Jacob Robinson's Blog, page 25
October 12, 2020
The Rise of Anxiety
As the mental health crisis continues to loom over our heads, we’ve noticed an astonishing pattern emerge: diagnoses of anxiety disorders, particular social anxiety, are skyrocketing. Now the question is: why?
Now, I’m no scientist (I’m sure any commenter on this blog can tell you that) but I do have two key ideas that I think play into why the rise of anxiety is occuring in the first place.
The first concept is based around anxiety’s mechanism of action. Anxiety is a spontaneous illness — meaning, it can get cultivated without any past predisposition. To get more specific, illnesses such as anxiety or PTSD are developed by a key event or series of key events, whereas illnesses such as schizophrenia or bipolarity need to have some sort of genetic inheritance or neurological imbalance to occur. This is why we see almost all spontaneous mental illnesses at the top of the case chart.
So while this may explain why anxiety is so common, it doesn’t explain its growth. This is where our second concept comes into play.
I believe that the rise of anxiety can be directly correlated — neigh, directly implicated — by the rise of the internet. Let me explain. If you were to go back to 1975, and make an awkward gaffe on stage in your high school, you could say with confidence that “things will be fine since all 50 or so people here will just forget this”. And that’s true — it’s because, pre-internet, news simply didn’t travel as fast, and if it didn’t travel fast then it couldn’t have a sense of permanency. Now, let’s flip to today. On a daily basis, embarrassing gaffes among small groups of people are uploaded, and — depending on their severity and virality — are shared quickly and made permanent. The long term effects of something like this are devastating, and is definitely something I’d pick up in a future blog post. But the main point to remember here is that it has gotten more dangerous to fuck up socially. Because of this, our “threat sensors” our over-stimulated, and chronic anxiety over social events occurs.
Once again, this is mostly ballparking by a person who is not an expert. But I think most will agree that there is a level of danger that has been created over the widespread antagonism of the internet. Will there be a solution? Likely, somewhere in the future. But we better think of it fast.
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October 5, 2020
Audience of One
When people start creating, they believe in a reality that people will listen to them right out of the gate. But in order to last, you have to build a mindset to create simply for one person: yourself.
Very few creatives end up making it, regardless of industry. I think a big part of why this is, doesn’t have to do with luck — but rather, with the fact that people become unmotivated rather quickly. The two primary reasons people become unmotivated are when they receive heavy criticism for their work, or when they receive nothing for their work at all. This post focuses on the latter reason.
I think the best way to go about this is to discuss how my own mindset has shifted over time. When I was young, I saw my ideas as these massive blockbusters, that everyone in the world would appreciate. And so, when I posted them and got one or two views, it dissuaded me from posting more. Now, however, it has become less about their success and more about getting them out there in the first place. I recognized that I had all these ideas in my head, and when I die or get debilitated they are all gone. And that’s that. I found that reality to be much more terrifying to me, and so I set out to put as many ideas into structured form as possible.
The more you consistently build, the more likely people will notice. Luck isn’t a wall, but a moving target. A solvable problem. And that’s my best advice to creators.
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September 28, 2020
Death in the Age of the Internet
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about death. More specifically, I’m going to talk about how death has changed — how death influenced the way we see online, and how online has influenced the way we see death.
First, I want to talk about real life death on the internet. Facebook was perhaps the pioneer for this — as users began to grow old and die, the site pursued a “memorialization” feature that allowed profiles to be curated after death. It is a strange sort of realization: when social media owners die, where do the profiles go?
There is something perhaps eerie about watching old videos, or reading old blog posts, and realizing that the person who made them is dead. In another way, it’s a boon to all of us. Better than ever before our memories now stay with the world long after our deaths, stitched together in the weave of the internet.
But perhaps more interesting is this new form of “internet death”, also known as “cancellation”. Social suicide had always existed in one form or another, and is an interesting concept in its own right. However, I plan on discussing the idea itself further in a later post — what I wanted to focus on now is scale.
Say you got “cancelled” in a time pre-Internet. In such a case, you can just go to the town over, and as long as no one there recognizes you you’ll be just fine. Post-Internet, however, things aren’t quite as simple. When the effect is across a universal scale, the damage becomes a lot more severe. It also means false-positives are a lot more deadly.
