What The "Smile More" Guys Don't Know About Aim

Here's a fact nobody asked for but everybody's getting: telling a woman to smile more does not, in fact, make her smile more. What it does is give her something to think about for the rest of the day, and thinking is exactly what you want a person to be doing right before you hand her a rubber ball and point her at a target.

I've built an entire company on this feeling. Somewhere between "you'd be so much prettier if" and "why do you always look so serious," I found the exact muscle memory I needed to become genuinely excellent at a children's gym class sport. I'm not saying you should go around telling strangers to smile more so they can unlock their competitive dodgeball arc. I'm saying it worked for me, and I'm not sorry about it, and neither is my shoulder.

Filed under: petty as motivation, it works