BlogSat

A couple of weeks ago when I was getting advice from someone about negotiating, he said "remember to be authentic". The phrase stuck with me, but I didn't think about it in much depth. It came back to me today in another context. It helped that I was vacation for a week, so I was looking at work (and how I work) with fresh-ish eyes. In a meeting today, I found myself suddenly stepping back and looking at my behavior.  I wasn't acting like I was when I ran meetings a couple of years ago, but it was suspiciously like someone I used to work with a year ago. Earlier in the day, I was having a slightly tense discussion with someone and I found my tone suddenly sharp, hesitating on my words to use and being suddenly passive aggressive - something uncharacteristic to me - and so immediately also unpleasant for me. I realized I was simply matching the tone of the person I was having a discussion with.  In both cases I was mimicking - copying behaviors I'd...

This is (like the earlier post ) is an incomplete thought, but here goes... Growing up, the vision of the future that science fiction sold me was one of "The Jetsons", where machines took care of our chores and tedious tasks. Humans (and I simply assumed this was all humans) were free to do the things they wanted to do rather than needed to do. As I grew up I naturally gravitated, both in the books I read and the films I watched, towards more dystopian visions of the future - where life generally sucked if you weren't in the top strata of society, and that top strata seemed to mostly comprise of evil people bent on ensuring the survival of that societal hierarchy. There's far too many good and bad movies that explore these worlds. For some reason, the one that's particularly coming to my mind today is "In Time" - not because its a good movie - it's ok - but because there's a tragic scene in this film where people are hanging by a thread to...