentations. The audience needs to hear information consistent with their worldview. Any full-blown confrontation with controversial facts will lead to strong resistance.
Usage of shared experiences as priming
Imagine that you talk to climate change deniers. If you would state the experimental data and then open a discussion, you will only face a wall. However, if you slowly evoke memories of cold winters and emotional elements of increasing weather catastrophes, even the most outspoken deniers will start to discuss these events.
This effect is related to priming. You have set the baseline for your data by recalling singular events that may never have been an objective baseline. Recall today’s weather disasters and profoundly affect the listener’s consciousness. The vivid images will replace any memory of his comfy warm armchair.
Usage of priming in your meetings
A good example is the typical meeting check-in. You can ask everybody on Monday how he is feeling today. Many people are ignorant of those meeting tricks.
But you can influence the response by talking about something good that happened during the last work week. It is essential to speak of shared memory and direct the focus on positive thoughts. There is nothing to gain if you talk about your fancy weekend.
In addition, most people feel happier during their personal life than their professional life. The workweek memory establishes a positive baseline.
Usually, people want to share something equally lovely or more admirable. As a result, they will focus on what was even more positive on their weekend.
Relate unknown things to known things
Sometimes it isn’t easy to describe the quality of a new thing. How would you describe the internet to someone from the 17th century?
You can use a long explanation of what it can do and where it is. Still, you may fail.
Better are phrases like, “the internet lets you have the world’s wisdom at your fingertip.”
Make it concrete: “The internet lets you see the number of cows in your country as quickly as the content of your storage cupboard.”
Relate information by matching across different dimensions, like speed and information retrieval: “You can speak to distant relatives as quickly as water flows from your tap.”
This last approach is the most difficult to come up with but bridges the widest gap of understanding.
Next time you present something, think about the listener’s world.
Do you sometimes wonder why we remember certain things and others not?
How was your day? Was it a good day? Or was it not so good?
The optimists will say it was not as good as tomorrow because tomorrow will always be better.
But here comes the tricky question:
Was today better than yesterday?
And if yesterday was not so good, how was your last month?
For those that had a bad day yesterday, the last month was quite ok. For the others, the previous month was also quite ok.
?? Does it mean we are all feeling equal about our lives?
Experience vs. Memory
We all experience daily ups and downs. The anger, the joy, and the bitterness. But our mind has a natural tendency to forget the negative emotions and, as such, the attached bad events.
Our remembered emotional curve gets smoothed out as we try to remember farther back.
Regression to the mean
Good days follow bad days. And the other way around. This pattern has an excellent explanation. Regression to the mean. The remembered emotions are the mean.
The daily ups and downs are the deviations from that mean. Bad days will always follow a long series of good days.
Regression is challenging to understand, and our mind has another natural tendency:
It searches for causes everywhere.
Remember your last mishap. We try to analyze and search for a cause. We would be far better to accept the reversal and think that tomorrow will always be better,
even though today was not good.
Shifting the mean
Now I wonder what we can do to shift the mean. Is it even possible? My takeaways from a quick google search :
As engineers, we love details. Nothing can be too complex. It is complexity itself that attracts us. What you should do instead.
In love with details
Let’s consider the 0.001 % corner case and make it 80 % of our work.
The problem: this level of detail is hard to impossible to explain. To get to 0.1 %, you must present the big picture and add some details. From there, it is still a way to go to 0.001 %.
It is impossible to tell the accurate picture to a novice in the field.
And most often, the novice in the field can be your customer or your boss.
Telling a story
The point is that 100 % truth is unnecessary to achieve the goal. The goal is to convince your customer/superior to provide additional funding for an idea you have.
It would be best if you instilled confidence that your idea is the one that can solve the problem.
Details add credibility
Well, then, let’s tell only a superficial account of our idea! What about this story: Man was born, angered the authorities, and was crucified?
Does it not sound too appealing? What about: Man was born, angered the authorities by declaring he was god’s son and delivering his message, for this, he was crucified.
The second one is much more interesting. It adds some intriguing detail to the story.
