I always hate these kind of conversation advice/social advice blog post things because the reality is that you can be an excellent conversationalist and make friends with everyone with all different conversational styles. I have friends that talk about themselves 75% of the conversation but nobody gives a shit because they’re interesting/funny/unusual/whatever and people like to be entertained. Similarly I have friends that typically talk very little about themselves - few short sentences and back to you - and that works too! You can be the kind of person who uses someone’s name all the time or literally never uses it and BOTH of those work just fine.
You know what doesn’t work though? Weird advice about making it about them, or mentioning their name X times, or other specific rules. You can spot someone who just read How To Make Friends or whatever else a mile away - why? Because they seem to be nervously following some invisible rule and it ends up making them seem like a kid from the school paper conducting their first interview. You know what DOES work every time? Having a relaxed, natural conversation! “Have a few beers and relax and just talk normally” is better advice than any blog post or self help book out there.
If you do not want to see articles like this on HN, you can always flag it to seek moderator attention.
The author aksh7i seems to be using HN purely for self promotion who posts self-help (and dare I say, offtopic) stuff like this. Their last post was flagged too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963914 And in the first comment in that flagged article, they were made aware of their inappropriate and blatant self-promotional behavior:
> OP, every single one of your submissions is a blog post of your own, and every single one of your comments is a non sequitur on one of those submissions, apparently in an attempt to boost it. Get that kind of drivel off HN.
> Also, this particular article is nearly 100% insight-free, rehashed, productivity influencer pablum.
This has gotten a ton of votes in only a few minutes, so I figured I’d add:
If you want to get deeper into this - very few people can have a conversation, discreetly think about something unrelated at the same time, and then change the conversation accordingly. If you’re one of the few that can do this you’re definitely not taking conversation advice from a poorly written blog. There’s nothing that throws off a conversation faster than the other person clearly _thinking_ about the conversation. Doing that is also a social signal the size of Texas that you don’t have normal conversations. Just relaxing and talking normally, even if you talk about yourself, even if you never say their name, even if you bring up politics, even if you break every rule in the internet conversation blogger rulebook? That’s a social signal that you DO have normal social interactions. Relax and just talk like you normally do, not like some blogger told you.
> I have friends that talk about themselves 75% of the conversation but nobody gives a shit because they’re interesting/funny/unusual/whatever and people like to be entertained.
What if you're talking 75% of the conversation, but the content isn't particularly interesting/funny? Is that still fine?
> Having a relaxed, natural conversation! “Have a few beers and relax and just talk normally”
Where "natural" and "normal" is completely clear and self-evident to everybody.
Most of these advices are targeted at people who struggle with social interactions. Many people are lonely without friends and bad habits like talking only about themselves won't help with that.
If you have great social interactions then great! You likely don't need such advice.
(Although I think most people could learn some "tricks" to improve their relationships)
> You can spot someone who just read How To Make Friends or whatever else a mile away - why? Because they seem to be nervously following some invisible rule and it ends up making them seem like a kid from the school paper conducting their first interview
I had dinner once with an acquaintance in the industry who did this. Every interaction we had with someone else (hostess, waiter, etc) he made it a point to stop them and ask their name. It was incredibly awkward because there was no point in knowing everyone’s name.
certain personality types don’t just talk about themselves but rather lack awareness of others and don’t know how to read the room, as you suggest they should. Really, these people are unlikely to change, much less realize they are bothering anyone or appear selfish. And indeed, trying to follow a set of rules laid out on the internet would just shine a light on it.
There is a balance to this. If you always only listen to others and never speak about yourself, you fail to build connections with them (because they know nothing about you). I had the opposite problem, I made every conversation about them and had to learn to change that in order to be able to make friends.
I’ve found that people generally really enjoy talking about themselves but only if you’re truly interested and are drawing connections between yourself and them and their experiences and interests. If you’re merely pumping them for information or listening to their stories about themselves it’s not a connection building experience, it’s just setting them up to self reflect verbally to you.
