jenk

[A] woman came up to me after a panel [at a con] and screamed at me for ten minutes, calling me every single name in the book. [...S]he believed she was a better writer than I was, and she deserved “fame” more than I did.

Finally one of the convention security people pulled her out of the room. My other panelists were shaken. I was surprised that the screaming had nothing to do with my editorship (as it had other times, mostly because I rejected someone’s story), but with my writing.

I had never met this woman before, although I’ve seen her since.

When I was twenty and still in college, I met a man who wrote part-time for the same organization I wrote for. He was also a nonfiction freelancer. He paid for his apartment, his food, his car, and his clothing out of his nonfiction income. I saw his product at work. He had a great voice and a lot of talent, but he couldn’t spell his own name and his manuscripts were almost unreadably sloppy.

I figured if he could succeed in the cutthroat nonfiction world with those messy manuscripts, then I could with my clean manuscripts. I wasn’t the wordsmith he was, but I was more professional.

My analysis of his work got me started. I wrote for some of the same places he did, and began to wonder how he funded his lifestyle. I wasn’t getting paid enough per article to pay for my apartment and my expenses. Eventually, I moved to larger and larger publications, publications that paid me a month’s worth of expenses per article. It wasn’t until later that I found out that he had supplemented his income writing term papers for students, and (ahem) dealing cocaine. (It was 1980, after all.)

I didn’t take the negative view—that you can never make a living at writing; that you need to deal drugs to make any money at all. Instead, I saw that he was succeeding as a freelancer, getting work published even when he wasn’t trying hard. And that inspired me even more.

Because I hadn’t been trying at all.

Let’s say you’re brought up in an abusive household, where if you ever admit that you’re wrong then your parents and siblings will use that as evidence against you in every future argument. The correct behavior in such a case is to never admit that you’re wrong, and to conceal every mistake you make. Given the people you’re living with, that’s the key to survival - a perfectly sensible reaction.

But once you’re out from under the thumb of your crappy family, this secretive, angry denial will harm you. You’ll fail at most jobs*, and if you ever date anyone who does trust you, your behavior will convince him that you’re a big liar. And he’s right; you are. Unless you change your ways, the kind of relationships you’ll build with people will – gotcha! – mirror what you had with your family.

You act one way when you’re trying to control damage from awful people, and act another when you’re trying to build bridges with good people. Treating the two as though they’re the same will destroy what you have…

…But treating bad people as though they’re good will destroy you.

— Stage Three Trust: Because You Asked For It

“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.
[...]
Jennifer Esposito, 28, an image consultant who lives in Rye Brook, N.Y., lived for four years with a man who ate only pizza, noodles with butter and the occasional baked potato.

“It was really frustrating because he refused to try anything I made,” she said. They broke up. “Food is a huge part of life,” she said. “It’s something I want to be able to share.”
[...]
Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like rejection,” she said.

As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.

In 2006, Catalyst looked at stereotypes across cultures (surveying 935 alumni of the International Institute for Management Development in Switzerland) and found that while the view of an ideal leader varied from place to place — in some regions the ideal leader was a team builder, in others the most valued skill was problem-solving. But whatever was most valued, women were seen as lacking it.

Respondents in the United States and England, for instance, listed “inspiring others” as a most important leadership quality, and then rated women as less adept at this than men. In Nordic countries, women were seen as perfectly inspirational, but it was “delegating” that was of higher value there, and women were not seen as good delegators.
- from "The Feminine Critique" in today's New York Times

You probably overestimate your emotional intelligence. Most of us do. You could get into real trouble when your EQ is extremely low — like posting naked photos of yourself [...] Most of us are not doing insanely stupid things. We are just doing a series of smaller EQ mistakes day after day.

At some point, if your EQ is too low, you will hit a wall. Most people notice the wall when they can’t get a job, because today, the job hunts that are most successful are based on networking skills — in other words, EQ. But here are other areas of the workplace that are becoming more and more important. And success in each of these three areas depends heavily on EQ.

Think hard about how you approach a group. Do you hope that the group conforms to you or do you conform to the group? As long as you respect the people in the group, conforming to them enough to form a bond is not a bad idea. [...] But you can find pieces of yourself that match up with just about everyone, if you are in-tune with yourself and other people.

1. Don’t try to change or resist company culture including dress, communication styles and office hours. Being different does not work.
   
2. Practice self-awareness. This is a life-long task and every day you can become a little bit more aware of how people perceive you. Just doing your job is not enough. You need to do it in a way that makes a positive impression on everyone else.
   
3. Manage your stress levels so you can avoid emotional displays of inconsistent behavior and inconsistent messages. Most emotional outbursts come from unmanaged stress.
   
4. Be approachable all the time – in your cube, in the hallway, even in the bathroom.
   
5. Network before you need to network. Being good at politics means that you are good at relationship building, and you can count on a wide range of people when you need them.

Most of us have to work at being likeable. Fortunately, [research] shows that the biggest impediment to likeability is not caring. So if you “just decide you want to do better,” you probably will.

[P]eople judge your work skills as incompetent if you are not likeable — no matter what your work skills are. It may not be fair, but it’s what people do.

A review of the studies reported in this issue suggests that the Internet may have had less impact on many aspects of social life than is frequently supposed. In many cases, the Internet seems to have created a new way of doing old things, rather than being a technology that changes the manner in which people live their lives. As a consequence, the policy implications of increasing Internet use may be less than is often believed.

A cute 30-something single from Lincoln, Neb., Minnie began corresponding with George Hoagland, a handsome young doctor from New Jersey [...] The two exchanged notes and photos and seemed to totally click [Turned out George was a white-haired septuagenarian who'd sent her a 40-year-old photo.]

[T]his little drama took place in 1904, when singles sought each other out through matrimonial ads in newspapers like The Correspondent, The Matrimonial Register, The Wedding Bell, and The Matrimonial Post and Fashionable Marriage Advertiser.
- Seattle P-I.

It is fine to say that parents are responsible for what their children read. But no parent can realistically patrol a child's access to paper. [G]overnment regulation of paper is clearly needed. We look to Congress for a Paper Decency Act, to close the giant loophole left open when [the] Communications Decency Act was limited to electronic media.
- from Slate