Now comes twitch. The religious blasphemers were only a tiny part of all the men born and crucified.
In other words, a more detailed story is less likely to occur. Details reduce the probability. But credible elements increase persuasiveness.
The brain does not understand relativity.
This logical fallacy comes from the fact that our brain is slow to process relative information. In many situations, we make quick guesses that rely on absolute numbers.
If you buy a drink for 5$ and get 0.5$ off during the happy hour, this sounds better than 5$ and 10% off.
50¢ is a level of detail that is easier to grasp than 10 %. And 0.5$ sounds better than 50¢.
Focus on the big picture
So next time, focus on the big picture, sprinkle it with some small convincing details, and avoid relative numbers.
The flow state allows us to shut down the controller instance in our brain. Everything seems to go smoothly. We experience that effortful tasks can make fun.
This emotional experience comes from a rise of dopamine and endorphins in your brain.
Some conditions are beneficial to arrive at the flow zone
being engaged in an effortful task
having a good mood or a happy life episode
low on depression
knowledge novices compared to experts
high faith in intuition
if they are (made to feel) powerful
In short, a young graduate with an inflated ego in charge of a small team or an important task will quickly arrive in the flow zone.
A mid-career engineer that has deep experience faced several setbacks at work, and just divorced is less likely to be in the flow zone.
If we experience flow together, we usually have the best time. Often this happens at perfect parties. Sometimes it can happen at work. Startups are among those workplaces where flow is the most common.
We all wish we were the young graduate again, working with his fellow beginners on a remarkable piece of technology. The world seemed limitless back then.
Flow is terrible for the holistic approach.
But did you ever work on a piece in flow mode and eventually recognize that you were doing a micro-optimization and completely lacked the big picture?
The controller in us keeps track of the big picture and what each of our actions adds to it. If we shut it off, we do what seems to be a very reasonable next step. Sometimes this next step leads us in the wrong direction.
If you are in a big office, you also face another problem. Interruptions of the zone are experienced as an annoyance. This comes done to a reduction of hormone release. While the exact processes are not yet fully understood, it is clear that the severe decline of endorphin release is experienced as an adverse event.
These negative emotions are undoubtedly destructive for you. It can also permanently affect your relationship to your coworkers. Their usually well-intended attempt to communicate with you provoked a negative feeling within you. Your cold response evoked a negative emotion in them and will lead to fewer communication attempts in the future.
What is better than flow to be a successful engineer?
Uncle Bob writes about his experience with Flow in “Clean Coder.” He highly warns us to enter the flow zone unprepared. We certainly will write better and faster code but often fail to consider external requirements for our code.
Later adaptions to the code will be necessary, potentially wrecking the beautiful flow code we created.
He recommends doing frequent breaks and switching activities to reactivate the internal controller. At the same time, he suggests pair programming as pairing would not allow flow.
This point does not entirely convince me. Two engineers who understand each other well and work in tandem can be so fixed on their solution that they forget the big picture. This is backed up by the evidence that two individuals can also arrive in the flow zone.
What is your opinion? Looking forward to your comment or mail.
So far, I have written 13 stories on medium over the last six months.
The number of views and reads I get varies from month to month but overall remains relatively low.
I have noticed that some stories seem to be more popular than others.
One thing I regularly ask myself: Is the problem in the title?
Burying the lead
There is the concept of burying the lead. The title should declare the main aim of the article. A novice fails by burying his most exciting fact under a lot of auxiliary information.
Sometimes one of my paragraph’s headings is more exciting than the article heading.
The only way to fix this is to write more and reflect on the titles. As a moonlight writer, I rarely have the time and energy to write hundreds of headlines to train my inner title generator.
Nevertheless, I guess that I will get better over time.
I am guilty of having 4 clipped sub-titles, amounting to roughly 25 % of my titles.
I changed that and vow to oversee the limit in the future.
Using headline analyzer
Software engineer that I am, I wondered if there is any software helping you get better. These analyzers could be rule-based or machine-learning-trained.
