Love Lives in the Details

Does It Matter If … ?

Everybody knows that love lies in the little things.

You don’t love “books”—you love this kind of book, written by this specific author.

You don’t love “food,” you don’t even love “Mexican food”—you love al pastor tacos with no cilantro, and the best in the world are made by that hole-in-the-wall taco stand on the main street of Encinitas.

You don’t love “people”—you love this particular person, because of their crooked smile after they make that self-deprecating joke about their singing voice, because they can really wear a suit, because their whistling when they’re content reminds you of a cat’s purr. The details, when it comes to love, they’re just everything. We all know this. We’ve all felt this.

So why the heck do we forget this when it comes to which activities or situations or behaviors we love? Why do we make do with generalizations?

“She just loves a challenge!” someone’s parents say proudly.

Really? Does it matter what sort of challenge? Does she love all challenges, or only those where she feels super-prepared? Or maybe it’s the opposite—maybe she loves only challenges where she has to react instinctively, and where, if she fails, she can console herself with the fact that she wasn’t actually expected to prevail.

Which is it? They’re totally different, and would lead her and her parents to set her up in completely different ways.

“He’s so good with people!” a boss writes in someone’s performance review.

Really? Which kind of people? Is he “so good” with people he doesn’t know yet and has to win over? Or “so good” at building deep trust with those he’s already acquainted with?

And how about a verb? What precisely is he doing with these people he’s so good with? Is he so good at selling to them, or teaching them, or calming them, or making them laugh, or remembering their names, or inspiring them? Each of these is starkly different from the others. Which is it with him?

One of the chief causes of our epidemic of anxiety and alienation is that both schools and workplaces appear impatient with, and deeply uninterested in, these sorts of details. They rely instead on the comfort of generalizations. All boys are like this, all girls are like that. All English people are like this, all Pakistanis like that. All salespeople want to get paid on commission, all customer service people don’t. All engineers are socially awkward, all nurses are instinctively empathetic. All teachers are warm, all administrators are pragmatic.

Of course, none of this is so. One Pakistani woman in software sales is very different in what she loves about herself, her activities, and her interactions with people than another Pakistani woman on the sales team. Yes, they are being paid to achieve the same outcomes—sales—but how they do it and which bits of it they love the most vary significantly between them.

The goal of school and work—and parents—should be to help very different people put ever-increasing detail to the specificity of their loves and loathes, what strengthens them and what depletes them. For each of them, these details will lead to greater fulfillment and agency, yes, but also performance and resilience. These details are love’s raw material.

How to Write a Love Note

Since school and work—and parents—can’t be counted on to take your details seriously, it will fall to you to watch out closely for the fine shadings of what you love. One simple way to do this is to write for yourself a love note. Begin with the phrase “I love it when … ” and then complete the sentence. The key to doing this effectively, with detail, is to ask yourself five “Does it matter?” questions.

For example, if your sentence is “I love it when I am helping people,” then ask yourself:

Does it matter who the people are?

Does it matter when you help them?

Does it matter why you’re helping them?

Does it matter what you’re helping them with?

Does it matter how you’re helping them?

With each question, your statement will become just that little bit more precise. Not that this statement is permanent—you might come up with a different set of details next year or the year after—but for right now, the focus is on pushing you to name, claim, and understand the detail of your loves. Because there, in the detail, lives agency. There, in the detail, you can find yourself.

I was working with the career counselor Donnie Fitzpatrick, from chapter 2, on how to apply this technique to his students. He described how he’d modified it in such a way that even they, at their relatively young age, could start feeling ownership for the detail of their loves. He gave each of his students an empty cardboard box at the beginning of the year. He called this their Voice Box. Here’s what he told them:

At the start of the year, each one of you has an empty box. During the course of this year, we’re going to do a bunch of stuff that’ll cause you to look at yourself and start putting details into your box. You can put books in there, or music, or sports stuff, or video games. Anything you want. You can even write or color on the inside and outside of your box if you’d like.

He told me about his Voice Box idea and asked me to come up and check it out. So on the day I visited he took me to his classroom, and there, piled high on shelves, were scores of boxes. The ones at the bottom were blank inside and out. But as my eyes moved up the shelves, the boxes became ever more colorful and filled with the details of each student’s life. The ones on the very top shelf—the boxes of the students furthest along in the class—were daubed with paint and scribbles of sayings and quotes on the outside, and on the inside were full to bursting, like a pillowcase on Christmas morning.

Donnie reached up, pulled one down, carefully moved aside some of the precious items in the box, and extracted a two-by-four piece of card on which the student had written a statement in bright pink Sharpie.

“I love this one,” he said. “This is a love note from a student who, before we did this Voice Box activity, would sit silently in the back of the room. That is, if he showed up at all—so many of these kids don’t see school as a tool to learn about their uniqueness because we don’t go deep enough in framing it that way. Many see it simply as something to endure. It’s little wonder that some students can’t see the point of school.”

“Now they’ve been given a way to reclaim their voice, to hear it for themselves, and with their voice comes a place, and a mark in the world, and a future. This kid, he’s here every day now. Sits right in front.”

Donnie turned the card over and showed me what the student had written:

I love it when …

   I’m playing my twelve-string guitar

      A piece I wrote myself

         To a small group of people

            Who I know really well.

“Did you know he played the guitar?” I ask Donnie.

“Nope, no idea. I still don’t even know if he’s any good. But do you see the detail?”

“Yes. What do you think it all means?”