Death on the internet is an ever evolving concept. Memorialization services and archives will likely be expanded. “Cancellation” will likely become regulated in some form. However, at this point things are still in the wild west. That can be scary, but it can also be hopeful.
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September 21, 2020
The Crazies
A lot of people in this world are off, in some way. On the internet, we see them pass by in comment sections and social media posts. But who are they, and what becomes of them?
I once heard a story from a relatively popular content creator on the internet. He said that one day he got a peculiar email from someone on the other side of the country. It said that the man knew the creator was speaking to him, and that they’d finally be together soon. The creator shrugged it off as some weird message, and went back to work.
The next day, he got a call. It was the man’s sister. As it turns out, the man was serious — he had sold all his possessions, and bought a one way ticket to travel to an old address listed as belonging to the creator. He had already left the airplane and started looking for the house before the family even knew he was gone.
These are the crazies, the injection of schizophrenia, mania, and other mental illness into the internet. While we like to pretend that abstractions such as these simply don’t exist when we browse the web, the truth is that it does. And it’s getting worse.
For most people, anonymization on the web provides us some nice protections against the crazies. Unlike the content creator, we’re all very unlikely to have one of them on our tails. And so, it provides us the opportunity to sit in the background and observe. Many people do just that — entire forums are dedicated to “lolcows”, specific crazies on the internet that provide a casual observer some laughs with their seemingly ridiculous actions. Many people poke and prod them, trying to get them to perform certain actions, only to retreat back into the shadows.
The translation of these acts to the real world is frightening. On the side of the observers, increased callousness and apathy towards those suffering from mental issues in real life. But on the side of the crazies, something even worse — an often accelerating mental deterioration, brought on by the fact that people not just disbelieve them, but actively laugh at the reality they presume to exist. For those with no support system, they are likely as good as dead.
The story of the crazies is one that is grim, certainly. But it is not an unsolvable problem. For example, the world has also seen a massive shift towards the importance of mental health. While this shift tends to be for more minor issues such as seasonal depression and anxiety, it’s still a good step forward.
The first step to help is to give a voice to those who can’t give a voice to themselves. The crazies are perhaps the ultimate definition of that. Once the world recognizes that these issues are much more serious than we currently make them out to be, we can start working towards the cure. Just keep the crazies in mind the next time you read something, would you?
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September 14, 2020
On Relative Morality
So this is not the sort of topic I dive into often. Perhaps some of my blog posts wax on the philosophical, but I try to stay away from the large abstractions that philosophy can create. So, why am I choosing now to talk about relative morality?
I can see two major reasons. Firstly, morality is one of the more practical issues philosophy handles. In the current environment where we all seem to think one thing is good or bad and attack each other for it, I think it is an especially important thing to keep in mind. Secondly, I think it’s pretty fascinating that it’s the philosophical viewpoint I’ve held the longest. I can predate it back, at the very least, to when I was doing the Cup of Pseudo-Philosophy series back on the old blog around 5-6 years ago. When I look at all the other ideas I thought up around that time, they seem laughably cringy at best. So what makes relative morality so enticing, and yet so resilient?
I think a big part of my view now with relative morality is that it helps to reconcile radically different moral viewpoints across cultures and across time periods. You can think of a lot of different examples of this — one might be the use of religious terrorism, or the propensity for war across time, or differences in age of consent across countries — and all these different examples seem to point towards relative morality in mutual exclusivity of absolute morality. In other words, there are no real ways to make a case for absolute morality in understanding historical cases such as Nazi brainwashing or child brides (at least, from what I can understand — see my “call for arguments” at the end of this post). You can see arguments for other ideas within morality, such as evolutionary morality (murder is seen as immoral across all cultures due to the fact that it reduces proliferation of the species), but in this case evolutionary morality is not mutually exclusive against relative morality.
Now, despite there being a lot of arguments in the case for relative morality, I can understand the idea that waving off big moral issues as “well it’s all relative so it doesn’t really matter” is pretty counterproductive. We still need to have these conversations, because we as a society need to understand our ought and ought-nots in order to move forward.
