During my recent undergrad, I was often openly critical of the cost effectiveness of various initiatives being pushed in my community. I think anyone who has been similarly ruthless is probably familiar with the surprising amount of pushback and alienation that comes from doing this. I think I may have convinced some small portion of people. I ended up deciding that I should focus on circumventing defensiveness by proactively promoting what I thought were good ideas and not criticizing other people’s stupid ideas, which essentially amounts to being very nice.
I wonder how well a good ruthlessness strategy about public contexts generalizes to private contexts and vice versa.
Anecdote re: ruthlessness:
During my recent undergrad, I was often openly critical of the cost effectiveness of various initiatives being pushed in my community. I think anyone who has been similarly ruthless is probably familiar with the surprising amount of pushback and alienation that comes from doing this. I think I may have convinced some small portion of people. I ended up deciding that I should focus on circumventing defensiveness by proactively promoting what I thought were good ideas and not criticizing other people’s stupid ideas, which essentially amounts to being very nice.
I wonder how well a good ruthlessness strategy about public contexts generalizes to private contexts and vice versa.