The key for me is people like to engage in a conversation about themselves, and that requires you to:
* deeply interact with them about what they care about, challenging them m and giving them a chance to defend themselves and their beliefs in a way that is respectful and demonstrates true interest
* weave yourself into the conversation bringing your experiences and thoughts into their conversation about themselves
* try to learn something new from them, and be sure you articulate what you’ve learned clearly
* bring new information to them about the things they care about and get their views on that information
Etc
It’s basically the same as any conversation that’s not a monologue, even a solicited one. They want to feel important and interesting to you, and learn about you at the same time. But in the end you can’t assume they’ll be interested in you at first, so it’s often useful to lead the way by being interested in them. If you are a person who likes to learn, this shouldn’t be hard. Just try to avoid sinking into social anxiety as best you can as that’s when things become forced and weird.
I still have this problem, I have friends but when we talk I often drift to make conversations about them. I think it is a difficult habit to get out of, and it feels awkward to say things about myself without getting an explicit question. For a long time I just thought people were rude but nowdays I understand the problem to a big part is with me. I have started to talk more about subjects that interest me since that doesnt make me feel as egocentric as straight up talking about myself. It feels like a step in the right direction…
I know your type and it's great! But yes, a connection is a dance, so if I'm getting pelted with these seemingly reasonable questions (read: "and how did that make you feel?"), they start feeling insincere.
Yeah, this is so true. I read a lot of advice around how I should ask lots of questions etc when I was younger, and I fell into the opposite trap, which is that I never shared anything because I was letting other people do all the sharing.
The real key is curiosity - do you understand their viewpoint? Really? Really really? Are you just responding to a best guess of what you think it is? But once you really do understand (and they understand that you understand) it's totally fine to talk about some anecdote about yourself if it relates.
A big thing I’ve adopted recently is being open with my mental health with my friends (similarly, with a balance; nobody wants to be trauma bombed) which has helped a lot with both strengthening bonds and making sure my friends know when I’m not going to be at my best.
Everyone deals with fucked up brains, and having people to openly talk about it with casually has both helped me deal with my own shit and get through it faster and meant we know each other on a far deeper level.
A lot of people out there do not listen to learn or share viewpoints or out of genuine interest for the other being, but to get information that they can later use against you. People with real interests (nerds) should be particularly careful when talking to most people because nerds don’t understand such intent, which is why I try to not share my interests or similar personal information when I don’t sense certain personality traits. Being shut up about yourself makes most people out there mad because they view a conversation as a “trade” and can’t expect a later dopamin fix if you don’t give them your share, but who cares.
I think the balance is the conversation partner should be trying to ask more about you... it's a shared responsibility, and if they don't it equally means that they don't care about knowing more about you. If they're asking about you but you're giving minimal personal responses and redirecting the conversation back to them though, yeah.
And you can drop hooks for them to ask more about even while talking about them - like "Did you have any trouble getting through Y? I had trouble with X there a couple times before"
There are plenty of bad conversationalists out there though, and I sometimes wonder if it's worth the effort of forcing a totally one sided conversation the other way.
There are different ways to talk about yourself; the one that attracts me when spoken to enough to seek friendships and relations is the one where the words 'I' and 'me' don't appear in very often. Like 'let's go to that AI meetup, gonna be great!' is an indicator that a) you like AI b) you want little ol' me (blush blush) involved. There is no boasting, no #iamthemaincharacter etc.
But you are right; there is a balance, people that only ask about me and don't tell anything about themselves won't work either. Personally, the preferred route is to just quickly find common ground and go do something. Can be anything.
There is a balance. I often tell people a funny anecdote to loosen them up and break the ice. It’s work entertaining people all night though. Back and forth is best.
Interesting. I had to make a conscious effort to go the other way around, i.e.: to talk more about me. I grew up reading too many books aimed at the extroverts among us ("There's a reason we have 1 mouth and 2 ears!"; "Silence is golden!").
It's hard to underestimate missed opportunities because a shy introvert (me back then) took and (mis)applied advice meant for extroverts who were already unable to stop talking about themselves. I became virtually invisible. Not good for my career, for my social life, or for my success with women.
