For earlier humans that roamed hostile environments, aggression and physicality had been critical. But the more cooperative we became, the less useful these traits proved. When we started living in settled communities, they grew especially troublesome. There, it would’ve been the people who were better at getting along with others, rather than the physically dominant, who’d have been more successful.

This success in the community would’ve meant greater reproductive success, which would’ve gradually led to the emergence of a new strain of human. These humans had thinner and weaker bones than their ancestors and greatly reduced muscle mass, their physical strength as much as halving. They also had the kind of brain chemistry and hormones that predisposed them to behavior specialized for settled communal living. They’d have been less interpersonally aggressive, but more adept at the kind of psychological manipulation necessary for negotiating, trading and diplomacy. They’d become expert at controlling their environment of other human minds.


A wolf survives by cooperating as well as fighting for dominance and killing prey. A dog does so by manipulating its human owner such that they’d do anything for them.


No other animal has taken domestication to the extent that we have. Our brains may have initially evolved to cope with a potentially threatening world of predators, limited food and adverse weather, but we now rely on it to navigate an equally unpredictable social landscape.


For modern humans, controlling the world means controlling other people, and that means understanding them. We’re wired to be fascinated by others and get valuable information from their faces.


The consolation of story is truth. The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we’re surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we’re subjected to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Ours is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It’s only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us.


Practice. Practice. Practice. There’s a reason they’re called “social skills” and not “social gifts.”


The world is popularly used for stage magic acts in which a magician performs an impossible-seeming trick of reading another person’s thoughts. As psychologists use the term, it applies to something that we do a hundred times a day with no special fanfare. Mindreading is the attribution of “hidden” or underlying mental states — wanting, fearing, thinking, knowing, hoping, and the rest — to another person. when you see someone reach towards something, you do not simply have the impression that an arm is extending in space; you see the person as reaching for the salt, wanting something, and aiming to get it. Without a capacity for mindreading, we’d be stuck looking at surface patterns of moving limbs and facial features; mindreading gives us access to deeper states within a person.


The only thing that allows government to work at the top levels is trusted personal relations. You can’t achieve this leading by email.


If regional leaders didn’t know me and didn’t feel comfortable with my understanding of what they faced, I’d be nothing more than a place card at the dinner table. The intimate conversations and the sharing of confidences will flow around me as if I didn’t exist. I’d be irrelevant, treated with indifferent courtesy as a tourist instead of a player.


If a subordinate exposes the ignorance of someone with greater status, he risks humiliating that person, questioning the validity of the later’s claim to influence and status, and revealing him as incompetent, outdated, or false. For this reason, it is very wise to approach your boss, for example, carefully and privately with a problem (and perhaps best to have a solution at hand — and not one proffered too incautiously).


In fact, much of what is important in the workings of this most powerful of all the world’s committees is to be found in the details that exist beyond the view of the general public: in the importance of personal relationships; in the important role that informal meetings, even accidental ones, play in influencing outcomes; in the constraints and the limitations of process; in the political and bureaucratic subtexts that outlive presidencies.


Riêng với gia đình, họ hàng anh là người tốt, người hùng. Với anh em bạn bè được anh giúp thì anh cũng tốt, là ân nhân. Còn ai không được anh giúp thì lại có góc nhìn khác.


Meanwhile the court was supposed to represent the height of civilization and refinement. Violent or overt power moves were frowned upon; courtiers would work silently and secretly against any among them who used force. This was the courtier’s dilemma: While appearing the very paragon of elegance, they had to outwit and thwart their own opponents in the subtlest of ways. The successful courtier learned over time to make all of his moves indirect; if he stabbed an opponent in the back, it was with a velvet glove on his hand and the sweetest smiles on his face. Instead of using coercion or outright treachery, the perfect courtier got his way through seduction, charm, deception, and subtle strategy, always planning several moves ahead. Life in the court was a never-ending game that required constant vigilance and tactical thinking. It was civilized war.


What is this magic requirement? Just this: a deep, driving desire to learn, a vigorous determination to increase your ability to deal with people.


That was the most lurid personal incident in Lincoln’s life. It taught him an invaluable lesson in the art of dealing with people. Never again did he write an insulting letter. Never again did he ridicule anyone. And from that time on, he almost never criticized anybody for anything.


If you and I want to stir up a resentment tomorrow that may rankle across the decades and endure until death, just let us indulge in a little stinging criticism — not matter how certain we are that it is justified.

When dealing with people, let us remember that we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.


Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism, and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.


I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.


Flattery is telling the other person precisely what he thinks about himself.


You can make more friends in 2 months by becoming interested in other people than you can in 2 years by trying to get other people interested in you.


A man who met Freud described his manner of listening: “It struck me so forcibly that I shall never forget him. He had qualities which I had never seen in any other man. Never had I seen such concentrated attention. There was none of that piercing “soul penetrating gaze” business. His eyes were mild and genial. His voice was low and kind. His gestures were few. But the attention he gave me, his appreciation of what I said, even when I said it badly, was extraordinary. You have not idea what it meant to be listened to like that.”


Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.


After I got to know the President, I learned the best way to convert him to an idea was to plant it in his mind casually, but so as to interest him in it — so as to get him thinking about it on his own account. The first time it worked it was an accident. I had been visiting him at the WH and urged on a policy on him which he appeared to disapprove. But several days later, at the dinner table, I was amazed to hear him trot our my suggestions as his own.


No worthwhile business relationship, whether with your own people or customers and partners, can endure without mutual respect. And as I’ve learned firsthand, showing adversaries that you regard them with admiration can resolve even violent conflicts.


We are all united by one single desire: to be valued by another.


The bottom line is that you must become genuinely interested in others before you can ever expect anyone to be interested in you. All things being equal, people do business with people they like. All things not being equal, they still do.


What you must always remember is that what motivates you to win friends is rarely what motivates others to grant you friendship.


I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me.


You don’t love someone because of who they are, you love them because of the way they make you feel.


People willingly follow your advice and recommendations only when they trust you have their best interests at heart.


Like all animals, our species can only detect the narrow band of reality that’s necessary for us to get by. Dogs live principally in a world of smell, moles in touch and knife-fish in a realm of electricity. The human world is predominantly that of people. Our hyper-social brains are designed to control an environment of other selves.

Humans have an extraordinary gift for reading and understanding the minds of other people. In order to control our environment of humans, we have to be able to predict what they’re going to do. The importance and complexity of human behavior means we have an insatiable curiosity about it. Storytellers exploit both these mechanisms and this curiosity; the stories they tell are a deep investigation into the ever-fascinating whys of what people do.


We organize much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls. We take pleasure in art, media and story that coheres with our models, and we feel irritated and alienated by that which doesn’t. We surround ourselves with “like-minded” people. Much of our most pleasurable social time is spent “bonding” over the ways we agree we’re right, especially on contentious issues.


How did they control each other’s self-interested behavior so fantastically, without the help of a police force, a judiciary or even any written law?

They’d do it with the earliest and most incendiary form of storytelling. Gossip. People would keep track of everyone else, closely tallying their behavior.


Not only is gossip universal, with around two-thirds of our conversation being devoted to social topics, most of it concerns moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group.


Evolutionary psychologists argue we have 2 wired-in ambitions: to get along with people, so they like us and consider us non-selfish members of the tribe, and also get ahead of them, so we’re on top. Humans are driven to connect and dominate. These drives, of course, are frequently incompatible. Wanting to get along and get ahead of them sounds like a recipe for dishonesty, hyprocrisy, betrayal and Machiavellian maneuvering. It’s the conflict at the heart of the human condition and the stories we tell about it.

Getting ahead means gaining status, the craving for which is a human universal. Humans naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing. And we need it. People’s subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others. In order to manage their status, people engage in a wide range of goal-directed activities. Underneath the noblest plots and pursuits of our lives, in other words, lies our unquenchable thirst for status.


Michael Ignatieff described the position of Canada from a similar point of view: “ Influence derives from three assets: moral authority as a good citizen which we have got some of, military capacity which we have got a lot less of, and international assistance capability.” With regard to the US, “we have something they want. They need legitimacy.”


The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture, its political values, and its foreign policies.


Skeptics who treat the term “public diplomacy” as a mere euphemism for propaganda miss the point. Simple propaganda often lacks credibility and thus is counterproductive as public diplomacy. Nor is public diplomacy merely public relations. Conveying information and selling a positive image is part of it, but public diplomacy also involves building longterm relationships that create an enabling environment for government policies.


Hundreds of people wanted to get close to Auntie Zhang, but Whitney bested them all. It was a painstaking process of cultivation and of anticipating her needs, all based on Whitney’s intimate knowledge of Auntie Zhang’s life and family. Before Auntie Zhang realized she even required something, Whitney provided it. After she did that a few times, Auntie Zhang was hooked.

Whitney shared with me her plan to groom Auntie Zhang and others in the Party hierarchy. Navigating human relations in China was such an intricate affair at that level that Whitney needed someone she could trust absolutely with whom she could strategize. Every relationship came with its own calculations and its own dimensions. We pored over these issues together, gauging what our counter-parties wanted, what motivated them, and how to get them to help our cause. “Should I approach her this way or that?” she’d asked me. “How do you think she’s going to react?” I became the one person in the world with whom she could explore these issues. It brought us closer and heightened our intimacy; it was us against the world.


Associate with people who are likely to improve you.


Not only is gossip universal, with around two-thirds of our conversation being devoted to social topics, most of it concerns moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group.


Selfless versus selfish is storified as hero versus villain. We’re wired to find selfless acts heroic and selfish deeds evil. Selflessness is thought to be the universal basis for all human morality. 60 groups worldwide shared these rules: return favors, be courageous, help your group, respect authority, love your family, never steal and be fair, all a variation on “don’t put your own selfish interests before that of the tribe.”


