Rule 89. It Doesn’t Hurt to Be Helpful

We said in the previous Rule that the angry person you encounter may have had a bad day before getting to you. Let’s try to make it a good day for all of them before they get to someone else. Let’s spread a bit of goodwill around out there and then maybe, just maybe, mad cyclists won’t be quite so ready to rear up and be abusive and aggressive. Perhaps no one had been kind to him that day. Perhaps no one had been kind to him for a very long time. See, it’s all your fault. If only you’d been a bit nicer to him, he wouldn’t have taken out his wet angst on the rest of us that day.

Always offering a hand and being generally decent to everybody is really easy once we get into the mindset that it’s what we are supposed to be doing. It can become your “default” behavior. So your first reaction becomes, “Yes, sure, I can show you how to do that, no problem,” rather than, “I’m very busy; can’t you ask someone else?”