Sadly I found no machine learning-based solution. All solutions work with word bags and reading-level statistics.
These are the improvements to my current headings. I aimed to reach at least a score of 70 points.
The general pattern is that the headlines are longer and feature more attention-grabbing words.
There are different categories of words (e.g., power words or emotional words). I tried to have at least one word in each category.
At the same time, I wanted an intelligible sentence and one that partly reflects the content.
Before improvement
Old Score
After improvement
New Score
Are you mentally depleted?
41
know, if you unwisely exhausted your mental energy supply for the day
71
Effective cheating with statistics
51
2 intricate ways statistics can influence the perception of the truth
86
Why do we like other people?
63
How a good mood helps to smoothen things
75
Why nobody has built your leadership
60
World Sensation: Why remarkably nobody has built your leadership
77
Effective leaders listen for stories
56
Effective leaders listen for stories that touch the heart and mind
78
What medium user need to know about leadership
67
4 powerful secrets a medium user needs to know about leadership
92
Storytelling for engineers
33
The world requires influential engineers with a passion for stories
71
Self-organizing cross-functional teams need a cooperative environment
57
Successful cross-functional teams need the luxury of confidence and trust
73
Discover your team’s common story
39
Three old but trusted ways to reveal your team’s common story;
91
Spice up your presentations with some psychology
44
Good presenters embrace these psycho tips in their life
92
Try these tips before lunch to get more followers
57
Try these 9 tips to get more and stronger follower growth
81
Do you read?
37
Knowledge advice: 2 Ways to read a book and improve your understanding
89
Try these mental tricks to gain the upper hand in conflicts
64
Try these priceless mental tricks to gain the upper hand in pointless conflicts
71
Average Score
51
80
I raised my average score from 51 to 80 points. I must admit that most of the headings have a certain edge. They sound like many other social media posts.
What is your opinion? Should a new writer rely on the help of software to improve his headings?
Feeling stressed? Do you freak out about small things? You exhausted your supply of mental energy!
Read on to learn what mental energy is and why a lack of it is dangerous for you.
The concept of mental energy
Mental energy describes the concept that you have a limited energy reserve. Any thought requiring a lot of self-control draws on this energy. In the theory of the two minds, the intuitive and the rational mind, this is the energy that the rational mind consumes. Sometimes this energy is also associated with motivation or the drive to do something demanding.
When I mention a big white bear sitting next to you and smiling his toothy smile at you, try not to imagine this bear.
Remember the last emotional film you watched, and you wanted not to be seen crying or having wet eyes?
You should have studied for an exam in two days and were invited to a massive party.
Remember your first job when you wanted to impress and not disappoint your new boss.
When you try to be a better self. When you ignore other people’s bad behavior and instead react kindly and empathic to their problems, especially if it is one of your loved ones.
All these moments certainly drain your mental energy, and sometimes you may react in a way you regret later on.
Why mental depletion is dangerous
Just facing these situations is not a sign that you are depleted. In fact, mastering these situations can be seen as a sign of mental strength. If you have never faced such a situation, congratulations, you are a better human being than I am.
There are clear signs that you are mentally depleted and lost your motivation.
You abandon your diet plans and tell yourself this chocolate bar is the last for this week.
It is ok to buy this pair of shoes, the new SmartWatch. You have earned it after this stressful week.
Your workplace’s arch-enemy attacked you again today, but this time you beat back and insulted him in front of everybody else.
At the gym, you tell yourself that today is not the day to go hard on yourself.
Math never was your thing. We all get older, and there is certainly an easier way to solve complex problems than trying mental acrobatics.
In summary, it is dangerous to be mentally spent as you give in to your intuition and desires.
And that often means you will make mistakes you regret further down the road.
Sometimes intuition can be good. The problem is those wrong judgments are difficult to detect. Confidence in your decision is not a good diagnosis.
“Judgments that answer the wrong question can also be made with high confidence.” ,Kahneman
How to build up mental energy
Now we know what mental depletion is. Solutions exist to refill and enlarge our reservoir of energy.
