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When you're twenty, you worry about what people think. When you're forty, you don't care what people think. And when you're sixty, you realize that nobody was thinking about you in the first place.
When you are sixty, less of your life remains, so the stakes are lower. If you piss someone off to the point that they do you in - who cares?
there is no content here. I wish she had said more Being an asshole is not the worst thing you can be. A lot of famous, successful people who are well liked have somewhat asshole qualities. The thing you really do not want to be is an ignoramus--someone who is an asshole but with no redeeming qualities.
I think about this a lot. I try to be kind to everyone, but there are at least a handful of people in the world who cringe when they think about me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Happy Sunday.
People then end up frustrated because they often confuse being weak and hollow as being nice and being assertive and self-directed with being an asshole.
In a way, we are Veblen goods: it's all about status and perceived scarcity in the end, whether it's conscious or not. That is not necessarily a negative or depressing thing as it also is the engine behind great things happening.
Isn't this state of mind kind of dangerous ? Like a self fulfilling prophecy?
If one is required to be concerned with not "being an asshole", how are risky ventures ever undertaken?
When you're twenty, you worry about what people think. When you're forty, you don't care what people think. And when you're sixty, you realize that nobody was thinking about you in the first place.
Sure, I don't worry about what people consciously think of me, like "Does he think I'm incompetent because of that mistake I made? Does she like the way I'm dressed?". I'm more concerned with what they're not thinking, or rather the biases they may be unconsciously harboring about myself or others. Look at this [1], from a study on the relation of criminal sentences and attractiveness:
>Physical Attractiveness had a significant influence on judges sentencing. The more unattractive the criminal, the higher the sentence. Or conversely, the more attractive the criminal, the lower the sentence. The results of three studies show a minimum increase of 119.25% and a maximum increase of 304.88%.
That's pretty disturbing to me. It what other ways am I being treated and being shaped by the unconscious biases of others? Say Jim gets promoted into management and made leader of a project instead of me, because he's a "better fit" for the role. For what reasons is he a "better fit"? Imagine if the unconscious mind could speak. It might say something like this:
"Jim was made tribe leader because of his robust musculature. His square jaw arouses me to no end - such an indicator of higher testosterone, strength, and disease resistance will serve our offspring well. Broad-shouldered Jim can probably throw a spear hard enough to pierce fifty men. A warrior of his magnitude will surely lead us to victory against our ancestral foe, the Google tribe."
Okay, that's fine, but what does that have to do with shipping a profitable software product?
"Square. Jaw."
Completely absurd. We can never completely relieve ourselves of these kinds of biases, and of politics. But I believe we can mitigate it to a meaningful degree. We can have meaningful standards and metrics for evaluating people for certain roles. Horowitz talks about this kind of politics-mitigation in at least one chapter in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
[1] The Law Project. (2021, January 16). The Law Project. Retrieved from https://www.thelawproject.com.au/insights/attractiveness-bia.... (The relevant HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044409)
One key insight about social relationships that took me a while to understand is that people respond mainly to whether you are life-affirming in your behavior or not. If you have things going on in your life and aren't afraid to exist as a person, they will naturally gravitate to you and give you a lot of leeway. Being a nice person or an asshole is orthogonal to the issue: they are just facets that may help or hinde…
I find myself drawn to these types--they may have asshole-ish moments or nice moments. That doesn't matter as much as my personal connection to them, the sense of whether I am rooting for them or not.
It's not about people not liking you. It's about the implication of this fact which is that you might be a bad person. Are you a bad person? Or are you a good person which happened to have a behavior which turned others against you?
Second, is good to meditate on this idea of the image you are trying to keep consistent with everyone. It's almost like slaving away to make all people like you. But that's impossible because whatever you do someone might think you're an asshole anyway.
So just focus on being a good person in your eyes and the rest will follow. And be kind to yourself, we all make mistakes.