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by sublinear 1070 days ago
I'm not sure if this is sarcastic or not since my reply went a bit sideways. I just felt it would benefit others more to hear my perspective.

Anyway, the social game is to just filter noise and find the signal you want.

When you look at all the self help books on this, they're all very scholastic and merely teach techniques that sour once they're well known. A famous one is repeating someone's name back to them. I can't think of a smellier tactic than that.

The goal of any social interaction is up to you. You don't have to be best friends with everyone. That's just a bonus when it happens. I suspect this is where the emotional drain occurs for a lot of people. You can't make people like you, but they're more likely to do so if you can make them think twice about disliking you.

Determine what appeals to someone, adjust your style accordingly, funnel them towards what you really want to talk about, make a decision about how strong the signal is and whether to move on.

I hope you see how this is kinda like gambling. This is how it can be very easy for someone to talk to 50 people and still be super pumped up to keep going. The upshot is that energy really attracts people. This energy... that's the charisma. You express it your own way and that's it. Keeping it going shouldn't be hard for anyone unless they had a murky goal to start with.

1 comments

I've met people like this, and I don't think that is charisma.

I think a better description of charisma is enjoying people. The people I think have the most "charisma" are the ones that always seem glad to see whoever it is, and they seem be like this for everyone. Kind of like a (pet) dog: they seem to think every new person is going to be an absolutely wonderful experience. Whereas there are some people I enjoy and others that I don't or am neutral about. I'm more like a cat: well, I might enjoy you, but we'll see about that.

That reverses the definition as everybody understands it. Charisma is when people enjoy your presence, which is definitely helped by them feeling good for making you feel good.