| HN Mirror

> I'm not sure why there is confusion between having an opinion/looking out for yourself and being a jerk

Often it'd down to delivery, and how you interact with people, rather than having an opinion.

My "favorite" learning moment personally came when I was once stuck in a meeting room with a colleague while we were waiting for a document revision or something, and out of the blue he told me "you know, when I first joined, I thought you were a jerk". I was really taken aback, because I could not remember any instance of being rude to him.

He explained that he thought so because I apparently "always" raised objections when he came up with an idea, while I'd let dumb ideas from [other employee] slide. But eventually he'd accepted that my input tended to be right, and had come to understand that I didn't mean anything with it.

It dawned on me what the problem was: I let the dumb ideas from [other employee] slide, because I knew everyone recognised how unworkable they were. I wasn't trying to be nice - I was just not wasting my energy on it; let someone else shoot it down and move on.

But this guy often had quite good ideas, that I liked. So with total blindness to how it came across, I tore into them to weed out potential problems. To me, these ideas had merit, and needed to be given careful consideration, either so we had good reason if we rejected them, or to make sure we refined them into the best we could do.

But what I communicated was a stream of seemingly hostile arguments, because I did not realise that he needed acknowledgment that the idea was worthwhile and good; to me that was implicit: It was why I found it worthwhile talking about it.

So often, the difference between coming across as an opinionated jerk and a nice guy who stands up for his opinions is down to making people feel like you appreciate their input and listen carefully, and that you are negotiating a solution with them rather than just hammering through your own viewpoints, even if the end point ends up being essentially the same.

> negotiations with what he wanted. Everyone in the company highly respects him for it and everyone is better off because of it.

People love a strong negotiator, because a negotiation gives people a feeling of stake in the outcome. Someone who is recognisably a strong negotiator is often admired even when you come up against them and know logically you're getting a worse deal than you could have, because a good negotiation is about making the other side feel like it's a genuine give and take, and that you are being listened to (hopefully it is true as well...).

It comes naturally to people. My son often tries to negotiate his bedtime, and we try to accommodate that as much as possible, because we know from experience that when we negotiate from a starting point we set, he ends up going to bed earlier than he otherwise would, and does so happily and without protest, seemingly triumphant because he put in effort on it and got us to yield a bit on our starting position. When we negotiate a time, he'll even remind us when it is time to get him ready for bed, if we don't notice the time.