My stages of learning to be a socially normal person

This post wasn't what I was expecting from the "socially normal" title. While there is a lot of self-reflection and growth in this piece, a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions.

Look at the first two subheadings:

> 1: Connecting with people is about being a dazzling person

> 2: Connecting with people is about playing their game

The post felt like a rollercoaster between using tricks to charm and manipulate, and periods of genuinely trying to learn how to be friends with people.

I don't want to disparage the author as this is a personal journey piece and I appreciate them sharing it. However this did leave me slightly uneasy, almost calling back to earlier days of the internet when advice about "social skills" often meant reductively thinking about other people, assuming you can mind-read them to deconstruct their mindset (the section about identifying people who feel underpraised, insecure, nervous,) and then leverage that to charm them (referred to as "dancing to the music" in this post).

Maybe the takeaway I'd try to give is to read this as an interesting peek into someone's mind, but not necessarily great advice for anyone else's situation or a healthy way to view relationships.

The book is called “how to win friends and influence people”, after all.

I read that book because it was on so many generic book recommendations lists.

It was less sleazy than I expected from the title. It actually had a lot of points about being genuine, being a good listener, showing respect to other people's opinions, admitting when you're wrong, being sincere, and so on. Decent advice, really.

A side benefit of reading it is you learn how to spot when other people are insincerely trying to use the tricks in the book against you. Once you see it, it's hard not to miss.

I read that book and I think it's terrible.

Though the "God has not seen fit to distribute evenly the gift of intelligence" was funny and I can relate...

but otherwise, I wouldn't want to live in a society where people are secretly hating you but "speaking ill of no man" a.k.a. "not criticizing."

I liked the book Winning by Jack Welch more, which advocates for "candor," and is essentially the opposite of How to Win Friends.

The sociopath who destroyed GE in the quest for more money is someone I would only take social advice from if I was done with humanity and had started to use society for entirely selfish ends.

He got away with “candor” because he was at the top and anyone who disagreed with him was removed.

Honestly any self help books from people in unique positions in society trying to tell the common man how to improve always read to me as “my top 10 tips for winning the lottery: tip one buy a winning lottery ticket”

Do you think you are a common man? Are you content with it?

Yes and yes.

I actually like being part of society and don’t need to feed delusions of grandeur to feel content.

Also I want to point out how I referenced his opinion as being like tips on winning the lottery. Getting to a unique position of power like that requires so much luck and other input that you have no control over that I view the “advice” on how to achieve it as useless and just the result of those people grappling with the cognitive dissonance of thinking they got to where they are on their own vs the actual reality