And I think this is where relative morality comes in handy. If you can understand that relative morality exists, then it is easier to understand and not dehumanize the other person. And if it is easier to understand and not dehumanize the other person, then it is easier for you to construct an argument that leads the person to your opinion of what right ought to be.
You see, this all really comes back down to the communication idea. We communicate morals differently. What relative morality provides us is the flexibility to help others understand our moral viewpoint, and for us to understand theirs — no matter how light/heavy the differences can be.
That’s all I have for now, but as I mentioned earlier I do appreciate any arguments against my ideas, and is especially the case for absolute morality. I think the morality debate is in general something special, and so if you have any arguments you think are great for the other side, I encourage you to post them down below.
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September 7, 2020
Why You Shouldn’t Network
If you’re in the business of business, you’ve probably been knocked on the head at least a thousand times about how networking is vital for your career. Well, I’ve got bad news: you’ve been lied to. Networking doesn’t work.
Well, networking in a traditional sense at least. The times of informational interviews and coffee chats are well on their way out, now being replaced by a much more organic form of communication. But before I talk about your modern alternatives, let me better elaborate on why I think the old world is kaputt.
The first problem with networking is that it’s superficial. The conversations themselves really aren’t worth your time, most of the time. Especially if you’re a college student, you probably don’t have anything to offer someone other than a few stupid questions and a minor ego boost. When I wrote about communication on Apalla, I wrote that people like to feel respected. Respect means respecting their time — if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it!
The second problem with networking is that it’s repetitive. Not only is the actual process of setting up a coffee date or a phone call monotonous, but if you do it enough times you’ll begin to realize that people sort of say the same things over and over again. Take the Tim Ferriss podcast — while the advice is fantastic, you only have to watch 6 or 7 of them to realize that everyone has pretty much the same keys to success. Hell, Tim himself wrote two books on this idea. Now, the people on this podcast are on the top of their game — how quality do you think the advice you’ll get from random people in your network is?
And finally, the third problem with networking is that it’s time consuming. You’re spending lord knows how many hours scheduling the damn things in the first place, which are on average 30-minute fixed chunks of your time. This is time that can be much better spent creating, whether it be code, writing, art, design — whatever type of creator you are. You should be spending this time getting money and leads in the door, not by asking some entrepreneur how they made it in their industry (spoiler alert: it’s about the same as everyone else).
Alright, so enough of the negatives. What should you be doing instead?
Well, as it turns out, I do have good news for you: the new world form of networking is even easier than the old world form. It involves taking a combined route when getting to know other people — meeting and creating, intertwined. In this case, you don’t have to worry about whether things are time consuming because it is tied to the content you’re producing regardless. Similarly, it is no longer superficial nor repetitive since the connections are made naturally over time.
So, here’s some examples of new world networking techniques:
Create content. Duh! Setting up things like blogs, social media accounts, or Youtube channels with the intention of making insightful content is what new world networking is all about. As you share your content, meet other people who are interested in what you are working on. Build these relationships, and you’ll be well on your way to building meaningful connections without the need for an informational interview.
Be on other people’s content. I’m thinking podcast guest appearances, guest blogging, et cetera. You might not have requests for yourself coming in everyday when you first start out, but you can certainly ask. Notice the value differential between “I want to talk to you to learn about your career path and how to get this prestigious job” versus “I want to write some high quality content on your blog to drive in viewers”. Same concept, very different value prop!
However, just because things are “new world” doesn’t mean that it strictly has to do with new age stuff like social media and technology. There’s plenty of traditional tasks that fit this bucket:
Join groups you’re passionate about. Say you’re a Youtuber focusing on the latest news in the RTS games genre. Well, you’ll have to join RTS-related news groups to understand what content to make anyway. Why not be involved in this community, and meet people in it? You could end up meeting the people who make these RTS games, and have them give you exclusive content. Just make sure you’re giving something back to the community in return.
Work within companies. This is absolutely the easiest way to network. Work for people in a company, and do a good job. If you do a good job, they like you. Capitalize on that liking, and build a relationship out of it. Easy as cake!