Some Tips that I found:
Increase your mood by watching comedy. Cat pictures help.
Focus on the big picture allows you to overcome short-term lows.
Repeat your values to yourself to collect strength.
Take a break by pursuing activities you like.
Sleep.
Deep Breathing and Meditation.
How not to drain other people’s energy
It is not only our energy that is important but also the energy of our fellow human beings. Spending time with unmotivated and depleted people is less fun and, in turn, decreases your motivation.
In return, it is also essential not to drain too much energy in your communication. If your listeners experience cognitive stress, they spend more energy.
If you present a complex fact, you can help the audience to understand the truth. Use appropriate diagrams and highlight parts by stressing points on slides.
A mentally spent audience requires far more assistance to understand a complex topic. Do not use any complex language, complex names, etc. Quotes from difficult and unknown names are less easy to remember. Verses and figurative language make things more memorable. And easy to remember means often that it is true.
Use any tricks described in “how to be liked” to appear more familiar to your audience. Talk in their language.
Discover two intricate ways statistics can influence the perception of the truth.
Statistics are truth
Today everything revolves around the truth. Just ask Donald Trump at https://truthsocial.com. Statistics are an excellent way to provide proof of the fact.
At least, that is what everybody should believe.
Every presenter should have an intended outcome in mind. We want to inform or influence a decision. Every issue has pro and contra arguments.
Statistics can help us to make the pro points more potent and the contra points weaker. The statistics serve as a quantitative anchor to your position. Read on to learn how you can twist statistics to your cause.
Statistics and the audience’s attention span
Many people assume that a fact is a fact. As such, it does not matter where and when you present your statistics as long as you give them.
That is a gross mistake. You are undoubtedly familiar with the concept of attention span. Long monologues usually overload the listener’s attention and lead nowhere. However, even in a well-structured presentation, there are different levels of attention span.
For complex ideas, our attention span is usually concise. This is related to the concept of cognitive ease and confusion.
But there is also the effect of the structure of the presentation on the attention span. The built-up to the production of facts can lead to a different perception. This is related to the framing effect.
Confusing your audience
In the good old days, the general advice was that it was best not to confuse your audience. However, today many public figures do precisely this. They answer questions that were not asked or change the topic frequently. All this is interwoven with statistics. The audience is usually overwhelmed and will accept any proposal.
If you want to do this, I recommend the following article:
Dodge the question: Take any question as a starting point to divert to a topic of your choice.
Attack: Repeat the question and say it is wrong/unfair. Talk about something else.
Repeat the keywords: Talk about unrelated stuff, but mention the keywords. In the business world, also known as bullshit talk.
Joke: provide a joke to get laughter from the audience.
Talk the other down: talk about many, many things to cover up the question.
If you do not want to do that, follow my article on avoiding ego depletion.
Influencing the attention frame
You and the audience
In a presentation, there is always a relationship between the speaker and the audience. They may both be of the same group or not. The speaker may want to influence the audience, or he is a teacher.
The topic and the structure of the speech are important. More important are often the audience’s prior knowledge and their feelings towards the topics. These conditions set the stage.
What do you feel when you read the words: electric cars, climate crisis, milk, golf ball, abortion?
Do you have the same feelings and constant background thoughts for each word?
Influencing the background thoughts
Attentive listening is a challenging skill. Many people listen and directly think about what they have heard. They start processing and ordering the information. Direct processing allows us to anchor new knowledge with already existing concepts. However, it makes the reception of further information more error-prone. This kind of chatter in your head is hard to silence. The good news? You can assume that many in your audience are not listening. They will not spot minor errors in your reasoning.
There are different approaches to influence this chatter. Among these are your choice of words, the consistency of the information, and providing a sense of reliability.
Activity words lead to activity.
Imagine you want to promote your newest fitness gadget and spread the ideas of a fitness lifestyle.
You face a crowd of average Joes and Janes. They are familiar with the sport but know only a little about metabolism.
How do you set the stage for your pitch? Do you start with a lecture on the negative effect of fatty foods?
