If she's showing any emotion at all that's 'the Don buying some fruit – you've taken a couple of hits, but there's still hope; the other scenario is 'Sonny on the causeway', she's indifferent, and what you two had is somewhere lying dead, with something like 50 bullet holes.
So, the absolute value of emotion – well it's basically that any sort of emotion is good, the only bad thing is no emotion.
In other words, as long as the person is not indifferent, you still have a shot.
I've been familiar with this idea or notion of the absolute value of emotion for some time, but I never heard anyone put it this way till one time I was listening to Steve Huffman who is one of the founders of Reddit. The video is part of a series of videos by Y Combinator for a program called Startup School which is aimed at getting technology entrepreneurs around the world to learn the dynamics and mechanics of starting a startup. Anyway, Steve was explaining how the worst place to be with initial users of your product is where they're indifferent to it, that it's better when they feel something, bad or good – so it's much better to have them love it or hate it, than not care...indifference is death, essentially. If they love it then bang! you've probably built something people want or need; if they hate it, then that's good too – it means there's something they want your product to do that it isn't doing or it's doing poorly...find what it is and do it, better than anyone else.
The notion is mathematical; if users love your product that's like +3, if they hate it that's -3 and the absolute value of both +3 and -3 is 3. All you need is something, a feeling, an emotion, the 3...once you've got that then it's only a matter of changing the sign in front of it to the desired polarity. If they don't care, that's zero, and there's nothing you can do with zero in terms of absolute value; zero is zero.
The other 2 founders of Reddit are Emmett Shear and Alexis Ohanian. I don't really use Reddit but I think they are really smart guys who did a great job of building a product people want. That's hard to do, trust me. I heard Emmet speak in the same video series and he seems pretty cool – of the 3 of them I think he's the nerdiest. Alexis Ohanian – is married to Serena Williams, something I find interesting in so many different ways not in the least because she's been a victim of a lot of misogyny and racism and yet she's married to a white guy – I think that's really cool.
I once saw this amazing series of pictures taken by world renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz of Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian that's really emotive and intense. If you have the time you should check them out.
The notion of the absolute value of emotion is even more important when the object is a person (rather than a product), specifically a woman.
If she's showing any kind of emotion...anger, love, hate, jealousy, affection, whatever it is, that's a good thing; you can work with that. If she feels anger, that's good, anger is something, you can turn that to like or love depending on what's at stake and how much game you have.
If, however, she feels nothing, not hate, just nothing – well, that's it. Most of the time there's no coming back from nothing except you magically find a way to defibrillate her into showing some iota of emotion. This doesn't happen very often.
Look for an iota of emotion
Moments before I decided to call Chika, I told myself one thing; any sort of emotion is good; the only bad thing is no emotion. That was all I needed to look out for, that was my grand plan, to look out for any sort of emotion and then look for a way to work with that. If, however she showed none, not even a glimmer, then I'd know we're done. I knew I'd apologize, but it would only mean something if at some point before that she showed that she still gave a fuck.
