altonzheng

Thanks, I'm early-mid career, and this feels like really good advice. It almost seems obvious: be helpful, don't be an asshole, and you'll be fine.

> Protip: never psychoanalyze anyone! This likely applies even to psychoanalysts.

Beside your point, but wondering if you could expand on this. I have a tendency to do this, and while it's fun, I'm starting to get the sense that it's a bad habit, possibly because I sense I'm overly confident on something that might be 100% wrong and it feels... invasive?

I’d add removing inner resistance, which could be expanded under motivation in the formula. Increasing motivation isn’t simply an additive process — you can introspect on the things limiting your motivation, eg. fear of failure, and address them. After that, you have more cognitive space, and a difficult task might suddenly seem much more tractable. It’s about letting go of the thoughts/emotions holding you back. In my experience, tackling this has been most rewarding, not to say the practices in the article don’t help.

Almost spit out my coffee.

Join a large company and inspect the engineering org structure, and you will have the answer. Or ask someone that works at one :)

When I introspected, I realized indeed, all my dislike of Google was, at the root, just saltiness at being rejected :D.

Very interesting, I would love to see level-headed discussion on this, although it might be politically fraught. I'm curious how these two axes were decided, if anyone knows.

Also, it makes me wonder about cultural relativism, since it seems there's this implicit sense of "progress" by the way the map was constructed. It lines up with my values, but is that my Western bias?

While I agree with your sentiment that the system is flawed and not serving much of the population, I think the parent's point still stands. If the system was designed solely for protecting wealth, it wouldn't be encouraging competition -- ie. cartels and monopolies would be permitted.

Make no mistake, whatever the goal is, the side-effects are unfortunate.

According to LinkedIn, Yelp has 8964 employees with top 2 being: 1. Sales (3799) 2. Engineering (1035)

I was surprised myself, and I don't know what they're for. I have heard they are a design-driven company though. Also, they have a magazine (airbnbmag.com)

FWIW -- according to LinkedIn, they have 14554 employees, with the top two functions being: 1. Arts & Design (3365 employees) 2. Engineering (1990 employees)

What a beautiful quote, thank you for sharing.

> But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time.

A little off-topic, but this is an interesting point. Made me wonder if our corporations fall prey to the same problem as well, since they're basically authoritarian states in structure. But I guess it's because they have such one-dimensional goals that this structure is so effective, as you said.

> If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to

Do you think it's possible for delegated authority to exist under an authoritarian system at all?

Another perspective (I learned from a therapist), is that we might already possess the innate ability to be great conversationalist, it's just performance anxiety that gets in the way. So for me, as someone who consumed loads of self-help material without much improvement, it wasn't about learning more skills or anything, it was about giving myself permission to be dumb, boring, lame, and still accepting myself at the end of the day. And once I'm able to do that, there's no more anxiety, and then everything becomes much easier. I feel like this is a path to a more natural sort of confidence, although you might get there by practicing social skills directly too. Very painful though, and I'm still working on this.

Not saying this applies to everyone, but I think it's helpful for people who approach their social anxiety with a type-A mentality.

I've fallen into the trap of similar thinking as the author, and I agree, the main issue is believing that mindfulness is a panacea. The more we suffer the more we hope for simple solutions. I really wanted to believe that meditate more == be happier. For my neurotic and driven personality, this meant obsessively meditating, and I began deconstructing and disidentifying from every negative emotion using mindfulness. I got to some interested states from that and felt like I could "overcome" any negative emotion, but my general sense is my practice was imbalanced and I don't feel like I'm much better off... maybe a little disassociated from reality. Most serious meditation practitioners are aware of pitfalls like this though, it's known as "spiritual bypassing".

Meditation is just another tool, although a very powerful one. Use it wisely.