It was eye opening. There was this whole other dimension to the room, which I could barely see, but to her it was front and center.
I don’t aspire to be like that primarily or exclusively, but sometimes it’s helpful to notice and pay attention to.
I had a coworker with this mindset and it seemed incredibly tiring on her mindset. She would routinely total up the cost of the exec's outfits and jewelry/shoes/purse and also always be measuring herself against everyone else in the meeting room. Who hadn't brushed their hair, who had recently gotten teeth whitening treatments, she even noticed when one of the directors got a facelift over work from home. She was able to point out his facelift scars via a screenshot she took.
She ended up getting let go for creating a "mean girl" culture when she iced out some new hires.
It just seemed like a very dystopian way to view our coworkers. I prefer to see everyone as a potential friend and not look for flaws.
For the facelift example, you notice it, and then remark about how youthful the director looks in that new shirt. For the shoes example, you notice it and then remark about their good fashion sense. For the hair example, you go to them and see how the home life is going (colicky kids, a new medical diagnosis, a death in the family, or pure unawareness, etc)
It may seem like 'pandering', but only if you do it to people who can give you a raise. You have to do it for the janitors, bus-drivers, and bar-tenders too. Because you want everyone's life to be a bit better that day.
It's kinda like being a culty-mad-scientist. You have to have all the knowledge, the years of experiments, the cash flow, the ancient texts, the elaboratory. It takes a lot to awake the elder god from it's slumber. But the most crucial step, and the last one at that, is the smarts to know to not to wake up the eldrich world ending demon at all.
Not unlike say, mindfulness. Of oneself, of others.
Says the person commenting on HN at midnight ;)
What? No.
I don’t have a good sense for this. Having friends and colleagues and a partner with the focus and attention span for it is invaluable. Like it or not, power dynamics are real. And teams with someone tuned into their social dynamics can work better than one purely technical and aloof.
Just because one doesn’t have a sense for a thing doesn’t make that thing despicable.
I like to think of this as report talk vs rapport talk. Men may just report facts to each other with very little emotion attached, whereas women will try and bond and strengthen relationships by telling stories about people and their feelings. This is why men struggle to understand why women in their life are angry that they never talk or don't share how things are with their day. It's because a lot of times, the two people think that the information they are sharing is what is important, and the other person thinks that it is too much/too little detail.
I think those observational skills make women much more suitable for negotiating and understanding nuances, where sometimes men may struggle to have seen the smaller details.
But of course making sweeping gendered statements is usually not accurate or helpful, just some observations in my opinion, and of course MANY people do not fit into this generalisation.
Go back to cavemen times, the men had to follow the blurry beast for dinner. The women had to be alert and vigilant to protect their young. We might think we have come far, but evolution is slow. We are basically living with cavemen genes in an urban jungle.
Sometimes generalizations are true. Evolution takes millions of years.
