You could try doing more listening and less talking. People like that. But listening with empathy has the perverse effect of rewarding the talker for sharing his woes. That's a problem because if you cause someone to focus on his own misfortune, you make things worse for him. In time, the talker will associate you with all of his most unpleasant thoughts because that's the connection you keep reinforcing.

My best solution for the scourge of talking is this: Be brief and say something positive.

Brevity will slow the inevitable decline in your popularity caused by talking. And saying something positive as often as possible will be a mood booster to whoever is in the room with you. Humans are followers, and if you set a positive tone, it rubs off.

You'll never regain the personal appeal you enjoyed as a baby. But if you say nice things, and don't say much, you might become relatively less unappealing than the people around you. And that's not nothing.

Scott nails it again. So good.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

Man, I love these kinds of stories.

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage & never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief & precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive & we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous & so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space & the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me & it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Meaning...his lack of one.