I watch out for people complaining about things, but don't treat it as a negative. It shows that at least they care enough to complain. The situation is far worse if they give up complaining, because they no longer care. Complaining also implies there are improvements that could be made, so again a benefit.
This attitude surprised someone the other day complaining about their code. I was delighted, since it meant they cared!
Careful, sometimes people don't complain because they are afraid of the retaliatory consequences if they do. Seems like a very dangerous assumption to make. I've talked to many people who just feel like they can't speak up in certain situations.
A sizable group but I prefer either to not work with them or to make it clear to them that they need to draw attention to problems.
These are the same sort of people who don't speak up when they think you're about to make a disastrous decision. I tell my coworkers/partners/clients frequently that I, like anyone, have blind spots. If they think I'm missing something, please, PLEASE address it sooner rather than later.
Chilling, from a chilling effect, is generally bad. It's better for people to speak their mind, and for folks to feel comfortable sharing their opinion.
Frequently, complaining is important to getting things done at work. If I were in a situation where I was worried about retaliation for speaking up about a problem, the real problem isn't the issue at hand but that I need to find a new job.
In building a startup I've found that users who complain more tend to be more interested and engaged. People who aren't interested won't complain because they are not interested.
Of course we also have happy users who never complain, so by no means is it a perfect indicator. Just saying complaining is not necessarily a bad sign.
Depends, some are just reflex rantings. Colleagues complaining about how absurd a task is, offer them a script to do away with it, refusal. Family member complaining about not having enough time, offered to do task; refusal. The rant is not about the actual object.
Rands covers this pretty well in "The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster" [1], I think. Specifically, the difference between a "vent" and a "rant": "The Vent that wants no help is a Rant. The Ranter somehow believes that the endless restatement of their opinion is the solution. Perhaps they have no clue what a solution might be or how to find it or perhaps they’ve been stewing on the topic so long, they’ve lost all sight of logic."
In the Army, NCOs are taught unofficially that soldiers will complain in their normal state and that, as a leader, you need to worry when the soldiers stop complaining.
Everyone is not on the hook for having to do so, or may not be able to do so based on what they know anyway. I will take someone who cares enough to complain any time, versus someone who doesn't complain because they can't come up with a better alternative.
Text of article ties pessimism, not bad temper, to higher earnings and longevity.
Ideally you have a full emotional toolbox. If you're always optimistic you'll blind yourself to risks. If you're always pessimistic you'll blind yourself to opportunities.
This is great common sense thinking. We have all the different emotions for a reason. You can even think of them as the tools. Right tool for the right job as programmers love to say. If someone follows article's "scientific" advice and stays angry all the time it will just become really stressful for him. I think if you are really dissatisfied with something it's best to burst out in anger and forget about it after few minutes. At least that's how I use this anger tool :)
High achievers are frequently perfectionists. Perfectionism is a good eye for details on the basis of very high standards. We know the downsides of perfectionism (e.g. black & white thinking, more difficulties to work towards 80/20 if necessary), but it is still an excellent basis for achieving great work.
There seems to be less cognitive load in keeping up perfectionism / high standards simply all the time; in comparison to deciding whether perfectionism is useful in each individual situation.
Therefore many high-achieving people will keep up their perfectionist attitude all day, for all things they encounter in life.
Unfortunately, few things in the world are perfect, or well enough under their control to become perfect.
Hypothesis: The bad temper of many good workers and high achievers comes from perceiving everything in life with the black & white pattern of perfectionism in a non-perfect world.
This both drains their energy and can make them appear a little dissatisfied.
Less scientifically stated: I personally see it as more of a point & click gesture coupled with a lot of 'Alpha' tendencies. It's a simple as "this is wrong. shut up. Make it this way which is the right way, and, do it now."
speaking as a bad-tempered, high earning person.
relevant part of the article:
> The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher earnings and longer lives – though, of course, they’ll anticipate the opposite.
also shout out to Elizabeth Hurley who was mentioned in the article :)
> To his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley's friends he was apparently known as ‘Grumpelstiltskin’.