Take others networking requests. Just because you’re no longer in the game of old world networking, doesn’t mean you should shun everyone who still is. Listen, here’s the best advice I will give you on networking out of all of this: you should always respond to people who are asking to network with you in good faith. Whether it be a LinkedIn message or a 15 minute phone call, (provided you aren’t outrageously busy) you should always accept. You never know where these things can lead, and it requires very little work on your part in comparison to the person who’s asking. And hell, maybe you can use that chance to spread the gospel of new world networking!
I hope this guide helped. As a person who was always incredibly annoyed with old world networking, I felt incredibly relieved to know that this format works just as well. I hope that relief spreads to you.
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August 31, 2020
How to Win an Election
For the final part of my election trilogy, I wanted to try and answer the ultimate question: how do you win an election in the first place?
I tried answering this question, perhaps in a roundabout manner, the last time this all happened. The article was called Why Donald Trump is so Successful but I think within the post I got more at why I thought he was going to win the election in the first place. It hits at the singular idea that at the heart of any Democratic election is a popularity contest.
Practically the number one barometer for how successful a candidate is, is how many times their name is mentioned. Donald Trump was constantly in the pocket in the media, and so was Obama before him, and W. before that, etc. etc.
Of course, there are still people who will get angry and, while they will serve as a microphone piece for the candidate, they will still not vote for the candidate themselves. And I actually think that, even though Trump is getting much more publicity than Biden, Trump might actually not win this time around. There’s a difference between getting people to know your name and making enemies. You’re not going to get anywhere if a lot of people know who you are and every single one hates you.
For the most part, policy does not matter. Policy only matters to a small subset of particularly educated individuals within the United States. Most vote on feeling. Therefore your goal should be to use communicative strategies to get people to feel liked and respected. And, if you pay attention, most politicians spend their time doing that rather than focusing on policy. Let policy wait until you’re actually elected.
This also explains why incumbents are so often victors in the second running. You’ve spent a whole four years hearing their names; of course they’re going to sound good to you!
Since I’m writing this two months in advance of its publication and five months in advance of the election, I’m not going to bother making any predictions here. All I will say is that I believe the candidate who best follows these rules will win.
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August 24, 2020
Nationalism’s Pros and Cons
Nationalism is talked about a lot in the media, especially with its recent uprising. Unfortunately, nationalism isn’t as black and white as people tend to paint it to be — there are bad parts to nationalism, and there are good parts to nationalism, and knowing the difference is key to running a country optimally.
This is part two of my “Election Trilogy”. You can view the first part here. These posts were written in June 2020. If democracy fell apart since then, whoops! But I’d like to think these are evergreen.
I’ll start with why nationalism is bad, because chances are you’re more familiar with that side. At the heart of every dictatorship — Nazi Germany, the USSR, North Korea, etc. etc. — there is nationalism. It makes sense. You aren’t going to go too far on a platform of killing eight million Jews if people don’t have an insane belief in the state. Because of this, nationalism has often been used to radicalize, brainwashing large swaths of the populace to do the dictator’s/party’s bidding (a fun side note: the way dictatorships are run are shockingly similar to that of cults, the only difference is that dictatorships have some processes that allow it to more easily scale).
However, just because nationalism is a tool used for evil, doesn’t mean it is an evil tool in itself. Nationalism, when used properly, can also be used for unifiers.
If you read my last post, you already know what I mean by unifiers. The United States (ironically) is one of the best examples of using nationalism for good, emphasizing the diversity of the population yet having them rally around specific ideas such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s hard to become a dictatorship when one of your national identities is freedom of speech!
Of course, examples like the United States are much rarer. Why is that? Well, for starters, individuals have selfish tendencies. If individuals have selfish tendencies, the individual wants people to do what the individual wants them to do. If the individual wants people to do what the individual wants them to do, they’ll start a dictatorship. And if they start a dictatorship, they’ll use nationalism. Pretty much the same as If You Give A Mouse A Cookie logic. On the other hand, there’s not a lot of reason to use nationalism if you don’t care what people do. So nationalism is simply used in dictatorships more.
So, if you wanted to go about using Nationalism, what would you do? Well first, you need anchors, or icons, to establish the guidelines of what the nation actually is. In terms of the United States, some anchors include things such as the Statue of Liberty, the Constitution, and Freedom of Speech. Notice that only one of these was an abstract anchor — the first two are real, tangible items that a person can see. Typically tangible anchors are better than intangible anchors as it reduces the friction of getting people to understand what exactly the anchors are.