I realized much, much later, that to advance in my career, to have a social standing within a group, to be accepted and to have my opinions valued, I HAD to speak up. I HAD to sometimes convey forcefully a personal point of view. That's what makes a person interesting. Nobody remembers a nobody who "listened to me all night long". That only works if you're already somebody that people wouldn't expect to listen to them all night long in the first place!
Sadly, very seldom this kind of advice comes with the correct nuances, in which situation it applies, etc.
I relate very much to this. I have autism and in-person social interactions have been challenging at times to understand. So, I became a student of the human social experience and read a bunch of books about how to speak human, which I think indeed sometimes were more for extroverts.
I have been learning how to gracefully interrupt, how to start conversations, how to have an opinion that is different from the others in the group, etc.
Though in the process I learned a lot about how many peoples' minds work, so that's been useful still.
I think this happens a lot with other advice too. Diet/health advice like the constant barrage of "eat less fat" and "eat less salt", dating advice like "don't focus on looks", etc.
I get it, in one way... there are people out there who are unable to listen to the end of a sentence that starts with any qualification at all, and barely listen anyways so it needs to be repeated, forcefully. But this is optimizing for them at the expense of the people who do listen and end up internalizing the message too well.
To add to your experience, there's also a group of people that grew up and lived their adult life so isolated that they will start dumping on anyone that shows a little interest, smothering them. I know I'm guilty of that sometimes.
Exactly. I was also given feedback I should talk and express my opinion more, only later in my life. I was given this professionally, and it's possibly been one of the best advice I've received in terms of my life, it's weird it took me to get to the position of having a career and no one else before that thought to give it.
When growing up I also listened to those statements as you said, in addition I would like to bring out the very common "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt".
This type of sentiment actually gave me performance anxiety. Thinking people are constantly evaluating you, and at any given time if you speak you could significantly lose that rating. In which case it's always best to stay with the "neutral" or whichever rating. I thought it would be okay to kind of be this "strong, smart, mysteriously silent type".
Unfortunately if you actually follow this strategy, you will be left behind, because people who do talk, and say things that are stupid, are more likely to learn to talk better than anyone staying silent. Eventually they will say fewer stupid things, their communication skills will improve.
If I hold a stupid belief or opinion, and I never voice it, there's no one ever who could make me understand why the belief/opinion is stupid, meanwhile I'm wasting all this time with the bad belief.
These types of advices are, as one would also expect listened only by people who shouldn't listen to the advice, and people who should, won't listen to it in the first place.
So in the end it's people frustrated with other people talking too much giving out this type of advice without any thought on the consequences.
The "better to remain silent..." to me is worst of them all due to the mindset it brings to the social situations. As if it's a constant performance who is able to give a smarter impression, while a better mindset is that social situations and conversations should be about learning, improving, connecting and having fun. Sharing your thoughts, making mistakes, saying stupid things, arguing, are all part of this.
As a teenager I used to perceive most social situations as this sort of competition/performance, so I could never enjoy those situations since naturally the strategy I followed didn't make me become better at the competition. Only way I could've become better is if I actively participated and was okay with losing at least for a while. Now I'm trying to perceive social situations as something where I try to achieve the aforementioned goals (learning, improving, connecting and having fun) for the group as a whole rather than having a competition within the group.
If I ever have a kid and if that kid gets natural disposition to being introvert or on the autistic side, which could be likely due to how genes work, I will make sure to do my best to inject the mindset I believe is more productive.
I'm more than happy to hear people talking about themselves - I just wish people would remember that they've already told me a story before. The third time you hear about someone's school days when they did X, Y and Z can get a bit boring :D
I talk too much about myself, but am working on it. I do notice it can build connections especially when you share ever so slightly embarrassing things or express emotions like doubt and uncertainty.
Anyway, I am always happy when someone interrupts me "yeah, you told me about that indeed", before I bore them with the same story.
Where I live we call this "having your heart on your tongue." It's a way to cope with stress (for me at least). I try to limit it, but it always makes me feel better when people have been through similar things and I am genuinely curious as to how they solved similar situations.
Btw, I may remember that I told the story before, I'm just very bad at remembering who I told it to.