> Hugh Grant may be famed for being moody and a little challenging to work with. But could a grumpy attitude be the secret to his success?
There is a little secret here. If you 'Alpha' in /just/ the right way, you edge on the side of gentle bullying your environment, and end up having an effect of changing it more than by trying to always try to negotiate your way into having people 'see' the 'right' path.
Basically. it saves time and effort. I know it's not a popular thing to say, but everytime people talk about 'leadership ability' it's mostly that: ultimately, driving people to do as you say.
I know it works for me, sometime you just can't re-re-re-explain stuff around, and a bit of the Alpha button aka Follow-the-leader wand waving helps saving time and saliva.
And yes, being grumpy (more often than not, faking it!) helps too. I think I've fine tuned the ability to an Olympic Sport. I'm known as 'the gruffalo' in the family ;-)
Of course you need to balance all that weight throwing with the counterpart: You need to be the first, and loudest to say if/when you get it wrong.
> If you 'Alpha' in /just/ the right way, you edge on the side of gentle bullying your environment, and end up having an effect of changing it more than by trying to always try to negotiate your way into having people 'see' the 'right' path.
how do your colleagues perceive you? If you work alone, or if you are the boss, maybe it's alright (the examples show Jeff Bezos, Beethoven, ...), but what if you work with 2-6 other people?
And in addition to that, although I agree that trying always to negotiate takes a lot of effort and energy, how do you prevent misunderstandings when you are grumpy?
Because if I say "X is 10", and then you say "No, I don't think so", but X is 10, while you still don't see that even if I try to use smoke signals to explain that to you, then you can see that being bully/grumpy/defensive/negative is not only not worth it, but it can also jeopardize tasks and the relationship with your colleagues, because it makes it harder to communicate with you - therefore next time, I won't ask you anymore, unless I really have to.
How do you personally deal with such situations? Because I believe that the answer is in the middle: a straight NO sometimes is better than any other attempt to negotiate (oh, wait, how do I tell him that this idea is dangerous? etc.), however, in my opinion it takes years of tuning and understanding. However, when dealing with other people, how do you unleash your emotions blindly? It just doesn't work out, despite all the benefits it might have.
> I know it works for me, sometime you just can't re-re-re-explain stuff around, and a bit of the Alpha button aka Follow-the-leader wand waving helps saving time and saliva.
The question is: why do you think you are the leader? No offense, just asking, because I want to know what makes people believe that.
I have seen this behavior pretty much unjustified - meaning: without this person who believed to hold the key to heaven, things worked better for everyone and even more efficiently, without communication issues and anger. I believe that a real leader doesn't need to be grumpy, as he will show with his actions how things should be, and people will automatically follow, because of respect, not because of fear.
Oh actually I should have added a bit more precision too -- I like working with people who do the same! Basically, it's nice for someone (me, or someone else) to feel a bit stronger about something, pick it up, 'claim' it and run away with it...
And yes, with people who /can't/ do that it's a bit more difficult..
You have to keep it in check and also be able to champion ideas that are not yours; ie become an advocate.
I have many questions for you, which I hope you can answer - at least to some extent.
For example, is it easy for you to blend in when you are with new people? Suppose you start a new job, new people.
Were you ever left alone in your job? If yes, how do you deal with it?
Have you ever had fights with colleagues due to those reasons? Did they ever tell you it's hard working with you? And your managers? If so, how did you fix it? Did you fix it?
Why do you do it? I mean, you mentioned it, when you said "to feel stronger", but then, my question is if this is worth it. Do you ever feel you miss good insights about issues? Because in my opinion when you behave that way, you will mostly focus on what you want to shout, your ideas, etc, but not on learning. How do you deal with it?
P.s.: I am not criticizing, I am just curious to know how people behaving this way deal with some of the most common issues in my opinion.
I've long looked for a kind of "creative impatience" in people as an indicator of someone who will likely make a creative leap on a problem or simply bulldoze their way past a hurdle.
