Tuesday, 9.04pm
Sheffield, U.K.
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. – Abraham Lincoln
Doug Lisle is a psychologist that I like listening to, first because he uses cartoons to illustrate his talks rather than boring slides, and second because what he says is interesting.
Lisle’s position on psychology appears to be that it’s all biology. I don’t think he seems to think much about the whole ego and id sort of thing. I really don’t know enough to have an opinion on the field, but for someone with an engineering background, a lot the old psychology stuff seems – well – made up. I remember reading some books in the field years ago and it was all, “well he said this” and then “she said this about what he said”, and my logical positivist engineering brain was going “why are people doing so much talking rather than just looking at the data?”
At the time, you didn’t have the data because you couldn’t look in people’s brains. And now that you can, it’s still not entirely clear why we think the way we do. For example, what can neurons firing in the brain tell us about poetry? Can you find a poetry circuit? Or a painting one? Probably. It’s like Pirsig writes about a novel and a computer – where, when you examine the circuits – is the novel.
Right, let’s back up. The thing about Lisle is that he doesn’t need the psychology to explain why we act the way we do. It’s biology. And a bit of economics. We make decisions to act for three reasons: to gain pleasure; to avoid pain; and to minimise effort. These are the reasons to act that kept us alive. And they’re also the reason why we’re in trouble these days because the easiest thing to do is often the worst thing to do in a world of abundance. Think TV and chocolate. A steady diet of those two is going to end badly.
Let’s look at the pleasure motivation in a little more detail. The obvious reason to pursue pleasure is the payoff in a relationship. But as social animals, pleasure is more than just that. One quite important type of pleasure comes from esteem. Lyle says we all have little esteem meters in our heads. We’re constantly making decisions based on whether the choice we make will increase or lower our esteem in the eyes of those around us.
How does this apply to the world we live in. Well, if you’re someone that wants to build a business, then you need people to pay attention to you. One way of doing that is to demonstrate how clever you are. You can do that by going on LinkedIn and putting out posts that show how knowledgable you are. You can call people out who are wrong, and tell them why they’re stupid. And if you do that consistently you’ll find that people respect you and look up to you and start following you.
Or will they? My reaction is more on the lines of … what a p****.
I know a few people like this, and they don’t come across as wise and helpful. They come across as cantankerous grumps. And not the kind of lovable grump that really has a heart of gold. This is the kind of grump that your kids are scared of asking for their ball back. The kind you cross the road to avoid, or pretend you don’t see because you don’t really want another conversation on why the world is going to hell in a shopping bag.
A more reliable way to get people to like you is to look for ways to raise their esteem levels. You can do this by sharing what they do, or commenting about what you liked about what they did. Lincoln may have thought that he was alone in desiring esteem, but as social animals that desire is hardwired into us. Esteem matters.
It’s not hard really. If you want to work with someone, figure out how what you do will raise their esteem levels.
Or, as Zig Ziglar (what a name!) said much more succinctly than this post, “you can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 