Just like your salary compensation should be determined by the value you bring to your company, instead of how well you negotiate and get people to identify you

Just like your salary compensation should be determined by the value you bring to your company, instead of how well you negotiate and get people to identify you as "one of us". Just like presidents should be decided by issues instead of how good looking they are. http://paulgraham.com/charisma.html http://paulgraham.com/charisma.html The other agents in all of our interactions are humans. Fallible, emotional creatures, guided by an unimaginably complicated, overlapping, self-contradicting set of heuristics optimized over millions of years to make us as effective as possible at creating more humans. View any behavior approaching rationality as something to be treasured and appreciated, rather than the norm-- _Even within ourselves_. Even very smart people need prolonged introspection/mindfulness practice to become aware of how rarely we actually act as a rational being. Wishing things were one way has no bearing on whether they are that way. We do ourselves a disfavor if we act as if the world worked the way we want it to rather than the way it does.