The Golden Rule Isn’t Enough

I’ve been thinking about the Golden Rule lately.

Treat people the way you want to be treated.

It’s something I’ve carried with me for most of my life, and I still think there is a lot of wisdom in it.

It forces you to consider someone other than yourself. Before you do something, you imagine what it would feel like if it were done to you.

Marriage, though, has been teaching me that this might only be the starting point.

My wife and I are different enough that treating her exactly the way I would want to be treated can sometimes have the opposite effect of what I intended.

I tend to respond well to challenge. If you show me where something can be better, my mind immediately starts working on it.

Give me a problem and I’m usually more energized by figuring out the solution than discouraged that the problem exists.

That has served me pretty well as an engineer.

It doesn’t always serve me as well as a husband.

Something I mean as encouragement can land as criticism. A solution that would make me feel better can make my wife feel like I missed what she was actually trying to communicate.

There are moments when I’m trying to help solve the thing in front of us while what she really needs is appreciation, reassurance, praise, affection, or for me to simply understand how she feels.

Neither one of us is necessarily wrong. We’re just different.

This keeps bringing me back to the garden metaphor I’ve been writing about over the past several weeks.

You wouldn’t walk into a garden and decide that because one plant responds well to a certain amount of water, every plant should receive exactly the same amount.

Some need more sun. Some need shade. Some need pruning. Others need to be left alone long enough to grow.

Even the same plant may require different care in a different season.

Good tending requires paying attention to what is actually in front of you.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize I learned a version of this lesson a long time ago.

My first internship in college was at General Motors in Saginaw, Michigan. I worked in a foundry where we were close to the very beginning of making parts that would eventually go into engines.

It was a dirty place.

Hot, loud, industrial, with molten metal and massive equipment doing work at a scale I had never experienced before.

What I remember now, though, is that even inside one factory there wasn’t one universal way of doing everything.

There were older processes that used sand molds and poured metal. There were newer methods that used foam, and while I was there we were working around even newer equipment and processes that were being installed.

They all ultimately helped us make engines, but the systems themselves were different. They required different knowledge, different maintenance, and different kinds of attention.

There were also different seasons of work inside the factory.

At times we were installing equipment or improving the physical line. At other times something needed maintenance or repair.

But eventually the line had to run.

You couldn’t shut down production every time somebody thought of another improvement. At some point you needed to see the system operate and actually make engines. Running the line would often teach you something that planning and improving it never could.

I hadn’t thought about that internship this way until recently, because more than twenty years later I’m building another kind of factory.

I’ve been calling it my software factory.

The idea is to stop rebuilding the same foundation every time I create a new product. Authentication, databases, deployment, transcription, notifications, testing, and other pieces can be standardized and reused so more of my attention can go toward what makes the product itself useful.

But I’m running into the same lesson I saw at GM.

Just because the products come through the same factory doesn’t mean they should all come out the same.

One of the things I’m building needs to be primarily a mobile app. Another makes more sense on the web. One relies heavily on voice capture. Another needs background processing. They can share a tremendous amount underneath without requiring identical experiences on top.

The factory gives me a common foundation while leaving room for the product to tell me what it needs.

I’m beginning to think a marriage needs something similar.

There should be some things that are consistent: honesty, trust, generosity, affection, communication, presence.

But the expression of those things has to account for the actual person you are loving.

This is where the Golden Rule starts to feel incomplete to me.

Maybe treating people the way you want to be treated is a good place to begin.

But loving someone well requires learning them well enough to understand how they need to be loved.

I’ve also noticed that learning someone means understanding that what appears to be happening in one moment may not be the entire story.

There have been moments lately when my wife has been frustrated by something and my first instinct has been to look at the immediate problem. If I can see a reasonable solution, I can have trouble understanding why the emotion doesn’t disappear once the solution becomes obvious.

What I’m learning is that the problem in front of me may only be the place where everything else is finally showing up.

Maybe there have already been several disappointments. Maybe she has been giving more than I noticed, adjusting more than I realized, or carrying something I wasn’t paying attention to.

Solving the visible problem doesn’t necessarily address any of that.

I’m trying to get better at being curious before becoming corrective.

What is actually happening here? What am I not seeing yet? What does she need from me in this moment?

Those are different questions than, “How do we fix this?”

And then there is the other lesson from the factory that I keep coming back to.

The line has to run.

I can spend so much time noticing how something could be improved that improvement itself becomes the default way I relate to it.

I do this with software. I do it with my routines. I do it with myself.

And I can do it with my marriage.

There is always another conversation we could have, another pattern we could understand, another thing we could do better.

But we didn’t build a marriage so that we could spend the rest of our lives working on our marriage.

We built it because we wanted a life together.

That life also needs to be lived.

This week that has looked like watching *The Traitors* together, a show my wife introduced me to. We watched the new season and now we’re planning to go back through some of the older ones.

There isn’t really anything productive about that.

Which might be exactly the point.

A few weeks ago I wrote about learning to enjoy the life I created. I think I’m still learning the same lesson from another direction.

Not everything I’m responsible for needs my improvement at every moment.

Some things need maintenance. Some need a change. Some need more attention than they’ve been getting.

And some things need me to stop tinkering with them long enough to enjoy what is already working.

This is also changing how I think about capacity.

For a long time, I think I associated having more capacity with being able to carry more: more responsibility, more ambition, more projects, more opportunity.

Now I’m starting to think capacity has just as much to do with knowing what the things you already carry actually require from you.

A garden needs you to notice the plant.

A factory needs you to understand the system.

A marriage needs you to learn the person.

And in all three, the answer changes depending on what is in front of you and the season it is in.

Maybe capacity isn’t becoming strong enough to treat everything the same.

Maybe it’s creating enough room in your life to notice the differences.

That’s what I’m trying to practice right now.

Paying enough attention to ask a better question:

What does this actually need from me?

—JP

What I’m Reading

I’m rereading *The Way of the Superior Man* by David Deida, a book I’ve returned to quite a few times over the years.

This time I’m reading it mostly through the lens of my marriage, particularly some of its ideas about challenge, praise, and the differences between what brings out the best in two people.

I’m less interested in turning any of those ideas into universal rules about men and women. What has been useful is noticing where something describes my own experience.

One of the clearest lessons for me lately has been that what motivates me doesn’t automatically motivate my wife.

That sounds obvious when I write it.

Living like I actually understand it has been harder.

What I’m Watching

My wife got me into *The Traitors*.

We watched the newest season together this week, and now we’re planning to binge a couple of the older seasons this weekend.

This probably wouldn’t have felt worth including in this newsletter a few months ago.

Now I think it is.

Part of building a life together is having things that you simply enjoy together. No lesson, no outcome, no attempt to turn the evening into something more useful.

Just trying to figure out who is lying before the other person does.

From the Factory

The software factory has been getting much more real lately.

I’m building several products at once, and increasingly the work is about deciding which pieces should become shared infrastructure and which things should remain specific to each product.

That distinction matters because the goal isn’t to mass-produce identical software.

The goal is to stop solving the same underlying problems over and over so I have more time and energy for the parts that actually make each product different.

There is a strange symmetry in realizing that the technical systems I’m building and the life I’m trying to build are teaching me some of the same lessons.

Standardize what should be consistent, pay attention to what is different, and know when to stop improving the system and let the line run.

What I’m Practicing

Lately I’ve been calling it enjoyment before improvement.

Not because improvement is bad.

I just don’t want my ability to see what could be better to keep me from seeing what is already good.

If any of this resonates, reply and tell me what you’ve been tending lately.

I’d love to hear what you’re building, enjoying, or learning to care for differently in this season of your life.

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