Check Before Re-Using Speech That Worked Long Ago
Some feature of your audience, or of the situation, is familiar enough to trigger a specific piece of material that proved to be scintillating in the past. It might be just as charming or poignant now as it was back then. But think twice before you wheel it out and redeploy it. Why? Because the slightest congruity between past and present can be powerfully tempting: surely this is a chance to validate old good stuff, to prove to yourself the value of what you’ve accumulated, and to be good-with-people without having to make a renewed effort. This temptation can cause you to overlook the important new factors that distinguish this moment from its distant precursor…
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Work, Overwork, and the Need to Belong
People have an evolved need to be part of something – to belong to a family that belongs to a tribe. Anyone who doesn’t have that can become susceptible to whatever offers itself as a substitute, even if the eventual price of belonging is unclear at the outset, and turns out to be too high. We are a profoundly social species, and the more isolated somebody is, the greater their risk for getting absorbed into a company that has cult-like features—especially if these only become obvious after some time has passed, and ties have been formed.
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On Hoarding
Hoarding occurs on a spectrum of severity. It can be a light nuisance, a serious problem that impinges on one’s life-possibilities, or a severe mental affliction with potentially dire implications for physical health. It’s a distorted version of some natural and necessary mental functions. In the deeply ancient world, long before civilization, people generally kept only what they could carry. Evolutionary psychology of this sort can easily jump to mistaken conclusions, but it seems likely that somewhere along the line it became adaptive to try and hang onto stuff that might be useful later on. A temperament that disposed people to a more retentive attitude became partly heritable—despite the fact that it could also cause trouble...
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People-Pleasing Pleases Nobody
It’s true that people-pleasing and self-effacement are much better than the opposite extreme—where narcissists act as if the world owed them everything they could ever want, going through life exploiting others by deception, cheating, and entitlement. But there is a vast, wholesome, fertile middle-ground between these extremes.
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