“Well, right, I didn’t know either. So, I asked him. Apparently, it has to be a twelve-string guitar because the tone is more full, and to him the tone matters a lot. It has to be a piece he wrote himself because otherwise it ‘doesn’t mean anything.’ It has to be a small group of people because otherwise he can’t see whether or not his music has touched them. And it has to be people he knows well because he knows they will love him, not judge him.”

That’s detail. That’s love. That’s a teacher taking the time and the rigor to help one kid define and own the specifics of what he loves. It might be the first time this kid had his loves taken seriously. Would he become a professional musician? Probably not. Would he develop other loves, with different details, over the course of his life? Probably. But for now, for today, his voice was heard, and he was seen.

If you want to see yourself, if you want to claim your own voice and own your own future, then ask yourself those five “Does it matter?” questions. Don’t be satisfied with vague generalities. Really push yourself to land on some telling specifics. Things about you that only you know. Your journey to the heart of you is paved with detail.

The Curious Case of the Stammer in the Chapel

One June morning in 1978—I was twelve years old—I walked by the notice board at school and saw that I was one of only five boys who had been selected to read aloud in chapel before the term ended in early July.

I thought it must be a mistake—of all the boys in my class why would they have picked me?—but it wasn’t. There, in headmaster Mr. Pratt’s neat blue felt-tip handwriting, was my name under the date, June 12.

I was terrified. And mortified. I couldn’t introduce myself, couldn’t say my own name, couldn’t carry on a normal conversation with another person. How the heck was I going to be able to stand up in front of the entire school and read aloud? The pressure would be so extreme I wouldn’t be able to get a single word out. And worse, as I walked numbly back to my classroom, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to rely on my synonym trick—substituting a word I could say for one that blocked me—since everyone in the chapel would have the piece in their Bible study books and would notice if I tried to swap out words.

My life at school was over.

The next morning, the chaplain finishes his bit and then calls on me for the reading. I stand up from my spot at the end of the pew, walk to the lectern, and turn to face the school. Everything is moving very slowly. I stare down at the words on the page. I can feel my stammer stare with me, assessing the words, uncoiling.

A big breath in. I gaze over the faces of all the boys, all the teachers, the formality of the occasion and the space, I let out the breath and prepare to speak.

And then, suddenly, somehow, I do. The words come fluently. A warm feeling locates itself in my brain, then all around my head. It feels like a humming, like an unlocking, and the words keep flowing, all the way to the end of the piece. Four hundred people. Not a single stutter.

Well, not quite. I think I bobbled a bit on the word “criticism,” but not really in a stutter-y way. It sounded normal, like what a normal kid might do when trying to read aloud in front of the school. I sounded like a normal kid. I was, somehow, a normal kid.

I wish I could tell you what my trick was, but I honestly have no idea what happened. I think it worked precisely because I wasn’t trying to beat my stammer with some conscious trick. I just stood up there, saw all the faces, and these very faces, which should have applied intense pressure, did the exact opposite. They released me.

I remember walking back to my pew, kneeling down, and marveling at what happened. I knew I hadn’t actually done anything to conquer my stutter—I hadn’t overcome it or faced up to it or worked at it. Instead, the situation had worked on me—the sight of all those people had created a specific mechanism that had operated on me. I couldn’t speak in front of one person, but stand me up in front of four hundred, and those faces staring up at me did something physiological in my brain. That warm feeling in my head was my synapses firing in a way they didn’t when I was talking just to one person. And this new firing pattern gave instructions to my vocal chords, and out came fluent speech. The words flowed smoothly, the time whipped by, I disappeared into the act itself—and wow, I just loved it. It was the reddest of red threads.

When it comes to love, the details matter. I couldn’t speak to one person. Add three hundred ninety-nine more, and all of a sudden I could.

And this love then served as the integrating point for learning. If I could speak fluently only in front of four hundred people, then why not pretend to myself that I was always talking to four hundred people? This strategy sounds perverse—speaking in front of a large group of people is supposed to be a stutterer’s worst nightmare, and can be found in precisely zero speech pathology manuals—and yet it worked for me. Each time I tried to talk to a friend in the schoolyard and my stammer began to coil itself around my throat, I would visualize four hundred people, feel the love of this rush through my system, and instantly the stammer would shrivel away, and the words flowed.

My stammer was gone in a week—and in such a permanent way that the next school I went to, and at my college, and at my job, no one even knew I’d ever had one.

Looking back, I realize that I didn’t beat my stammer. Instead, I just turned my attention toward something specific that I loved—this detailed red thread—and hung on tight. This thread lifted me up and up as I watched my stammer vanish to nothingness beneath me.

To identify the detail of your red threads, return to the Red Thread Questionnaire one more time.

Your goal is to list at least three activities—although more than three is absolutely fine—where you saw or felt one of the three signs of love: you instinctively volunteer for it; you disappear within it and time rushes by; you feel mastery at it.

Write these activities down and then, for each one, ask yourself those “Does it matter?” questions.

Does it matter who you’re doing it with?

Does it matter when you do this?

Does it matter why you’re doing this?

Does it matter what the focus or the subject is?

Does it matter how you’re doing it?

Each question will push you for that one additional detail, that one specific characteristic that can transform a colorless thread into something spiritually uplifting. And each answer, each precise detail, will give you power. Through your answers, you’ll learn how to use your own loves to identify your reddest threads, so you can then weave them into contribution.

What a gift to give yourself.