Next, you need to assimilate, or get people cognizant of the anchors. All people wishing to be citizens of the United States must take a citizenship test that quizzes them on these exact anchors. At the same time, natural-born citizens are required to take U.S. History and Government classes to keep them knowledgeable of the anchors. These forms of education and testing are what keep the nationalism alive.
So, that all just about sums up nationalism. In our final part of this timely trilogy, we’ll be talking about how to win an election. See you then!
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August 17, 2020
Identity and Political Groups
Identity and politics play an important, intertwined role. Politics is, of course, itself an identity — but for the focus of this post we’re going to go away from political identity and moreso discuss how identities interlay themselves into politics.
(This episode is part one of my “Election Trilogy”. There will be two more posts coming related to political content. Take in mind that these are general thoughts that were written two months in advance; if shit’s gotten wack over that time, not my problem!)
The only good thing about having two political parties is that it’s very easy to A/B test certain concepts. One of those concepts you can test is that of identity.
Democrats took in identity from a fragmented point of view. Republicans took it from a cohesive point of view. Democrats are, on their head, much more diverse than Republicans. That isn’t what is bad. What is bad is that they took that diversity and never consolidated it into anything. There was no explicit, unified message; just inner conflict caused by divisive identities. You can compare Hillary Clinton/Joe Biden to AOC/Bernie Sanders and be surprised they’re even in the same party to begin with.
On the other hand, the Republicans do not have all that much identity diversity. They are, on average, white, heterosexual, Christian men. Because of this they fail to be effective, but they are efficient. This is because it is much easier to find a block that qualifies Republicans: pro-gun rights, anti-abortion, etc. etc. It is less “Republicans vs Democrats” and more “Republicans vs Everybody Else”.
I wrote a post a while back on diversity in general called You Can’t Do It All Alone. I’ll add an addendum on that by saying that diverse groups have higher maximum productivity and non-diverse groups have higher average productivity. What I mean by this can best be described as this: if you can unify a group of diverse personalities, you are going to perform better than anyone else: you are going to be both effective and efficient. However, if you fail to unify, or fragment, then your productivity is still going to be lower than the non-diverse group.
This is exactly what happened with the Democrats in 2016. When Sanders lost the nomination you had a large swath of people refuse to vote for Clinton — or vote for Trump — out of spite. This could end up playing out very similarly in 2020, as the conflict between Biden and Sanders supporters was even more contentious this time around. On the other hand, you could say that the goal of “Defeat Trump” has now overcome the hostility of 2016 and gives the Democrats their much needed advantage. In reality, neither of these scenarios matter.
They don’t matter because the fragmentation is still there. In the latter example, they “got lucky”. So they defeat Trump… what then? You still can’t contend that the new left (Bernie, AOC, Omar, etc.) will be able to agree with most things on the old left (Clinton, Biden, etc.). You certainly can’t contend that the supporters of either side will agree.
Because of this, a Democratic presidency (at least, as things currently stand) wouldn’t stand to go very far. If the Democrats fail to unify the rest of the house, then Republicans will still be able to step ahead and things will stay at a stand still. Just like how things are now.
So, what can the Democrats do? I feel like I’ve been alluding to this point the whole time, but I’ll go ahead and say it outright: Democrats need to focus more on unifiers than detractors. Not only that, but it has to have a better unifier than “Beat Trump”. There won’t be a Trump to beat if they do make the presidency, and will have to move on in some way. How do they move on? Find the common denominators between the new left and the old left (those are easily the biggest two fractions within the Democrats) and act upon those. They can’t be generics such as “extend healthcare”, because then there would be debate on the how. They have to be hows themselves, or solutions, in order to step ahead of the Republicans and make good ground these next few terms.
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August 10, 2020
Make-or-Break vs. Nice-to-Have
I’ve talked a lot about mindset on this blog. Each time I have, I’ve given a less-than-satisfactory answer of “I honestly don’t know how to fix this”. Truth is, I still don’t. But I think I might have something here that could help nudge people in the right direction. It’s the difference between the Make-or-Break and the Nice-to-Have.