Oh yeah. I have good conversational memory. Hearing the same story three times is usually when I start to doubt the other persons memory. However, they have a different task to solve. I only have to concentrate on what they are telling me, and that makes repetition detection easier. However, they likely told the same story to numberous people, so they are used to repetitions, but they have no (good) mechanism to detect when they tell the same story to the same person.
That's also part of the difficulty of having multiple girlfriends at an advanced age. If you have N girlfriends and M jokes, you should maintain a table sized N*M to keep track which joke already told to which girlfriend.
I often look back at a comment I've written or email I've sent, and am annoyed at the number of paragraphs that start with "I ...". This one included! I think it looks odd when it's every single paragraph, so in extreme cases I will try to rewrite some of those sentences.
With this metric in mind and considering the topic of the article, I think this comment section makes for an ironic and amusing skim. Although I guess it's totally reasonable to talk from one's own perspective when discussing a piece of life advice.
Nobody else has brought up the elephant in the room, so I will.
OP: Your Substack is called "Thoguhts" and not "Thoughts" -- is this entirely because someone else is squatting on thoughts.substack.com? Or is there some additional "deeper" significance to the obvious mis-spelling?
This describes me well. How can you find the inner home? How can you be more conscious during conversations? I often come from an interaction with someone thinking: "God, I talked way too much. Should've listened more."
I can't give much advice there, other than be conscious/mindful and practice. Learn to pause between sentences, breathe, ask questions, listen, don't move to a next subject, etc. I think a lot of people have a fear that their soap box will be taken away if they don't fill the space, which... unfortunately isn't wrong because others love to hear themselves talk too.
You might have heard it from other places but meditation. It's literally training you to be present with your thoughts and knowing what exactly is happening in your mind at the moment (and letting it go).
Once you start meditating regularly you can observe that you got tangled up in thoughts quite early on and pull yourself back.
As many practitioners say it helps to create space between impulse and action.
A dating advice, for a guy, is "70/30"; Let her speak 70%, you speak 30%. People really like to share their own knowledge because that is their comfort zone, especially about themself.
When I throw a few cocktails back, I can get too comfortable with ranting, so I try to stfu every couple minutes to let others take the reins just in case I'm being overzealous (which is also embarrassing).
I wonder how many HN readers need to read this - reluctant as I am to overgeneralise, my instinct would be: not many. And the comments seem to reflect that.
I'm certainly someone for whom the opposite advice would be more in need - I think listening to people talk about themselves is something of a defence mechanism; avoiding letting people in.
Certainly agree on the "think more, talk less" front.
I think we often forget or don't realize quite how central talking, and thinking about talking is thinking, is our thought process... or a substantial part of our thought process. How we figure out our values test them and learn to apply them.
We get extremely attached to the stuff that flies out of our mouth, consider it "me."
"You’ll seek only true friends who align with your values, and experiences that bring you purpose and fulfillment and you’ll find a calm quiet center within :)"
Here is where I diverge. I think better conversational habits kind of lead to the opposite. True friends with very different values. A better, calmer separation of self from others, and hence a better ability to appreciate and love those that aren't like us, don't align with our values.
I've been running support groups for the last two years. While there are a few people who try to take all the space, most people enjoy the explicit permission (consent?) to talk about themselves. When they do, it's wonderful. We need more of it. However, I think the main point of the article isn't about talking less, it's about listening more. Specifically I found people get way more out of it when they aren't just waiting for their turn to speak, but really engaging with other people's stories. Then when it's their turn they haven't been thinking about what to say so what they do say often comes as a surprise to them. That's where the real catharsis happens.
Something to think about: ADHD prevalence is between 5-15%, depending on region/study. Excessive speech is an ADHD symptom. It's part of physiology and not curable.
This is basically an advice for extrovert people. Another advice for such people would be "stop repeating the same concept/anecdote every time we talk about that topic", but then they would probably stop being extrovert at all :)
At least in my experience these two are the most common traits of extroverts (and I do wonder if there is any real connection to how their memory works).
There is a huge difference in values to be observed between an individual who is interested and one who is interesting.
Interesting people are tiresome to be around and very rarely productive. If all you ever do is try everything possible to be interesting, you're boring.
