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This is an interesting statement to me. I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me wha
by Verdex 4y ago
This is an interesting statement to me.
I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me what I can do to help work through it or increase my skill levels with respect to it.
At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. That is to say, object level is what people actually say and do and meta level is like the subtext to borrow a literary term of what people say and do.
The boss saying, "let's all work hard and do what it takes." Is something that I want to take literally. What they mean is, "Just put in 8ish hours a day and don't take a two week vacation right before a release." However, I'm deeply uncomfortable with taking the meta version.
When the meta version is totally divorced from the object version is where things completely go off the rails for me. "Let's all work hard and do what it takes." => "Don't rock the boat because none of this was ever going to work in the first place."
Fortunately for me, I've only seen such bosses (or I suppose scenarios) from afar. As far as I know I've never worked directly for one.
- Hermitian909 4y ago> At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. This is a really common failure pattern of people with a history of excelling in relatively explicit systems (e.g. grades at school). Reading can actually help a lot here. "Influence" by Cialdini, "How to win friends and influence people" by Carnegie, or the "Gervais Principle" by Rao decent intros to some relevant concepts (though each has problems, particularly Rao's book). Once you have a framework of understanding incentives, cognitive traps, and the tools most people use to navigate these kinds of political games it gets a lot easier to grasp what's going on (being a good player is, IMO, much harder)
- Verdex 4y agoI found Gervais Principle to be fascinating. Although, like you say the book definitely has it's problems. Fortunately, years before I encountered Gervais Principle, I had already seen a similar thing with technical books. Just because an author talks with confidence and presents a logical soundish framework doesn't mean they actually know what they are talking about OR it doesn't mean that what they are talking about is universally applicable. I got the same feeling from Gervais Principle. There's some lessons to learn here, however you also need to make sure you bring a lot of salt to the table.