Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Some guys who are cocky like that are insanely driven to justify their cockiness. I'm sure that's exactly what your VP was looking for: a classic driven, workaholic, alpha male executive.

This is an interesting topic from a geeky point of view, since geeks tend to be the opposite of cocky guys like this. Geeks tend to be meek and have bad posture and avoid boasting. The downside of this is that some geeks manage to avoid ever being in a position where they have to stretch themselves to live up to their boasting. Competition and arrogance drive a lot of achievement.

View on HN

Exactly right, and a self-deprecating meek geek with bad posture who comes to realize that the world works this way can use this information to his advantage. First, observe that social skills can be learned the same way as anything else: by making empirical observations and performing experiments, and combining this with analysis and theory. More specifically: Actively seek out friends and opportunities for socialization and force a constant minimum level of social activity [empirical observations]. Push your boundaries and don't fear unfamiliar social situations [experiments]. Observe yourself in social situations and (dispassionately) note what you could have done better [analysis]. Read everything from pop psych self-help stuff (e.g. succeedsocially.com) to social psychology and evolutionary psychology (e.g. books and papers describing nonverbal communication and social signaling) [theory]. Learn to project confidence yet be your own worst critic. Be extremely aware of the breadth of your ignorance but don't be sheepish about what you have learned and done. Understand when to be a little hubristic and when to be a little deferential. These are things that we all do automatically to one degree or another, but we can all be more effective by actively observing ourselves and deliberately making adjustments. The downside is that getting better at these skills will necessarily involve a lot of fucking up, but the alternative is to just stay where you are without improving things.

I've recognized that what holds me back is what I fear and in some cases I feel default non-optimal social habits are my default because I am addicted to the feeling of being a lone wolf, the wallflower in a social situation.

As you point out, hacks only work if you iterate on them. You can't unit test social graces you can only have good exception handling. And good exception handling may come down to experience handling situations earned by actual trial-and-error and as this article says - a certain amount of cockiness.

this is an excellent point.

At least if someone is confident and then wrong you can learn not to trust them. Someone who always hedges may never be quite as wrong, but is far less useful to a manager.

In an organizational structure it's not about one person being right, it's about the organization making a decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com