Interested people are a lot of fun and get the ball rolling on a lot of productive energy. If you take a great interest in others and pursue that interest, you make the group great.
Its really that simple. Next time you find yourself nodding off around someone, count the times in the conversation they took an interest, versus the moments they spent trying to be as interesting as possible. You may observe a big release of energy by spotting this factor ..
[+] [-] owenversteeg|2 years ago|reply
You know what doesn’t work though? Weird advice about making it about them, or mentioning their name X times, or other specific rules. You can spot someone who just read How To Make Friends or whatever else a mile away - why? Because they seem to be nervously following some invisible rule and it ends up making them seem like a kid from the school paper conducting their first interview. You know what DOES work every time? Having a relaxed, natural conversation! “Have a few beers and relax and just talk normally” is better advice than any blog post or self help book out there.
[+] [-] distcs|2 years ago|reply
The author aksh7i seems to be using HN purely for self promotion who posts self-help (and dare I say, offtopic) stuff like this. Their last post was flagged too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963914 And in the first comment in that flagged article, they were made aware of their inappropriate and blatant self-promotional behavior:
> OP, every single one of your submissions is a blog post of your own, and every single one of your comments is a non sequitur on one of those submissions, apparently in an attempt to boost it. Get that kind of drivel off HN.
> Also, this particular article is nearly 100% insight-free, rehashed, productivity influencer pablum.
They choose to continue spamming HN regardless.
[+] [-] owenversteeg|2 years ago|reply
If you want to get deeper into this - very few people can have a conversation, discreetly think about something unrelated at the same time, and then change the conversation accordingly. If you’re one of the few that can do this you’re definitely not taking conversation advice from a poorly written blog. There’s nothing that throws off a conversation faster than the other person clearly _thinking_ about the conversation. Doing that is also a social signal the size of Texas that you don’t have normal conversations. Just relaxing and talking normally, even if you talk about yourself, even if you never say their name, even if you bring up politics, even if you break every rule in the internet conversation blogger rulebook? That’s a social signal that you DO have normal social interactions. Relax and just talk like you normally do, not like some blogger told you.
[+] [-] The_Colonel|2 years ago|reply
What if you're talking 75% of the conversation, but the content isn't particularly interesting/funny? Is that still fine?
> Having a relaxed, natural conversation! “Have a few beers and relax and just talk normally”
Where "natural" and "normal" is completely clear and self-evident to everybody.
Most of these advices are targeted at people who struggle with social interactions. Many people are lonely without friends and bad habits like talking only about themselves won't help with that.
If you have great social interactions then great! You likely don't need such advice.
(Although I think most people could learn some "tricks" to improve their relationships)
[+] [-] melvinmelih|2 years ago|reply
I had dinner once with an acquaintance in the industry who did this. Every interaction we had with someone else (hostess, waiter, etc) he made it a point to stop them and ask their name. It was incredibly awkward because there was no point in knowing everyone’s name.
[+] [-] gilleain|2 years ago|reply
Reminds me of this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W34wyKZlWQ (Mitchell and Webb, 'People Person' sketch). Yes, it's obvious when people do this, and unconvincing.
[+] [-] ShamelessC|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rockbruno|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|2 years ago|reply
The key for me is people like to engage in a conversation about themselves, and that requires you to:
* deeply interact with them about what they care about, challenging them m and giving them a chance to defend themselves and their beliefs in a way that is respectful and demonstrates true interest
* weave yourself into the conversation bringing your experiences and thoughts into their conversation about themselves
* try to learn something new from them, and be sure you articulate what you’ve learned clearly
* bring new information to them about the things they care about and get their views on that information
Etc
It’s basically the same as any conversation that’s not a monologue, even a solicited one. They want to feel important and interesting to you, and learn about you at the same time. But in the end you can’t assume they’ll be interested in you at first, so it’s often useful to lead the way by being interested in them. If you are a person who likes to learn, this shouldn’t be hard. Just try to avoid sinking into social anxiety as best you can as that’s when things become forced and weird.