The Make-or-Break is the dream internship you’re in the final round for. It’s the perfect 4.0 GPA you’re holding. It’s the championship game of the season. You’re so focused on getting it that you don’t think of anything else. You don’t even want to think about what life would be like if you didn’t have it. Well, the truth is, you still think about it. You don’t want to, but you do. And it gets you depressed. It puts an added load of stress on your body. The day comes, and you’re violently shaking all over. Then it happens, and you get it, and then…
…and then what? Maybe a pat on the back. Maybe there’s some sort of congratulatory pizza party. But after a few days, you’re already on to the next thing. Already on to the next stressor.
On the other hand, losing is a lot harder. You can be despondent for weeks, even months. (There’s a beautiful article I’ve read in which an author interviews former high-school football players decades after they lost a major regional championship, deemed the “most embarrassing day in [the town]’s history. It’s a perfect (albeit extreme) example of this, but I can’t find it. If you have the source, please comment it down below). So, this seems a lot more centered on the break than the make. Not exactly the best deal, is it?
Then, there’s the Nice-to-Have. Nice-to-Have is that Innovation Challenge you think would make a good resume-builder. It’s the tech internship you heard about last week that might be cool. It’s the one of many funding pitches you have scheduled for your startup. Noticing something?
With Nice-to-Haves, we turned the pressure off. We didn’t make you any less ambitious, or any more passive — they are not things, they are things that you want — but the lows are not nearly as bad. No longer are you depressed with visions of failure, or stressed by the massive amount of competition. No; you’re simply working for yourself. Everything simply is.
So, there’s some clear advantages and disadvantages to these mindsets. The major thing that Make-or-Break has going for it is focus; you are much more likely to get a particular thing if you use a Make-or-Break mindset. However, I’d wager that this advantage is mostly a crock of shit. Want to get into McKinsey? There’s about 100 consulting firms that pay just as well. Harvard? There’s 8 Ivy League colleges, plus another 25 or so Elites. YCombinator? Last I checked there’s over 400 accelerators and incubators looking for applicants.
But those “aren’t the same as your goal”, huh? Well, why do you want to work at McKinsey? To make $100,000 a year advising companies, or to have people gasp when you tell them where you work? Do you want to go to a school that gets you connections, or a school that gives you prestige? Do you want resources for your startup, or the ability to say “YC ‘XX” in your Twitter bio?
Prestige is meaningless once you figure out how goals work. And Make-or-Break is worthless once you realize Nice-to-Have will get you to your goals without breaking the bank.
I’ll give you a personal example. About a year ago I was given the opportunity to go study for a semester at Stanford University. However, there were some major financial hurdles that put the whole experience into jeopardy.
In the first few months, I took on a Make-or-Break mindset. I believed that I had to get this experience in order to look competitive to companies I was going to end up applying to. I spent hours on end in a nervous mess, my health considerably deteriorating. For a few days, I couldn’t do anything but sleep — doing anything else at all just made me worried.
However, as things got closer, I began to see the reality of the situation. Life wasn’t all about trying to impress companies — it was about building something for yourself, and following your own long-term goals. I started realizing all the millions of things I could do even if I didn’t go to Stanford. I could build out the blog more. I could continue my podcast from hiatus. I could get down my movie backlog. I could read. I could write. I could start a company. I could do a lot of things. Little did I know, but this was the beginning of the development of my Nice-to-Have mindset.
I did end up going to Stanford, but I had learned my lesson. It was time to start cultivating the Nice-to-Have fixation.
If you want to start building a Nice-to-Have mindset, there’s a couple of resources I’d recommend. Tim Ferriss’ Fear-Setting Guide is a classic example of this, and is the one I’d recommend the most due to its structured nature. I’m working on my own variation of this called the Tactics-Strategy framework, but it’s a little bit earlier on. You can read the Twitter thread where I introduce it here. Finally, this piece by Tim Urban, while directed at communication in particular, can be easily extrapolated into this sort of scenario.
Mindsets are some of the hardest things to build. Trust me, I’ve dedicated a decent chunk of my time to figuring that out. But any step forward is good, and if I can get you to turn from a Make-or-Break to a Nice-to-Have, I think I did good.
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