How Do We Get Better At Something?

Wednesday, 9.21pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Esteem must be founded on preference: to hold everyone in high esteem is to esteem nothing. – Moliere

I’m a big fan now of Dr Doug Lisle and his presentations.

You can find them on YouTube and what drew me to them first is that he uses hand drawn pictures to talk about complex things.

What he says is interesting too.

One of the things he’s talked about is a model of human interaction based on what he calls an “esteem meter”.

The idea is this.

If people reject you, then that affects your esteem.

This is often thought of as a bad thing.

It’s not. What you should see a message of rejection as is feedback.

Feedback is a good thing, it’s a signal back from the world telling you whether everything is ok or if you need to change something.

For example, you send out messages to different populations at different times – to possible mates, possible friends and possible people you might work with – what Dr Lisle calls “trading partners”.

If their response is positive, then your esteem rises.

If not, you may need to change your message.

It’s really simple when you look at it that way.

If you want to get better at something try doing it, get feedback, see what it does to your esteem, learn from that feedback and try something else until you get a boost.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh