I'm not a big fan of HTWFAIP. It's basically "don't be a jerk". A lot of geeks are good at that already, and could actually afford to be a bit more of a jerk.
This is the problem, most people don't even know if they are being a jerk or not. I thought I had good social skills until I read HTWFAIP. It made me realize how socially inept I was. Turns out the main message in most social intelligence books is the emphasis of empathy; it is actually a hard skill to learn and one that's usually underestimated by the majority of people especially geeks.
Empathy - often poorly defined. Do you mean empathy - you "put yourself in other people's shoes" (i.e. you are not a psychopath), or the ability to read people?
People with lots of empathy who can't "read people" come across as ... awkward. Or dorky. Yeah ... the word is "dorky". Kinda like Simon Tan.
Attached to that, though, is that there are different levels of "jerkness." Most of us could do with being more jerk-like when it comes to defending or promoting our own interests and ideas, but we need far fewer jerks who try to mess up other people's lives. Sadly, they all seem to get lumped in under the same term..
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I'm not a big fan of HTWFAIP. It's basically "don't be a jerk". A lot of geeks are good at that already, and could actually afford to be a bit more of a jerk.
This is the problem, most people don't even know if they are being a jerk or not. I thought I had good social skills until I read HTWFAIP. It made me realize how socially inept I was. Turns out the main message in most social intelligence books is the emphasis of empathy; it is actually a hard skill to learn and one that's usually underestimated by the majority of people especially geeks.
Steve Blank had an interesting post about this: http://steveblank.com/2010/02/08/emulating-empathy/
Empathy - often poorly defined. Do you mean empathy - you "put yourself in other people's shoes" (i.e. you are not a psychopath), or the ability to read people?
People with lots of empathy who can't "read people" come across as ... awkward. Or dorky. Yeah ... the word is "dorky". Kinda like Simon Tan.
Attached to that, though, is that there are different levels of "jerkness." Most of us could do with being more jerk-like when it comes to defending or promoting our own interests and ideas, but we need far fewer jerks who try to mess up other people's lives. Sadly, they all seem to get lumped in under the same term..