Very simple tip that will guarantee you to be more well liked and people will like to be around you: I always practice “leave people better than you found them.” People will start gravitating toward you because their brains will associate good vibes around you.


The postwar business norms of the 1950s encouraged a new, distinct culture and set of values. Those hoping to climb the corporate ladder no longer turned to Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth and its philosophy of dedication, perseverance, and thrift. Now, they looked to the advice of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), which advocated smiling, getting along, and ingratiating oneself with colleagues and clients as the key to success. Young executives, according to this new thinking, needed “people skills” to navigate corporate bureaucracies.


Hackers are also motivated, in large part, by the esteem they can gain in the eyes of their peers by making solid contributions. It’s a significant motivating factor. Everybody wants to impress their peers, improve their reputation, elevate their social status. Open source development gives programmers the chance.


The things that I got really upset about, and what still makes me upset, is not the technology per se but the social interaction around it. One of the reasons I got so upset about Tanenbaum’s posting was not so much the technical issues he was raising. If it had been anybody else, I would have just blown it off. The problem was that he was posting it to the mailing list and making me… I was concerned about my social standing with those people and he was attacking it.

One of the things that made Linux good and motivational was the feedback I was getting. It meant that Linux mattered and was a sign of my being in a social group. And I was the leader of the social group. There’s no question that was important, more important than even telling my Mom and Dad what I was doing. I was more concerned about the people who were using Linux. I had created a social circle and had the respect of those people. That’s not how I thought of it at the time, and it’s still not how I think of it. But it must be the most important thing. That’s why I reacted so strongly to Tanenbaum.


In a divided and lawless world such patriotism is reasonable and necessary, for without it the group could not survive, and the individual could not survive without the group. Prejudice is fatal to philosophy, but indispensable to a nation.


Even though it seems like it’s big business and impersonal, and “they” take care of it, it really isn’t. There is no “they.” It always comes down to an “I” of somebody, and in many cases, it’s a principal.


Ultimately it comes down to your gut feeling. Your gut feeling gets refined as you hire more people and see how they do. Some you thought would do well don’t, and you can sense why. As you hire people over time, your gut instinct gets better and more precise.


In other words, as the score keeping becomes less land less formal and as the expectation for reciprocal exchange stretches over a longer and longer period of time, a relationship goes from being an exchange partnership to being a true alliance.


The best (and sometimes only) way: via an introduction from someone you know who in turn knows the person you want to reach. when you reach out to someone via an introduction from a mutual friend, it’s like having a passport at the border — you can walk right through. The interaction is immediately endowed with trust.


Your stronger connections are more likely to happily introduce you to new people — to your 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections. Weak connections, while valuable sources of new information, will not usually introduce you to other people unless they have a compelling transactional reason (i.e., unless it benefits them in some way).


Relationships are living, breathing things. Feed, nurture, and care about them: they grow. Neglect them: they die. This goes for any type of relationship on any level of intimacy. The best way to strengthen a relationship is to jump-start the long-term process of give and take. Do something for another person.


Finally, once you understand his needs, challenges, and desires, think about how you can offer him a small gift. We don’t mean an Amazon gift card or a box of cigars. We mean something — even something intangible — that costs you almost nothing yet still is valuable to the other person. Classic small gifts include relevant information and articles, introduction, and advice. A really expensive big gift is actually counterproductive — it can feel like a bribe. Inexpensive yet thoughtful is the best.


One lunch is worth dozens of emails.


It’s not just the people you know. It’s the people they know — your 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections. Plan an event where your friends bring a few of their friends; invite your extended network.


What most students would have done is gone off to the library, skimmed some books on Russian history, and said they weren’t sure it was possible. What Sheryl did was call Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian who specialized in the Russian Revolution. She engaged him for 1 hour and took detailed notes. Which she impressed Summers with the following day.

Your network is an indispensable source of intelligence because people offer private observations and impressions that would never appear in a public place like WSJ or even your company newsletter. Only a coworker can clue you in to your boss’s idiosyncratic preferences. Only a friend working in another organization can tell you about an as-yet-unannounced job position being created there.

Second, people offer personalized, contextualized advice.


Serendipity comes about when you’re in motion, when you’re doing stuff. Serendipitous network intelligence turns up in similar ways — when you’re engaging people. If you’re in touch and top of mind, someone may forward an email with information that’s relevant just because they’re thinking of you.


Think carefully about where you choose to live and work. Then commit to improving whatever community you do live in.


The greatest compliment one human being can pay another is to demonstrate that he was listening.


I keep lot of my opinions to myself. My grandfather, who was a gravedigger, told me one day, “Son, the next time you go buy the cemetery, remember that a third of the people are in there because they got into other people’s business.”


What’s a simple thing someone can do to better their life?

Compliment people behind their backs. It seriously reduces the drama you have to deal with in your day to day life. Especially do it to co-workers.