And then you have the rare individuals who can make everyone feel important, if just for a moment in their lifetime

> I once shook hands with Bill Clinton, and for one tiny moment, he made me feel like the most important person in the world. That's charisma.

It's not far off from love, is it? When someone's in love with you, they see you as the most wonderful person in the world. It's a hell of a feeling. If you can do that for people you're not in love with, you've got charisma.

http://ask.metafilter.com/128697/What-is-charisma

Curiosity is great. When you aren't motivated by money, what else is there? For me it's curiosity.

Also, Scott Adam's post reminds me of this little passage (from http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues):

"The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance."

I've been trying to live by the motto: better to be curious than right. (In other words, try to continue seeking information about someone's viewpoint before proving that yours is better, which generally leads to defensiveness and/or makes people think you're an ass.)

I find this difficult, because I love being right.

Furthermore, you can fake curiosity in hopes of generating reciprocal curiosity. Everyone likes an opportunity to talk about himself.

I've always liked reading Dilbert; I've found it to be an interesting and amusing perspective. More serious than most comics yet still humorous. But Scott Adam's writings apart from Dilbert are pretty awesome. The Dilbert Principle especially was a more interesting perspective on management than any management class I've taken.

I find similar effects from remembering random details of people's lives, as well as creating inside jokes.

I'd like to read this article, but the belly fat ad is too much.

whats in YOUR google history? ;)

In this case its actually http://fetchback.com/.

Does your google history really affect the ads you see on one independant website ?

if the website is serving google's adds, you're damn right they're targetted at you personally.

a week after i got back from vegas last year, hotel receipt hits my gmail, and every freaking ad was about vegas hotels.

We all know Gmail uses text clues to serve ads. The question was about the ads on an independent website?

Yeah, Google can track your intentions not only by search queries or your email(if you use Gmail that is), but also the sites you visit - if they run Adsense/Doubleclick ads.

i didn't mean gmail adds--i mean, every add, on every site that uses adsense, ever.