They can come off like a malcontent but if I see them start working on something with that certain body language of "I've had enough of this" I'm always secretly pleased and look forward to the outcome, letting whatever sparks may be, fly.
On the other hand if these same folks walk away from something it's likely they don't see any way of salvaging whatever the faults may be. Either way, their mindset or approach is a gift.
In the same vein, but applied to personal relationships, "bad tempered" people are probably less likely to put up with low-intensity abusive behaviour, and while that may result in more conflict short-term, it might make for a more peaceful life in the long run.
I got really annoyed at the poor science behind this study and wanted to compose a really good, original comment in response.
But I couldn't come up with one, proving the study wrong.
I just think that they have the causality reversed.
Care a lot -> Focus + Hard work + strong emotion
So the anger is a side effect of caring.
But that is a guess. I'd have to look at the study and I would flip directly to the page where they reveal the effect size and the significance first. That's what they should report.
You don't have to prove the study wrong, you just have to be cognizant of this:
THESE ARE ALL JUST NARRATIVES.
Sure, they found some studies on the subject of anger and creativity. Does this mean that "bad-tempered people earn more and live longer"? Fuck, no.
First of all, this was never what was being studied. Second of all, what the hell is "bad-tempered"?
It's all "just a guess". The act of going from observation (the behavior of a bunch of students in a study) to the abstraction (anger helps you live longer) is necessarily an act of intuition. You can accept it or not, as you like. If you decide the evidence is compelling, go for it - live your life by swearing at people.
But you're just as free to say, "This evidence is bullshit, and it's a great stretch to say that it has general implications about the impacts of anger-management on health and success." There is no one to tell you otherwise.
The unfortunate problem with this, and other articles in this vein, is the pretense that we have arrived at some idea of the "truth" based on "evidence", as if either of these things existed, and we should all start living on the basis of this paradigm. There is only ever observation (itself a fraught enterprise) and subjective interpretation.
> the pretense that we have arrived at some idea of the "truth" based on "evidence", as if either of these things existed, and we should all start living on the basis of this paradigm. There is only ever observation (itself a fraught enterprise) and subjective interpretation
Perhaps a bit tangential, or perhaps not, but anyway - that comment was very strongly postmodern.
I've been reading Feyerband (Against Method), Latour (We Have Never Been Modern), and Foucault (The Order of Things) lately, I am so hopped up on postmodern criticism of science it isn't even funny.
Also, invaluable in being an excellent scientist. Understanding the epistemology is great for destroying your illusions about what you are producing and clearing the way for useful effort.
For instance, I just read this post by astazangasta. There is very little subjective interpretation involved. I'm pretty sure that I know what astazangasta meant by those words.
That is, this was a well-written, unambiguous post. But that post goes a long way to empirically disprove your point.
An interesting thought a friend of mine had the other day is that the ONLY HOPE for objectivity is in exactly this, the moment of conversation. In the moment where a clear thought passes from one person to another, it exists in a space where we can recognize it as lacking subjectivity, as it must pass through that point of perfection to make the leap from one mind to another. But as soon as it gets to its endpoint it becomes muddied - I can't guarantee that you read what I write the way that I intended it.
This is exactly why objectivity doesn't exist in human behavior. You can argue that there is a objective sense of something, but that is always filtered by a person's subjectivity, so the muddling you mention starts at the first step of meaning. Communicating this to other people is essentially starting a balancing act between subjectivities, between interpretations of the thing. Furthermore, saying that a clear thought has passed from you to another person is yet another layer of interpretation of their response and reaction. To say this transfer lacks subjectivity is to make a category error due to an apparent (i.e. interpreted) congruence in the subjectivities between e.g. the speaker and listener.
tl;dr: Hope only comes into play because objectivity in this context is an article of faith.
