#semi-off-topic rant:
Why are we still taking advice from Dale Carnegie in 2012? Our salesman culture is at its end. Value cannot be created by convincing others of its existence. True hackers cringe at any Carnegie quote, IMHO.
Dear Miss Manners:
Don't you think that nowadays, in modern life,
the old-fashioned custom of the condolence call
is out of date?
Gentle Reader:
Why is that? Is it because people don't die
anymore, or is it because the bereaved no longer
need the comfort of their friends? Miss Manners
is always interested in hearing about how life has
been improved by modern thinking or technology.
because the way people work hasn't changed much since he wrote the book in 1936, and it's points still stand. I believe "how to win friends and influence people" is actually one of the books that Ycombinator recommends to it's companies.
If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. [1] When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.
I was put off by title for a long time, before I was finally convinced that it was worth reading. How to win friends & influence people is one of the most influential books I've ever read. I try and go back and re-read it about once a year. It's just a good handbook on how to improve the quality of life for yourself and people around you.
As someone else said, people haven't changed.
I was commenting too literally about the traditional sales process he established.
"This was amazing to me, to realise that there are different ways things are done, and that the overlap of different methods and cultures can be so powerful."
seriously? I shudder to think that there might be grown adults who didn't already know this.
But yeah, I tend to think that some of these "amazing insights" are chosen tongue-in-cheek, just to have an excuse to blog something and submit to HN. It's getting tiresome. I also sense a recent wave of Redditors that have signed up, based on many comments with Reddit-style comment patterns. Which I actually like on Reddit, but hoping to not see here.
So, right, I sometimes discourse in HN comments on these sorts of topics. We're facing a crisis where authenticity is vanishing from the everyday life; and the traditional protector of authenticity -- religion -- is sapped away by technology, entertainment, and poor design choices. I may someday request to do a TED talk called "TED is the Problem" about this, but I can't as yet fit both an engaging discussion of the problem and what we can do about it into six minutes.
The point is, I'm 27, and I'm too young, and I'm not special. I'm working on it, practicing writing on how to be heartfelt and authentic in the world -- and the sort of crankiness at the Mistakes of Society which was once the domain of prophets and is now the domain of bloggers. But really I am only just learning to stand within it on my own. I don't even have any formal academic qualifications of any kind yet (though my Master's thesis in Physics will be presented next month). I don't have any successful projects on GitHub. I'm just little-old-me. So I refuse to submit because banality still fills my insights. The rush to be famous also, frankly, terrifies me. (Since I'm not special, I feel a great freedom to be Real.)
I guess I'm working my way around to a question which I want to ask the community. It looks something like this: "What do we do when simply talking about authentic living is an inauthentic form of life?" What do you do when the very act of saying, "here is how to Really Live" looks like a shameless attempt to gain a cult of followers because you're afraid that you're not Really Living?
Heck, I've reread this very comment a couple of times, and darned if it doesn't look like I'm committing the same error that I'm complaining about. But I really want to know. Does authenticity eat itself? Is there any room left for us to teach others to be authentic? Or is that a relic of the bygone age of gurus and rabbis, a victim of the Hollywoodification of Western culture?
I get tired of the constant pessimism on the internet. Sure, in real life there may be "pity" awards and "everyone is a winner" attitudes, but it is far more extreme in the opposite direction online. Every article I read nowadays is "you're not special", "the chance of you succeeding at anything is somewhat better than buying a lottery ticket", etc. Can anyone name ONE positive effect of these sorts of articles? They don't make me think, "Oh gee, this author's a genius!" They instead make me think some middle-aged programmer is upset he never created some grand vision he always had and wants to bring everyone else down along with him. So yeah, SomeTwitterBootstrapWidgetOnRailsInHerokuIBangedOutOverAWeekend.com may be popular, but IAmAnOldFartThatHasNothingBetterToDoThanWriteDemeaningAndPessimisticArticlesAllDay.com is just as popular.
By the way, I don't use rails, Heroku, Macs, Twitter, and iPhones, nor did I attend an elite private US high school in case you were thinking I am upset because I might fit his description.
Your comment really made me laugh and I thought how I wish my wife knew about HN so I could share it with her.
"these "amazing insights" are chosen tongue-in-cheek, just to have an excuse to blog something"
Maybe some are. But I think the social proof exists where someone sees that items like this are well received on HN and they go to lemm-mimick the same behavior to feel special.
I gave up. There are many corpses leading down this path.
These people want their affirmation, not reality or actual knowledge.
If they did, they'd be reading a book, or a paper on databases instead of HN.
It might be an obvious point, but sometimes it's worth remembering that there's a lot of commonalities between businesses in very different industries. So talking to strangers isn't just a nice thing to do, but can actually give you some practical value.
This is so the exception.
My experience has been that unless I'm speaking to a founder or very senior manager all suggestions and ideas for improvements disappear down a black hole.
The employee will nod and say things like "oh, that's a good idea", but will almost never pass it along to a decision maker.
If you are the decision maker in a small company, you have to create the culture for employees to speak up.
In a big company, the culture is impossible to change. A decision maker in a big company has to "spy" on the employee/customer interactions (record customer service calls for example) to find out what customers are suggesting.
Exactly my experience. There is no feedback loop. My assumptions are as follows:
1) There is no reinforcement for an employee to pass along a suggestion to upper management.
2) The idea you have has already been vetted or is not practical for cost or other reasons for the organization. So if they have tried passing along info they've found the same information passed along that they can't act upon so the feedback loop no longer exists.
3) The person who you give the suggestion to is lame and it never gets passed along because they suck (which is why they are in that front facing position and not higher up).
4) The higher ups have never worked at the lower level jobs. They haven't interacted with customers to even know what goes on or what behavior should be encouraged. Or if they have it was so long ago they simply don't think about it now to the extent that they should.
Most of the time my experience is #3 I'd have to say. I get my hair cut at the same place and passed along the fact that the confirmation emails are in to small a font. I've know the person that cuts my hair for many years. She respects me. But for some reason it's not in her personality to get into minutia like that. Otoh when I mentioned to her that the front desk acted a certain way that could directly change her income she was right on it.