Try a new game: Make others smile — and let yourself smile with them

By David McElroy · August 2, 2018

I’m not sure exactly when this game started. I don’t even remember when I first noticed what I was doing. I just know it frequently lifts my spirits when I need a boost.

It sounds silly. It sounds like something a child might do. But it makes me happy — and I’ve realized it lets me bring a brief bit of joy to others along my way every day. And it’s super simple.

The game? I count how many times each day that I can get people to smile — when they clearly hadn’t felt like smiling beforehand.

Ridiculous? Maybe. Childlike? Absolutely. Life-changing? Maybe.

Dr. Jerome Motto was involved with attempts to curb suicide in the San Francisco Bay Area for years. One of his patients committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge in 1963, but the retired physician told the New Yorker in 2003 that the suicide which affected him the most occurred in the 1970s. After a man jumped to his death, Motto learned something that left him chilled.

“I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner,” he said. “The guy was in his 30s, lived alone. Pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’”

Apparently, nobody smiled at him. He jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and died.

What if you could have been the person who smiled at him? What if you could have made him smile? Might you have saved his life?

We never know the drama that’s going on inside the heads of the people around us. We never know who’s miserable and needs a reason to smile, even if it’s just for a moment.

Today, I got three smiles from people who didn’t seem inclined to smile before I said something to them. Just three people. It took me only a few seconds of effort. But all three seemed briefly happy — and each experience gave me a brief feeling of euphoria

In Walmart this evening, I stopped to chat with the door greeter. She was having a terrible day and she told me how unhappy she was with a couple of things. I briefly commiserated with her and then I told her — almost as an afterthought — that she looks really great tonight wearing some red earrings that matched a bright red shirt underneath her Walmart vest.

She immediately brightened and a big smile came over her face.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “I really needed that.”

She hugged me and I went on my way, but she was still grinning.

There are a million ways to make people smile. Sometimes it’s a compliment — if it’s truly genuine, of course. Other times, it’s sincerely listening to what they have to say. At other times it can be a silly joke. After awhile, it becomes a game.

I made a 3-year-old girl smile in Chick-fil-A tonight. She certainly wasn’t a suicide risk, but you might have thought her life was over as her mother led her to the restroom at one point. She was limping and her exasperated mom tried to get her to move along.

When they came out of the restroom, I smiled at the mother and she said, “She’s decided she can’t tee-tee because she has a broken leg.” And they went back to their table near the play area, but the little girl was still unhappy.

I was leaving a couple of minutes later, so I stopped at their table and asked the little girl if her broken leg had healed. She grinned a huge smile and started showing me where her leg had been “broken” a few minutes before. I told her she must heal really quickly and congratulated her on being better. Her mother seemed to appreciate someone taking the little girl seriously and she grinned at our exchange.

There was another woman in a different store, but you get the idea. In each case, the exchange took only a few seconds, but it made someone else happy — and it made me feel happier, too.

Try my game. I suspect you’ll enjoy it.

How many grumpy people can you get smiles from? You won’t always be successful. Some people seem to enjoy their misery so much — or else they’re just so deep in pain — that they won’t play along. But that’s OK. Just count how many times you get the unexpected smile. You might be surprised.

Sunsets make me happy. They make me smile. The more dramatic ones frequently cause others to smile, too. So here’s my blatant attempt to make you smile. Will it work?

I shot the picture above about five minutes after sunset tonight in Birmingham. It was gorgeous to experience and it has been a joy to share. Take a close look at it. See if the beauty I experienced will make you smile, too.

I sized a copy of this sunset picture for use as a desktop picture on a computer, so if you’d like to grab a copy of this — if it will make you smile — click here to download a 2560×1600-pixel version. It’s sized for the native resolution of a 13-inch MacBook Pro, but it should be able to resize for most screens.

And here’s Merlin guarding the windows of my office Thursday morning. My cats and my dog make me smile — and it makes me happy to share them with others. (They have their own Instagram account if you’d like to see more.)

There are plenty of reasons to smile. Beauty. Humor. Love. Good will. Gratitude. You can find plenty of reasons if you look for them.

Making others smile might not change your life. You might not even save anybody else’s life. But if you’ll make a few people smile today, you’ll make them just a little bit happier — and you might find it changing you just a little bit every day.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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