Seems like it would take a lot more energy to be manipulative than it would be to excel at something.
It only seems that way. Sometimes being manipulative is easier than trying to excel (otherwise we'd see more people doing well
How to keep someone with you forever
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#22Also known as how to spot a dysfunctional work environment! Lots of good advice in there, especially if you've never experienced cube-land first hand. I wonder how many people are filing this under "useful but morally grey", versus "i need to quit my job and fill out a YC app"?
Cube-land?
This sounds like many startups, too.
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#23I think King Arthur had the last word on this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7ZUibOUX28 He was the Joel Spolsky of the Middle Ages, I'm telling you.
Nitpick: If there was a actual historical character who was anything like "King Arthur" he lived a long time (probably about 600 years) before the first accounts of him written in the Middle Ages.
Also, if Arthur really had been the Joel Spolsky of ancient Britain his knights would never have sat at a big round table, except during lunch. Rather, they would have each had an individual round table in a glass-walled soundproof office with a door that could close.
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good nitpick. I'm definitely on the 'Arthur as fiction' side of the debate. The first proper account of 'King Arthur' was from Geoffrey of Monmouth in the first half of the twelfth century; historical details place that Arthur in the late sixth century. Ignoring the accuracy of a tale told more than five hundred years after the event, if Arthur was real and such an important figure, why did the Venerable Bede fail…
Bede's was not a history of a homogeneous socio-political people, and Arthur, if he was any kind of early mediaeval king, was certainly not King of all Britain. The island was politically fragmented. Record keeping was poor. The very exceptionality of Bede's history would be one reason for its incompleteness. And wikipedia, at the time, was notoriously unreliable.
True, but Bede's history was wide-ranging and made no mention of Arthur or any other elements of his legend.
To the extent that Arthur could have been real, he likely would have been a warrior-leader, rather than a king, fighting against the spreading Anglo-Saxon invaders.
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#25Also known as how to spot a dysfunctional work environment! Lots of good advice in there, especially if you've never experienced cube-land first hand. I wonder how many people are filing this under "useful but morally grey", versus "i need to quit my job and fill out a YC app"?
Cube-land? This sounds like many startups, too.
Yep. :\
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#26Sounds like emotional slavery and a recipe for future prozac customers.
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#27Seems like it would take a lot more energy to be manipulative than it would be to excel at something.
It only seems that way. Sometimes being manipulative is easier than trying to excel (otherwise we'd see more people doing well
But in order to keep that person you have to make a chaotic environment. Who wants to deliberately have crushing debt?
It's more like if you're already a loser, you can use some of that to your advantage by dragging someone else down with you.
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#28The advice is great on both fronts wish I read it about 10 years ago. Really bad work places and a really bad relationship, it works even better when you're doing both at the same time. Lesson learned, you can't save the world, shitty people and shitty companies will always be so, the key is to move on and surround yourself with great people both in business and in life. It's really the same effect in both cases, the…
Wow. After reading the OP's article and your follow up link... gah.
This hits terribly close to home in my recent (though now past) life.
Glad to be (largely) free of that though, these days.
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#29"If somebody is investing time, resources, and energy into convincing you of your own worthlessness, that same somebody has revealed to you that they have a lot to lose if you don’t believe them. They’re protecting their own loss of power."
From related article: http://www.fugitivus.net/2010/06/10/on-interpersonal-badness...
Re: How to keep someone with you forever
#30It's a bit spooky when an article/link you've read a while back turns up on the front page of HN with quite some discussion around it.
Especially because the link is the :visited colour, and you have to go there just to confirm that what you'd read before remains the same :)