To be clear, I am not in the camp of trying to recover objectivity, and generally feel that the attempt is a sin: God is dead, etc. I thought it was an interesting attempt to find a space where it might exist, though, in the moment of the joining of two minds. Undeniably something happens in the act of conversation, since we know we can speak to each other in a useful way that is not entirely subjective. We must at least be responsible to each other in conversation, and we might call that act of (partially) successful transmission/reception "objectivity".
I think you're just describing the topic of conversation, which I guess could be called an object with definition(s), but in the context of conversation I don't think it could be said to have inherent objectivity, since definitions themselves are subject to variations of meaning. "Oh, I thought you meant/told me to...!"
Further to the "something" that happens in conversation, I think of Gilles Deleuze and his concept of sense-making, or cognition. You may be interested in some of his writings along these lines if this page resonates with you at all (just to save you the google, autopoesis means "self-creation"):
Let's say I ask you for a Pepsi. Now, when I think of Pepsi, I almost undoubtedly think of different things than you do (I think of drinking it as a kid out of shot glasses, among other things). But there's enough overlap that, when I ask you for a Pepsi, I can get something that I recognize as Pepsi.
We mean somewhat different things by "Pepsi" - at least in the things that the word carries with it in our minds. We can't pretend that the meaning is identical. But it is equally wrong to pretend that there is no overlap. There is enough common ground that real communication can happen.
(I stole this from Francis Schaeffer, though his example was about tea.)
"Sciences" in this case deserves an extra-large pair of scare quotes. If science is the process of arriving at objective fact by testing hypotheses in a reproducible way, just about any field with the root word "social" can be excluded.
That doesn't mean they provide nothing of use, merely that they aren't science and lack rigor. Careful not to confuse the two stances.
I'd be curious as to how you find the boundary of science and decide what "rigor" is. The closer I look the more I find this border is cracked and broken, and the notion of a "science" that produces "objective fact" is a fiction, in the "hard sciences" as much as in the soft ones.
Recently my favorite koan on this subject is from Deirdre McClosky's "If You're So Smart":
>The market for apartments in New York, says the economist, is "just like" a curve on a blackboard. No one has so far seen a literal demand curve floating in the sky above Manhattan. It's a metaphor.
The same is true in physics (etc.), where we have models that describe the world - but these models are only responsible to our subjective demands on what they must do for us. If they lazily drop off in the area around a black hole or in the interstices between galaxies, well, so what? We can still tune our GPS satellites. The only "objectivity" here is what the priests who currently reign happen to tell us is the edge where we can stop worrying.
This argument is dangerously close to a problem I'd like to call "semantic wankery". As in, by defining first terms fuzzily enough, anything can be equated to anything else.
What is rigor? Everything is subjective. Well, great philosophical position and all, but when we're talking about evaluating whether what we know is actually reflective of reality, remarkably unhelpful.
Reality being classified as that which exists despite individual opinion.
Look up through a clear sky, stars can be seen. Get a telescope, and we can start describing properties of those stars. Better telescope? More properties. Anyone can reproduce this. Or perhaps the moon - we've sent people there. We know that it exists and is a place a person can walk the same way we're sure that Japan exists and is a place a person can walk.
The whole of humanity deciding tomorrow that the silver disk in the sky no longer exists? That rock is still there and still influencing our tides.
The semantic wankery is a real problem. What's fuzzy is you saying things like 'the properties of stars' as if those exist in any way other than our description of them. Sure, there may be a material reality. But a star does not "have mass", mass is only our (current) description of some unknowable ineffable thing.
And it is very important to appreciate that there is no such thing as "mass" out there, mass only exists in our heads. Mass may be straining towards a point informed by reality, but it is NOT that reality.
The reason it is important to remember that our ideas and descriptions are not reality and can never be is because doing so is required if we are ever to replace our ideas and descriptions with ones that serve us better.
Mass may be an abstract construct, but it's one that's proven pretty handy for a few centuries. It lets us send planes up into the air. It lets us send satellites into orbit, which lets us predict where we are at any given moment, which lets me figure out how to avoid the terrible traffic on routes 101 and 85. It lets us figure out how big an engine we need to power our vehicles, and how much to charge for shipping, and whether that laptop we want will be a pain to carry around.