[+] [-] plufz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andirk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnfn|2 years ago|reply
The real key is curiosity - do you understand their viewpoint? Really? Really really? Are you just responding to a best guess of what you think it is? But once you really do understand (and they understand that you understand) it's totally fine to talk about some anecdote about yourself if it relates.
[+] [-] mynameisvlad|2 years ago|reply
Everyone deals with fucked up brains, and having people to openly talk about it with casually has both helped me deal with my own shit and get through it faster and meant we know each other on a far deeper level.
[+] [-] JesseMReeves|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cauliflower99|2 years ago|reply
How did you learn to speak more about yourself when (if you're like me), your mind starts to shut down as soon as you start?
[+] [-] rendaw|2 years ago|reply
And you can drop hooks for them to ask more about even while talking about them - like "Did you have any trouble getting through Y? I had trouble with X there a couple times before"
There are plenty of bad conversationalists out there though, and I sometimes wonder if it's worth the effort of forcing a totally one sided conversation the other way.
[+] [-] anonzzzies|2 years ago|reply
But you are right; there is a balance, people that only ask about me and don't tell anything about themselves won't work either. Personally, the preferred route is to just quickly find common ground and go do something. Can be anything.
[+] [-] slowhadoken|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertlagrant|2 years ago|reply
I think there's a big middle between this and "always making conversations about yourself".
[+] [-] rayxi271828|2 years ago|reply
It's hard to underestimate missed opportunities because a shy introvert (me back then) took and (mis)applied advice meant for extroverts who were already unable to stop talking about themselves. I became virtually invisible. Not good for my career, for my social life, or for my success with women.
I realized much, much later, that to advance in my career, to have a social standing within a group, to be accepted and to have my opinions valued, I HAD to speak up. I HAD to sometimes convey forcefully a personal point of view. That's what makes a person interesting. Nobody remembers a nobody who "listened to me all night long". That only works if you're already somebody that people wouldn't expect to listen to them all night long in the first place!
Sadly, very seldom this kind of advice comes with the correct nuances, in which situation it applies, etc.
[+] [-] dvcolgan|2 years ago|reply
I have been learning how to gracefully interrupt, how to start conversations, how to have an opinion that is different from the others in the group, etc.
Though in the process I learned a lot about how many peoples' minds work, so that's been useful still.
[+] [-] rendaw|2 years ago|reply
I get it, in one way... there are people out there who are unable to listen to the end of a sentence that starts with any qualification at all, and barely listen anyways so it needs to be repeated, forcefully. But this is optimizing for them at the expense of the people who do listen and end up internalizing the message too well.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mewpmewp2|2 years ago|reply
When growing up I also listened to those statements as you said, in addition I would like to bring out the very common "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt".
This type of sentiment actually gave me performance anxiety. Thinking people are constantly evaluating you, and at any given time if you speak you could significantly lose that rating. In which case it's always best to stay with the "neutral" or whichever rating. I thought it would be okay to kind of be this "strong, smart, mysteriously silent type".
Unfortunately if you actually follow this strategy, you will be left behind, because people who do talk, and say things that are stupid, are more likely to learn to talk better than anyone staying silent. Eventually they will say fewer stupid things, their communication skills will improve.
If I hold a stupid belief or opinion, and I never voice it, there's no one ever who could make me understand why the belief/opinion is stupid, meanwhile I'm wasting all this time with the bad belief.
These types of advices are, as one would also expect listened only by people who shouldn't listen to the advice, and people who should, won't listen to it in the first place.
So in the end it's people frustrated with other people talking too much giving out this type of advice without any thought on the consequences.
The "better to remain silent..." to me is worst of them all due to the mindset it brings to the social situations. As if it's a constant performance who is able to give a smarter impression, while a better mindset is that social situations and conversations should be about learning, improving, connecting and having fun. Sharing your thoughts, making mistakes, saying stupid things, arguing, are all part of this.
As a teenager I used to perceive most social situations as this sort of competition/performance, so I could never enjoy those situations since naturally the strategy I followed didn't make me become better at the competition. Only way I could've become better is if I actively participated and was okay with losing at least for a while. Now I'm trying to perceive social situations as something where I try to achieve the aforementioned goals (learning, improving, connecting and having fun) for the group as a whole rather than having a competition within the group.
