Turn Your Worst Enemy into a Shiny Mineral

A magical way to reframe a challenge and improve your perspective on people

This week I caught up with a friend I met when her company bought my startup. We went through the list of people we worked with there, trading stories on who’s doing what now. She mentioned someone that neither of us enjoyed working with and remarked, “You sure are able to hide your true feelings when someone’s being a jerk…I wish I had that power.”

I had not thought about that as a “skill” in some time—it’s certainly something you can’t tag connections with on LinkedIn. But the person she mentioned did force me to learn something that has helped my life tremendously.

Earning the Out

We sold our startup to a large tech company with over 1000 employees and 20 years of history. While it, too, was once a fast-moving startup, the company and product had matured to the point where some leaders became more focused on playing power games for personal benefit than looking out for their teams and the shareholders. I’ve worked for and with big companies for most of my career, so I’ve seen all the political games played. But I chose to go the entrepreneurial path in large part to get away from playing them. And in building my own companies, I aggressively rooted out these culture killers.

When our company was acquired, the purchase came with an 18-month earnout. More than half of the purchase price—and almost all value that would go to me and my employees—depended on working with our acquirer to bring our product to their existing customer base. So now I was embedded back into a BigCo and challenged to fit in.

I met hundreds of new people and had to navigate many moving people parts. One of my strategies was to go back to something I did in my corporate days: I built a habit of putting people in either a “Good” or “Bad” bucket based on a few data points of personal interactions.

On Day 3 of our acquisition—with 545 days to go—I had a first meeting with a key leader in the BigCo. Five minutes in, he was presenting PowerPoint slides about how he planned to carve up our business and split my people up into his org chart. Fortunately, I parried his attack that day, but it was just the first of many fights.

I was playing defense, with company investors and employees counting on me, working against a guy who was out to destroy “My Baby” and break up my dream team. He represented the opposite of who I am and everything I stand for—the Anti-Bob.

He was a company veteran, close to the CEO, and had built an internal network that Littlefinger would envy. My team knew I was on a call with him when I stormed around the office, seeing red. I couldn’t fight, and there was no one to complain to. So I went book shopping.

Reading is Fundamental

A few years ago, I discovered the author Robert Greene. He has written multiple best-selling books on how humans behave, with topics including War, Power, Mastery, and Seduction. His skill is blending historical examples with his first-hand experience in corporate boardroom battles. I’ve gone back to his books many times for many reasons over the years. He had just released his book The Laws of Human Nature when I started wrestling with corporate politics, and I quickly scanned for some lifeline of help.

Just a few pages in, I discovered this gem of a quote:

“If you come across any special trait of meanness or stupidity . . . you must be careful not to let it annoy or distress you, but to look upon it merely as an addition to your knowledge—a new fact to be considered in studying the character of humanity. Your attitude towards it will be that of the mineralogist who stumbles upon a very characteristic specimen of a mineral.” – The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene

A light went on for me…Yes, every person is a unique “shiny mineral”—interesting and worthy of study. I needed to pull back from being a victim and instead take the perspective of a sociologist. Remove the emotion, and turn the person into a puzzle to solve.

Over the next few weeks, I trained myself to trigger “shiny mineral” whenever this bureaucrat made my blood boil. It quelled my anger, allowing me to make better decisions, strategize around him, and move on in my life. I taught Shiny Mineral to my leadership team, and we kept ourselves honest by invoking the phrase when one of us was whining.

Not long afterward, we cracked his code; he was no longer a blocker, we maxed out our earnout and lived happily ever after.

Today when I come across a challenging person, my initial reaction is to smile and think, "shiny mineral.” And I realized that this person gave me a gift by forcing me to grow and improve as a human. I got rid of my “Good” and “Bad” buckets for labeling people. There’s no way in hell he’s reading this, but if he is—I offer a hearty Thank You!

Other Reframing Tips for Difficult People

Since this experience, I have discovered and used other reframing models to help overcome my emotional frustrations and advance my causes. Here are a few that have stuck in my playbook:

• Negative emotions are a choice - All this stuff is in your head. If you let another person bother you, that’s you choosing to let them in. This makes an angry reaction even worse. Not only do you feel bad at the moment they hurt you, but they keep hurting you the more you think about it.

• Feel sorry for them - People who harm others are almost always victims themselves. They have had rough childhoods, never learned how to work well with others, or might have family problems at home. They may not know the harm they are bringing to others. And all of it eventually is going to bite them in the end. It’s not karma. It’s the odds.

• What can I learn from this person? - When you play a videogame and get to a “Boss” at the end of a level, do you bitch about it? Of course not! You see it as a fun, sometimes frustrating, challenge; that’s what the game is about. Life is a game.

• Some people don’t like me, either - Look, I’m sure I’ve rubbed a bunch of people the wrong way after decades in the workplace. As a fast-moving startup founder with a high-pressure earnout goal to hit, I’m sure people saw me as a bull in a china shop. Give others a break just as you hope they give one to you.

We’re all flawed humans trying to make our way in this world. To succeed, we must learn to cooperate with all kinds of people, including those we dislike. The way to win is to learn to better control the one person you can: Yourself.

Bob Gilbreath is a 2x-exit entrepreneur and co-founder of Hearty, a curated matchmaking service that combines top software developers with early-stage, venture-backed startups.