First, you must invoke the need for action. Do this by using active words. Talk about how you love to go hiking on the weekend. This reminds the audience of their weekend activities. The audience is waiting for some action and will likely lapse over a statistical mistake.
1 in 10 persons does not have a heart attack if he does sport. 2 in 10 persons of those use fitness gadgets. Fitness gadgets have a benefit.
This seems like a good deal. 2 are better than 1.
Another way to present the information would have been that 8 in 10 people are happy to do sport without gadgets. The data is essentially the same but less activating and does not fit the predisposition of the audience.
Provide a consistent story
A consistent story helps to reinforce any sentiments the audience had before. If you add details that do not fit, the audience becomes distracted. This is why so many scientists have a hard time presenting a good story. They want a complete picture describing any anomaly in the data.
However, it is not the complete picture, but the most consistent that convinces. Almost nobody is interested in the story of Gandalf’s youth in the story of lord of the rings.
A good story follows the concept that “What you see is all there is.” The speaker should reinforce this concept. The listener will automatically apply it. A consistent story is believed to be more accurate. This means consistency will lead to higher confidence in the speaker.
At the same time, a speaker that neglects details can also be more confident in himself. Daniel Kahneman explains this with our desire to see patterns:
“Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little and when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance”.
Providing a sense of (fake) reliability
There are mathematical formulas to express the accuracy of information. Intuitive sampling is often much too small and presents a systematic failure. Nevertheless, many sources only ask a few hundred people. Saying that 70 people asked 14 to use gadgets sounds far less impressive. The relevance is inflated by expressing it relative or in proportion to 10 or 100.
Talking about ten people adds a level of detail to the narrative. 10 out of 100 people is better visualizable than 10 %. Detailed stories are, therefore, more persuasive. The same applies to the question “how many?” vs. “what percentage?”.
From a statistical perspective, the inverse relation is true. More details make an event less likely and less likely to be true.
Much of business success stories and proven business methods rely on this approach. Success stories are cited as proof of a technique. One project’s success does not mean it is a suitable method for all projects. Still, this is an accepted approach in business writing and journalism.
But how are these methods successful? Whether we communicate with other people verbally or non-verbally, our brain processes any sensory input of our senses.
We perceive the singular input, like the smell of familiar food or the noise in our favorite bar, as a cue. If this cue is familiar to us, then we have a feeling of cognitive ease. We are happy to recognize something familiar. The same applies to abstract things like events, speech, or thoughts. The more we can rely on existing cues, the less alien something feels.
What influences cognitive ease in communication
Most people know that the clothes you wear must fit the occasion. Nobody comes in his holiday shorts to a job interview as a bank teller. Visual appearance, manners, and speaking style add to this equation. We perceive someone as likable if he dresses the same way as us and if he has the same values. And because he is likable, he seems more trustworthy. This halo effect relies on a feeling of cognitive ease.
In contrast, somebody unfamiliar to us will face the full force of our intellect. We analyze all his arguments with a lot more scrutiny. We observe and analyze more rationally.
Remember the feeling you have when you enter a new group. You are first aware of the differences or do not perceive any familiar cues. As a result, you experience neural stress. As soon as you get acquainted with the new situation, you start to relax.
How to fit in
You have undoubtedly encountered situations where some people seemed more equal than others. Be it at the selection for group contests or a work promotion. Rarely are people actively discriminated against. Instead, the choice was done because their message seemed easier to understand. And because it is easier, it looks better and more authentic.
If you do not fit in the system 100%, be it by gender, skin color, dress style, or attitude, then you must work extra hard to replace the missing cognitive ease with other factors that can smooth the way.
How a good mood helps to smoothen things
The other factor is mood. The mood is like the perceived safety of our surroundings. If an environment is not safe, we have a bad mood as we constantly need to watch our back. This is why office politics affects a workforce’s long-term happiness. Inversely, showing a good attitude can provide an image of safety to other people. This “artificial” good mood can act as a balance to the missing familiarity.
Therefore it is always good to show your bright side towards strangers and only complain towards your friends.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.