Yes, it's ultimately a fiction, and it probably won't suffice to get us to alpha centauri. I am far more likely to ship a package or drive a car than go on an interstellar voyage, though.
On the contrary, I think it's extremely useful for two enormous reasons:
1) This recognition that our models are not the truth and can (should) be frequently questioned and rejected fundamentally underpins skeptical inquiry. Newton believed he was discovering fundamental Laws, the clockwork that runs the universe. Einstein proved this to be fallacious, and now we live uneasily with the knowledge that Einstein's descriptions are "false" as well.
2) Our models are not only responsible to "reality", they are also responsible to political, social, economic demands. Who, what, and how we observe are choices we make that shape the nature of our reality (that is, our view of "the real world", which is the only thing ever available to us - the real world is always inaccessible). It behooves us to be aware of this intrusion. Science is not a pristine garden undisturbed by anything other than "fact" - fact itself is polluted by its habitat, the human mind. The history of science is littered with horrors that resulted from the conviction that our current dogmas are true and that our current forms of knowledge the best.
Anger can come from other sources, not just from caring (if we're considering 'caring' as caring for others). For example, a narcissist may get angry if they believe their self-image is under attack.
In addition, caring can be expressed in a multitude of different ways.
"Half the students were asked to recall something which had irritated them and write a short essay about it. The other half of the group were made to feel sad."
So the "better" performing group was angry and did something about it. While the control group was made to feel sad. Not neutral. Not happy. Not optimistic. Hm.
Optimism means you assume a good outcome. Pessimism means you generally perceive risk as more likely. Anger is a reaction to a potential threat; you already see risk and think you can change it. Happiness is a state of contentment.
So.... Yeah, if you're happy, you generally perceive low risk and don't see a need to be defensive or change anything. But we don't live in the jungle. We don't have to be constantly on guard, because we are on top of the food chain, and generally speaking we don't need to compete to survive or even thrive.
So the premise that being angry will make you live longer is at best misguided. If anything, being angry will more likely help you assume a defensive posture; not many people want to attack someone who looks like they will attack back. But again, this assumes your livelihood depends on fending off attacks, or beating other people. Not all people live those kind of lives.
Finally, things like heart attack are probably more related to genetics and diet than how angry you are. But being angry also clouds your judgment, meaning you're less likely to take advice, like your doctor telling you to lay off the doughnuts and red meat.
Or, perhaps people become more bad-tempered as they age. The OP assumes that there are good-tempered and bad-tempered people and that we remain in our respective categories throughout out lives. That's plain wrong.
Money changes people. Getting old changes people. With age and money can come paranoia. Having a pile of cash can make you look at those without as potential enemies. In much the same way, the reduced mental and physical abilities of age can make old people fearful of the young and better-abled.
I'd say that long-term studies are needed that track angry people over decades, but that too is premised on the concept that angry people remain angry. Imho temper is a function of life circumstance, not vice versa.
Off on a tangent, I find myself wondering if I'd have a higher opinion of Hugh Grant's acting if he did roles closer to his real mood. He needs to consider following in the footsteps of another Hugh: Lawrie as Dr. House.
this basically contradicts to many other studies about the mind-body connections, such as hapiness-immunity connections.
that 2010 study of patients of CAD and their follow-ups of 5-10 years of 'angry' levels is kind of flawed as what should actually be studied should be the "anger" levels as the causal effects of the CAD 5-10 years prior to the onset of CAD. it's more likely beyond certain points of the progression of CAD the change of mood does not mean anything to the prognosis.
If I posted an angry, but seemingly well-supported rant aligned with the sentiment of a particular group, people will probably upvote/reblog it (see: Trump).
Anecdote: "This is a recorded "interactive" message."
"O.K. The others are gone übermorgen and, I told it before, that we have our own problems. We have fooled ourself the whole time - to... Alas! I think ye understand.
This attitude surprised someone the other day complaining about their code. I was delighted, since it meant they cared!