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Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a classic for good reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...
I second this one!
It can be a bit on the nose, though, larve, to use this book.
Best,
bigDinosaur
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Seriously, it's very easy to go wrong with How to win friends. IMO a lot of its advice probably worked better back in the day when formality was somewhat more appreciated and knowing when to avoid it more of a skill.
I think that's pretty important. This is not an article that says "I'm always right, people are just too stupid to notice that, here are mistakes they're making."
It says, or at least it reads to me as, "People often think I'm stubborn and can't acknowledge when I make a mistake. Sometimes, not always, that is a result of miscommunication, because my brain works differently from many others. Here are some of the ways it does that, and how it leads to that wrong perception."
I read this as being strongly opinionated and egocentric.. I want to call it "ausplaining", this tendency to go "no no, YOU don't understand ME (because I'm special, not because I'm wrong)" whenever we get ourselves into situations like the exemplified. I do this A LOT as well, and when people do stick with me for long enough, I often find that I'm either getting my point across by re-framing my explanation, or disco…
> The author may also benefit from investing some of their mental capital (I'm not being sarcastic, they're obviously very intelligent) into learning how to play the games I am not aware of any good systematic textbooks on this topic. (of course not the author)
It's interesting to me that all four examples put the blame with the other party. I hope it's just worded poorly or I am reading too much into it. Edit: I'm not saying that invalidates the article's content (in fact I recognize the situations from personal experience), but it doesn't really put a positive spin on it.
Sometimes the blame is with the other party. An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1] The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average. An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above…
> But yes Person X / Fund Y is wrong size for us. (11:52 AM)
So based on a sample size of one, they acknowledged they were wrong about 90 minutes ago.
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Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask. If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology). If me asking what the goal is is per…
Well, if you actually asked what the goals of the manager's proposed evaluation/comparison were, great! If you had probed around the context of the discussion a little bit by asking some open questions like "So why did this article pique your interest in relation to our company?" or "That's interesting, I wonder how their approach compares to ours. What do you think?", then even better. However, that isn't quite what…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author here, thanks for reading. That is exactly the first question I would ask. If you ask me to make something better, I need to know what you mean by “better”. That’s where a productive discussion start, when we align the goals (and I don’t really care about them, they all turn into interesting technical challenges) and then discuss strategy (amongst which there is technology). If me asking what the goal is is per…
Well, if you actually asked what the goals of the manager's proposed evaluation/comparison were, great! If you had probed around the context of the discussion a little bit by asking some open questions like "So why did this article pique your interest in relation to our company?" or "That's interesting, I wonder how their approach compares to ours. What do you think?", then even better. However, that isn't quite what…
I can’t imagine dedicating this much time analyzing whether or not I can acknowledge when I’m wrong. It’s almost like this entire piece is an elaborate rationalization the author is making rather than admitting they are wrong.
And a fundamental requirement to admit to being wrong is, well, actually being wrong. If you analyze a situation and find that you're factually correct, you haven't failed to admit to being wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes the blame is with the other party. An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1] The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average. An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above…
> more than half the population is below average intelligence. I guess I'm in the bottom half, then; I thought the average was that quantity for which half are below, and half are above.
A distribution which is biased towards high-side outliers (such as wealth or income) will generally have more than half of the population below the mean.
It's not at all obvious to me that general intelligence has such a distribution (and I can think of plenty of physical mechanisms [injury, disease, malnutrition during development] by which the opposite could easily be true).
Great insights. I often feel like saying: "normal people don't want to think about the details of a question." They grab for the quickest way to stop thinking and label it right or wrong depending on how much they like it. This is of course an oversimplification.
I really think pinning this on autism is misplaced. Willingness to engage in exploratory conversation is a combination of intelligence and learned habits of mind. If your boss (anyone, really!) comes to you with an idea and he misunderstands the first thing out of your mouth as a rejection, then you probably should work on how you communicate that thing. Or just surround yourself with smarter people. Also if your bos…
The boss is doing absolutely the right thing here! Asking a trusted domain expert for an opinion about whether some technical investment would benefit the business.
The alternatives are a) the boss hears the podcast and the next day "rewrite it all in React" is at the top of the backlog, or b) the boss never polls the team about the technical state of things and everyone grumbles there's never enough time for paying down technical debt or experimenting with new ideas.