These are quotes that stood out to me from Tim Gunn’s book “Gunn’s Golden Rules.” A lot of them really struck a chord with me so I wanted to share.
“I reflect on manners, or the lack of them, each and everyday. There are times when I want to stop the world for a moment and ask certain people some probing questions (….) in the Internet age, even the very word manners seems antiquated.”
“I used to host a wonderful fashion scholarship dinner. I did it for five years in a row. But the last time I did it, it was horribly managed. Every decision made around the event was terrible and the people organizing it were completely dismissive of every concern I had. I just hated the whole thing. So I said to myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I thought, this is something I was doing to be nice, and it’s no longer fun to do, so I’m going to bow out for next year and let someone else do it.”
(Having been in a similar situation back in school, reading that made me feel better about my own decision to bow out.)
“I like the idea of always learning. Always. If you’re not learning, what makes you want to get up in the morning?”
“When you see someone who is doing a job you wouldn’t want to do, you should simply think, There but for the grace of God go I.”
On “old fashioned” acts of politeness, such as holding the door open for people:
“It has to do with noticing our fellow human beings and saying, ‘I recognize that you’re on the planet, and I don’t want a door hitting you in the face’.”
“Honestly, I don’t understand how people can navigate the world and pretend no else exists.”
“Fighting by email is bad, too. I’m all for writing down the angry e-mail, but don’t send it. That carefully crafted note never has the effect you want it to have. It just inflames the situation. Print it out and then delete it.”
“You can tell when what you’re doing is what you’re meant to be doing. If it’s fun, and satisfying, and comes together in a great way, then you know that’s something you’re in someway destined to do. If it feels dishonest, it probably is.”
On giving advice & critiques:
“Context is everything – for clothes, for behavior and for expectations. Truth telling is good, but you also have to accept the conditions as they are (….) The question I ask myself before giving advice is: Is what you want to say really going to help them?”
“You can be too rich and too thin, but you can ever be too well read or too curious about the world.”
“That is one thing I try to keep in mind when I talk about people’s behavior. I believe very strongly that we should all try our best to treat one another well, but I also know that some people who are difficult are doing their best, only their best isn’t all that great. I used to be much more hard-nosed about this and about a lot of other things. But that moment when I opened up the check from my father taught me that I didn’t actually know everything about him. He had things going on inside his head that I never knew and that I will probably never understand.
When someone does something cruel or rude now, I think of that.”
It’s a really great book and I definitely recommend picking it up if you have the chance.