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In your real life group of friends, make sure you don’t engage with people who emphasize a spirit of one-upsmanship in regards to who is the most “informed” abo
by mlthoughts2018 8y ago
In your real life group of friends, make sure you don’t engage with people who emphasize a spirit of one-upsmanship in regards to who is the most “informed” about every esoteric, up-to-the-minute or bleeding edge development in every topic.
Usually these folks have a shallow understanding of most of the stuff they go on about. Enough to sound smart in an isolated sound byte at a party, to make other shallow people go, “wow, how do they stay so informed?” but which completely falls apart with even just a few cursory depth questions.
I think scanning Hacker News links begets this shallow way of thinking and emphasizes name dropping new topics as if it makes you seem like a zeitgeist genius.
Read just a few things that interest you, and try to read them a little more deeply. For all the other stuff, just ignore it. If it’s really that important, it’ll come up again and again. You’ll read it eventually. Anybody giving you a hard time about not having already seen it is probably a shallow time waster who only “knows more” about it in the most superficial sense.
Social media is like a petri dish for these people too. So, as should be immediately obvious by this point in history, just stay away from social media.
- FLUX-YOU 8y ago>Enough to sound smart in an isolated sound byte at a party, to make other shallow people go, “wow, how do they stay so informed?” but which completely falls apart with even just a few cursory depth questions. People can get into that habit because the industry has been branded as a fast moving one in which we all must stay up-to-date. I'm all for calling out shallow people, but let's not pretend there isn't also a bigger force at work as far as that kind of signalling goes. And naturally people that do these things tend to herd together where no one is going to rock the boat.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoI don’t know. It’s usually a hallmark of a worthwhile business partner / team member / friend / network connection when someone is willing to just admit candidly that they don’t know something, that they aren’t an expert at XYZ and so their political opinion or design opinion, etc., should be discounted and they don’t have (and don’t need to have) something constantly poignant to say. Networking with a bunch of people who just constantly regurgitate the same constantly poignant pseudo-intellectualism to each other doesn’t really pay off. You get a big network on LinkedIn and you show up at events and in the end you don’t get any actual job opportunities / leads / VC intros, etc. etc., because the self-reinforcing circular facade doesn’t have any substance with which it can possibly turn out as a payoff to you. I think even from an expected returns point of view, just simplifying your life, minimizing the shallow chatter, networking sparsely but judiciously, is just way healthier and offers better payoffs.