If I ever have a kid and if that kid gets natural disposition to being introvert or on the autistic side, which could be likely due to how genes work, I will make sure to do my best to inject the mindset I believe is more productive.
[+] [-] scrapheap|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|2 years ago|reply
Anyway, I am always happy when someone interrupts me "yeah, you told me about that indeed", before I bore them with the same story.
Where I live we call this "having your heart on your tongue." It's a way to cope with stress (for me at least). I try to limit it, but it always makes me feel better when people have been through similar things and I am genuinely curious as to how they solved similar situations.
Btw, I may remember that I told the story before, I'm just very bad at remembering who I told it to.
[+] [-] lynx23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tescocles|2 years ago|reply
I always get paranoid they'll remember half way through the story that they've told me it before, and then ask why I didn't say anything.
[+] [-] dsego|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] circlefavshape|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boerseth|2 years ago|reply
With this metric in mind and considering the topic of the article, I think this comment section makes for an ironic and amusing skim. Although I guess it's totally reasonable to talk from one's own perspective when discussing a piece of life advice.
[+] [-] beardyw|2 years ago|reply
".. anyway that's enough talk about me. What did YOU think about my performance."
[+] [-] distcs|2 years ago|reply
See:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aksh7i (100% self promotion)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963914 (flagged)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37966657 (warned)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38067963 (dead)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38187431 (flagged and dead)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38188099 (warned again)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aksh7i (incoherent comments)
[+] [-] shrikant|2 years ago|reply
OP: Your Substack is called "Thoguhts" and not "Thoughts" -- is this entirely because someone else is squatting on thoughts.substack.com? Or is there some additional "deeper" significance to the obvious mis-spelling?
[+] [-] gulyams|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|2 years ago|reply
But yeah, it takes conscious effort and practice.
[+] [-] bacza2|2 years ago|reply
Once you start meditating regularly you can observe that you got tangled up in thoughts quite early on and pull yourself back.
As many practitioners say it helps to create space between impulse and action.
[+] [-] andirk|2 years ago|reply
When I throw a few cocktails back, I can get too comfortable with ranting, so I try to stfu every couple minutes to let others take the reins just in case I'm being overzealous (which is also embarrassing).
[+] [-] lopis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucideer|2 years ago|reply
I'm certainly someone for whom the opposite advice would be more in need - I think listening to people talk about themselves is something of a defence mechanism; avoiding letting people in.
[+] [-] dalbasal|2 years ago|reply
I think we often forget or don't realize quite how central talking, and thinking about talking is thinking, is our thought process... or a substantial part of our thought process. How we figure out our values test them and learn to apply them.
We get extremely attached to the stuff that flies out of our mouth, consider it "me."
"You’ll seek only true friends who align with your values, and experiences that bring you purpose and fulfillment and you’ll find a calm quiet center within :)"
Here is where I diverge. I think better conversational habits kind of lead to the opposite. True friends with very different values. A better, calmer separation of self from others, and hence a better ability to appreciate and love those that aren't like us, don't align with our values.
[+] [-] blopker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xlii|2 years ago|reply
Something to think about: ADHD prevalence is between 5-15%, depending on region/study. Excessive speech is an ADHD symptom. It's part of physiology and not curable.
[+] [-] darkwater|2 years ago|reply
At least in my experience these two are the most common traits of extroverts (and I do wonder if there is any real connection to how their memory works).
[+] [-] Cypher|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boffinAudio|2 years ago|reply
Interesting people are tiresome to be around and very rarely productive. If all you ever do is try everything possible to be interesting, you're boring.
Interested people are a lot of fun and get the ball rolling on a lot of productive energy. If you take a great interest in others and pursue that interest, you make the group great.
Its really that simple. Next time you find yourself nodding off around someone, count the times in the conversation they took an interest, versus the moments they spent trying to be as interesting as possible. You may observe a big release of energy by spotting this factor ..
[+] [-] JR1427|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanHulton|2 years ago|reply