Flies, Honey, & Vinegar

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar...

 

With fall weather showing up, so has the cold weather and, unfortunately, the cold virus.

 

Lately, I have been running on empty, bedridden and sick, taking plums of antibiotics and cough drops to weather the storm.

 

On my way home from the corner CVS yesterday, I stumbled past a unique bookstore, Neighborhood Books, on the corner of 19th & South. Having never seen this store before, I was intrigued and went inside.

 

Wall-to-wall, the books piled on like leaves on a crisp Fall day, each with their own unique colors and markings.

 

As I walked around, I noticed the shelves were labeled by what genre it held.

 

Legal thrillers...

 

Pulp fiction…

 

Comic novels...

 

And then there was this tiny section that read “Local studies”...

 

Normally a section like this wouldn’t have caught my eye, but right in the center of the shelf was an old book that looked like it hadn’t been opened in years, and if it did get opened it would have fallen apart on the spot.

 

Naturally, I grabbed it off the shelf…

 

It didn’t have any writings on the exterior, so as I flipped through the first couple of pages I was able to find that this was a 1744 copy of “Poor Richard’s Almanack”, a book series written by Benjamin Franklin under the pseudonym “Richard Saunders” back in 1732.

 

I pulled out my phone to do a little research and found that for the 26 years, the Almanack was a wildly successful bestseller in colonial America, selling nearly ten thousand copies per year.

 

It consisted of a hodgepodge of facts, weather forecasts, household hints, puzzles, historical tidbits, poems, and assorted amusements. However, what made the Almanack most well-known were the witty proverbs and maxims that Franklin included as fillers.

 

Page by page, you could see all of the little oddities that the book held within.

 

And then, I stumbled upon one of Franklin’s patented maxims:

 

“Tart Words make no Friends: a spoonful of honey,

Will catch more flies than a Gallon of Vinegar.”

 

An English proverb, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, is a saying of kindness.

 

It doesn’t have a counter-intuitive meaning. If you are trying to catch flies, you are literally going to attract more with honey. That is, you’re going to get what you want (in the proverb - flies, but in life - any goal) with kindness rather than acidity.

 

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

 

The flies represent anything you want to achieve. Honey (sweet) represents anything pleasant that you do to get what you want. Vinegar (sour) represents anything unpleasant that you do to get what you want.

 

This is a saying that means you will be more successful in your life, your relationships, your business - your anything - by being kind to others rather than being mean and doing hurtful, dishonest things to them.

 

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

 

There are countless stories of business people who went from being hasty and rude to being nice and understanding. One of those people is entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

 

“Nice is way undervalued,” he says, “and I learned the hard way.”

 

“My partner, Todd, came to me one day and he goes - now I like to curse - and he goes, ‘I don’t care about cursing, but you curse too much. Not everybody’s as accepting towards cursing as you are… So calm the [expletive] down.’ And I took that to heart. It became apparent to me, that the nicer I got, the more effective the people around me got, the more productive we got, and the more sales we got.”

 

You see, the people who surround you are going to respond in the ways you would like, if you act out of kindness. Whether those people are your friends, your family, or your employees, the principle will always apply…

 

And you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

 

 

To kindness,

Tyler