"Better too many than too few"

There's a fear at the bottom of all this, and it's of the other kind of person. The one who never apologises. Who bumps into you and walks on. Who gets it wrong and blames the brief. You know that person and you'd rather be you, and if the price of not being them is forty sorries a day, you'll pay it.

Tyler Okimoto and colleagues, in 2012, looked at what refusing to apologise does for the refuser. In two studies, people who refused to apologise for something reported higher self-esteem afterwards than people who didn't refuse, along with a greater sense of power and control and of having stood by their values. Refusing felt good. The researchers presented this as a problem, because it explains why people who've done harm dig in, and I'd present it the same way. The non-apologiser isn't a model. They're a person who's found that not saying sorry feels powerful and is spending that feeling at other people's expense.

So the fear is pointed at a real thing. I'd just ask you to notice that the choice you've set up, forty sorries or none, isn't the choice. Nobody in this book is asking you to refuse an apology you owe. Chapter 22 is about making the ones you owe better. What the book asks is that you stop apologising for the doorway, the question and the rain, and that isn't the non-apologiser's refusal. It's the ordinary position of most people, who say sorry when they've done something and don't when they haven't, and who are neither doormats nor bullies for it.

"Better too many than too few" assumes that the sorries are all the same kind, so that more of them is safer. They're not. Too many reflex sorries and too few real ones is exactly the position chapter 8 describes, and it's the worst of both. A person who says sorry forty times a day for nothing has, when they finally do something wrong, a word that's worn through, and the apology that matters most is the one that lands least.

The middle isn't a compromise. It's where the real sorry lives.