A car flew past us in the left lane on I-77 last week, easily 90 in a 65. My five-year-old (same kid who ate breakfast in the bathtub last week) watched it disappear ahead of us and asked, "Dad, why is he driving so fast?"

I thought about it for a second. Then I told him about a rule my wife and I try to live by.

It's not something we say out loud.

My wife picked it up years ago from Tricia Griffith, the CEO of Progressive. She brought it home, and it stuck. We didn't hang it on the fridge. It's just something we remind ourselves, or each other, when we're stressed or really annoyed. The rule is "assume positive intent."

But my son asked a direct question and I gave him the real answer. "Maybe he's late for something important. Maybe his wife is having a baby. Maybe he just got a call that his dad is sick. We don't know. So we're going to assume he has a good reason."

He thought about that for a minute and said, "Or maybe he just wants to get home."

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech in 2005 called "This Is Water."

The speech is about one idea: your default setting as a human is self-centeredness because we experience everything in the first person. Everyone in the grocery store line is in your way. Every slow driver is inconveniencing you. Every irritating coworker is doing it on purpose.

Wallace's argument is that the actual point of being an adult is learning to override that default. Not because the people around you deserve charity. Because the alternative, walking around assuming the worst about everyone, is a terrible way to live.

The part that stuck with me is that you get to choose what the mundane, frustrating parts of your day mean. The traffic. The slow line. The guy flying past you at 90. You can decide he's a selfish jerk. Or you can accept you don't know his story, and it probably isn't about you.

You can choose either interpretation but only one of them doesn't wreck your afternoon.

The same principle applies at work.

An employee misses a deadline. The default read is lazy or careless. The charitable read is they're buried, or something broke at home, or they didn't understand the priority. The charitable read is almost always closer to the truth, and even when it isn't, starting there gets you to a better conversation.

A client pushes back hard on a proposal. Default: they're being difficult. Charitable: they got burned before, or their boss is breathing down their neck, or they genuinely see something I missed.

My wife sends a curt email. Default: she's mad at me. Charitable: she's in back-to-back meetings and typed it in 30 seconds between calls.

I'm not saying you ignore bad behavior. You still hold people accountable. You still address problems directly. But if you start from the generous interpretation instead of the suspicious one, over years, in a marriage, on a team, in a business, the compounding is enormous.

This is the internal version of what I've been writing about.

The last seven issues have been about external action. Build the thing. Make the call. Ship the imperfect version. Make yourself replaceable.

But there's an internal game running underneath all of that, and it matters just as much. How you interpret the world while you're doing the work. What story you tell yourself when things go sideways. Whether your default is "everyone is against me" or "everyone is just trying to get home."

This week's takeaway:

Next time someone does something that irritates you — a driver, an employee, your spouse, a stranger — give them the most generous possible explanation before you respond. Not because they've earned it. Because you have.

⚡ ONE MORE THING

If you've never heard "This Is Water," it's free on YouTube. 22 minutes. Probably the best commencement speech of the last 30 years, and it gets better every time I listen. Wallace killed himself three years after giving it, which makes the whole thing hit differently. The speech is basically him explaining a battle he would eventually lose.

— Matt

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