Spotlight on an Invested Personality

Not a great quality image for this post to be sure, but considering it was taken in the dark on my phone with a 10x zoom on it - it is fine. It is of my daughter at the rehearsal for her dance class and it pretty much depicts the order involved...

None.

I remember being a kid and performing in various ways at this age, but about 30% of the children in the group were acting like they had never been to a class or taken instruction before. It was weird and strangely off-putting how little care they (or their parents) had for the practice. Still, Smallsteps had fun dancing and prancing around the stage in butterfly wings.

She gets this from her mother.

Her father (I think that is me) hates the spotlight.

Okay, Smallsteps doesn't like the spotlight either, but she does like performing assigned tasks and I hope that in the future, she will be assigning more of her own tasks, rather than taking orders. Sure, learning a skill like dancing however, does require taking orders and instruction, repetition and a lot of dedication and consistent work - off stage.

In a post I wrote recently, I mentioned how dressing 10% better than others can get good results, as part of a general strategy to be 10% better at everything we do and the difference it might make to our outcomes. As expected (and not judging here), someone commented about being comfortable in whatever they wear, not caring what others think.

That is great!

However, this is also part of the problem I see repeated time and time again - the "dressing" part (in this case) is treated as if it is in a vacuum, that it doesn't act on or influence anything else in the ecosystem. That is not true. Yes, you should be comfortable in what you wear, but if what you wear is getting in the way of accomplishing other things that are important to you, than you might want to rethink where you are willing to be comfortable and where you are not. This essentially means is,

what price are you willing to pay to be comfortable in the clothes you wear?

Everything has an opportunity cost, because nothing exists in a vacuum, except theories. Doing one thing will have numerous impacts on everything else and this is why being aware of our own hierarchies of needs and desires is useful in discovering where we are willing to sacrifice comfort.

I know plenty of people who say that they wear what they want and don't care how people judge them, but those very same people also want more opportunity, respect, promotions or money and the like. Now, they can say they are a victim of irrelevant and unfair judgement, but they are missing a highly salient point - People are irrational and judgmental by nature. If a person doesn't recognize that their behavior and presentation impact on people's opinion, they are going to have issues if they are not self sufficient and require relationships and work collaborations in order to accomplish their various goals.

If self-sufficient and wanting or needing anything from anyone else, by all means, act and do however you please - but if you are dependent on others, it is just not possible. It is like someone who doesn't take care of personal hygiene, brush their teeth, comb their hair or wash their clothes wondering why they aren't dating supermodels.

Cleanliness is just one of the prerequisites I assume.

And, this affects business and work life too, where in order to make the impacts necessary to build the types of relationships needed to be successful, a "game" has to be played. The game of understanding human nature to a high enough degree that messages are transmitted, received and carried out well enough to reach goals. To deny the impact our behaviors have on others is quite shortsighted and unaware.

This is the same with the arguments about free speech, which everyone has by default. Oh, you didn't know? Yes, everyone has it - it is just that like everything there is no such thing as free - there are consequences to every action, cause and effect. In some places the cost to saying what you want might be very low, while saying the same thing elsewhere could see an extreme price paid - but there is always a cost.

On Hive for example, the cost of being a dick might lead to a downvote of varying size depending on downvoter stake, but there is also a cost of not getting upvoted by someone too. Both are costs of response to behavior. There are other costs too, like unfollows or mutes - yet, people are *Still "free" to say what they want - but these other costs don't get mentioned, only the downvotes do.

Why is this?

Well, because while people want to say what they want, just like they want to wear what they want - they don't want to pay the price of saying what they want and don't necessarily recognize the price of wearing what they want. Essentially, they want to have their cake and eat it too.

It is not that it is entirely impossible, but as humans are filled with heuristics and generalizations that filter the information received to lessen mental energy expenditure, to change their behavior requires making it through the judgement mesh favorably. There are various ways to do this, but there are also many, many things that increase the number and raise the hurdles to their behavior.

Think about that supermodel being approached by 100 people, with some being clean, well spoken and well dressed and some being filthy, stinking and slurring their words, as well as everything in between. Are they going to take the time to get to know each of the 100 one by one in order to be able to accurately judge their personality and suitability as a partner?

Unlikely.

And this is my point. If looking for a particular result, setting up unnecessary hurdles to getting that result isn't really "good business". Not factoring in the way humans think and are likely to react to our behaviors, but expecting people to not judge based on what we do, shows a complete lack of awareness and empathy.

I don't know if you have noticed, but none of this or the other post linked, is about wearing clothes to impress people - it is about human nature and game theory, looking at the way we act and people react to what we do and how they see us. To live in a fantasy world where "looks don't matter" is only going to bring on the pain, because looks are everything in a relationship.

Not necessarily physical looks, but other people's perception of us and the representation they build that depicts who they believe us to be. This mental avatar is a dynamic production, and covers all of the things that are important to them, whether it be physical looks, personality, skillset, professionalism, trustworthiness or any number of other things - these are all factored into the impression we make and they create - whether it is accurate or not.

We might feel unfairly judged at times, but in the eyes of the person doing the judgement, they are being as fair as they can, based on their own beliefs, opinions, predispositions and genetics. Tomorrow, they might for some reason judge differently, but that doesn't change today.

Perhaps, rather than maximizing being "comfortable in our own skin" at any cost, we should consider what we are willing to pay for that comfort and, can we afford it. Maybe, we should also lift our noses from the screen from time to time and pay attention to the impressions others make on us, whether good or bad and why and then remind ourselves - each opinion we create is a judgement made on that person, where we are looking at a narrow selection of all they are - and applying a general rule to them - just as they are doing to you.

If we are what we do and we aren't who or where we want to be - we have to do differently, right? It doesn't matter whether we want a promotion, more money or to date a supermodel - everything takes some kind of investment which means, everything we do, comes with some kind of cost.

Time. Money. Comfort.

Sometimes, one might have to stand in the spotlight, even if the darkness is preferred.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]