Pollay
By Mary Jane FineDavid Pollay has told this story a quintillion times by now: He was in New York, his hometown, cabbing it to Grand Central Station. A black car zipped out of its parking place, cutting off the taxi, whose driver jammed on the brakes, avoiding a rear-ender by an inch. The guy behind the wheel of the black car, the bum, had the gall to curse the cabbie. So what’d the cabbie do? He smiled. He waved. He didn’t let it get to him. And he left Pollay thinking, Wow.
So, 20 years later, what does Pollay do? He writes an inspirational book called The Law of the Garbage Truck and travels around imparting the cabbie’s message.
It works, he says. Honest.
Because, and here’s the heart of the matter, this is what the cabbie told him: “Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger and full of disappointment … And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. So when someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally … move on.”
Easier to say than to do, though, right?
“Yeah, it is,” he agrees. But, he says, the more you practice not dumping those negatives on others, the more you apply the smile-all-the-while principle, the easier it becomes.
It’s important. The world has gotten to be an uncivil place, he says. (No kidding. Think traffic jams. Think election rhetoric. Think Congress.)
But, c’mon, even Pollay fails, at times, to heed his own good advice, doesn’t he?
“Lemmee think,” he says, gazing across the dining room of his Ocean Ridge home. He ponders. He stares straight ahead, as if trying to summon the image of that failure. The best he can do: He rushed his daughters — Eliana, 8, and Ariele, 7 — when he was running late, recently, to get them to art class. Practitioners themselves of The Law, they forgave him.
This give-yourself-very-good-advice-and-actually-follow-it attitude has been Pollay’s philosophy all his life, he says. He got his master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in applied positive psychology, after all. And made his living as a speaker, advising corporations and organizations on how to create happier, more productive workplaces.
But does this self-described “pretty even-tempered” guy ever feel that he’s being, um, a Pollay-anna?
No, and he’ll tell you why. His work is based in science. It’s not an unsubstantiated theory. The documentation is there, in his book: Nice guys don’t finish last.
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