Lesson #3: It's Nice to be Important, but It's More Important to be Nice

The title of this post is one of my favorite quotes of all time. The first time I heard this was when I was watching the Ellen DeGeneres show a several months ago. Dwyane "The Rock" Johnson was on the guest, and though I can't remember what he was responding to, he said, "It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice" and that's stuck with me ever since.

When we're young, one of the first things we are taught is to be nice. Nice was the cool thing to do; we liked our teachers because they were nice, or we thought a kid was cool because they were nice. As we moved from the stages of elementary school and onto secondary education and adulthood, I feel like we start to lose the idea that being nice is cool. We're attracted to people because they're good looking, they make us laugh, or they have a mystique to them; it's not because they're necessarily nice.

In the process of trying to appeal to people and gain popularity, people sacrifice kindness, which is just wrong. When someone is trying to be funny, they may do so by targeting someone's fault, which may hurt that person. When someone is trying to be smooth and cool (I read a study that showed that girls are attracted to guys who don't smile), they may be a bit cold and unfriendly to some people, which is definitely not nice. Being nice is an important trait that shouldn't be compromised.

One of my idols is Ellen DeGeneres and there are two things I love about her that relate to this lesson. One, in her monologues, unlike other talk show hosts, she doesn't bash other people in order to get laughs. And two, she always ends her show by saying, "Be kind" which I absolutely love. If everyone in the world were like Ellen, we'd all be living in a better place.

Too many times, I've been guilty of being a bit judgmental. I used to not like someone for specific reasons, maybe it was because they were extremely loud, or perhaps I thought they were a loner without friends. As I've grown, I've come to notice that some of the people who have little friends are some of the nicest people I know. Rather than coming up with a criteria for whether we want to be friends with someone, we should always heavily factor one question: Are they nice?