Today is National Be Nice Day. Periodically, I check the National Day Calendar to see what special days are coming up. I do this partly for my own amusement (What’s more amusing than discovering it’s National Sneak Some Zucchini Into Your Neighbor’s Porch Day?) and partly because I sometimes, like today, happen upon material for a related blog.
The National Day Calendar website usually lists its entries’ origins. For instance, National Sneak Some Zucchini Into Your Neighbor’s Porch Day was started by Tom and Ruth Roy—curators of more than eighty Calendar entries, including such gems as No Socks Day, Cat Herders’ Day, and Blah Blah Blah Day.
The Roys created their zucchini holiday as a way to “donate” their unusually bountiful zucchini harvest to their unsuspecting neighbors.
I wondered how National Be Nice Day came to be. Who championed the idea? What event or series of events led to its creation? To my disappointment, the National Day Calendar website provided no details, and despite my quasi-exhaustive research (I clicked through 40+ pages of Google search results), I was unable to unearth a backstory.
This left me to fill in the details with my own unsubstantiated—yet probably right—speculations.
At some point in history, somebody grew so tired of dealing with mean, selfish people that they lost their wits. They then proceeded to scream in a never-witnessed-before manner: Why can’t they just be nice?
The deeper I dive into the art of being a good teammate, the more probable I find that scenario to be. Dealing with the un-nice can be maddening.
Plenty of people think they are nice, but they aren’t. Their flawed self-assessment stems from their lack of understanding of the comprehensiveness of the term.
The dictionary offers at least eight different meanings of nice (pleasant, agreeable, kind, etc.). The thesaurus provides more than ninety synonyms (cordial, tactful, virtuous, etc.). People mistakenly take a cafeteria approach to the word. They try to pick and choose which meanings they want to apply.
They’re pleasant, but they’re not necessarily virtuous. They’re agreeable, but they’re not necessarily tactful. To be nice, all the meanings must apply. (All the meanings are also all attainable!)
Much like being a good teammate, being nice is nothing more than a choice. The question, therefore, isn’t so much Why can’t they be nice? as it is Why do they not choose to be nice?
The answer is fear. They’re scared of being taken advantage of. They’re scared of being rejected. They’re scared of what being nice might cost them (reputation, status, victories, etc.).
I say hogwash to all those objections. They’re all byproducts of selfishness.
The great Bear Bryant famously stated, “It costs nothing to be nice.” And he was right. It’s nice to be nice.
I’ve written about the undeserving stigma attached to being nice on a previous occasion (Nice Guys Are the Only Ones Who Finish). Those scared of the costs of being nice lack vision. They are shortsighted.
Being nice is an investment. Like all great investments, it can take time for the venture to pay dividends. Whether people are nice to you to or not, choose to be nice to them. Because in the end, the investment isn’t in others, it’s in yourself.
How you treat others—how nice you are—will be the measure of your life.
As always…Good teammates care. Good teammates share. Good teammates listen. Go be a good teammate.
