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Read at your own risk. Do not continue reading if you do not accept full responsibility for all actions you take as a result of reading this book. The author is not liable for any damages including, but not limited to, academic failures, career path mistakes, financial loss, feeling upset, and physical/mental injury.
In the previous chapter, we discussed setting goals, breaking them into smaller goals, and executing to achieve the smaller milestones; however that’s not everything because other people affect your life as well. You need positive interactions with those who can influence your success for better or worse. Managing your interactions with others usually comes down to these steps:
You may have a knee-jerk reaction after reading these steps. Your first instinct is that life is not a business, but outside of your family and close friends, life is a “business,” whether or not you want to believe it.
Now, reign in your unsupervised emotions and analyze from a logical perspective. Suppose a random person on the street walks up and asks you, “Sir/Madam, will you give me a place to stay tonight and cook me a warm dinner?” Your response would be “Why? I don’t even know you.” There is nothing in the transaction for you, so you decline to provide housing and food for the stranger. Clearly your response would change if the stranger is an attractive celebrity who offered to pay you a million dollars. Like it or not, outside your family and close friends, your interactions are a series of transactions; you only accept the transaction if you like what you’re getting in exchange for what you’re giving.
Just as you think about your own goals, think about the other party’s goals during your interactions. The recruiter at the career fair is only looking to hire full-time employees and not interns. The professor wants to get out of teaching and back to doing research. The kid asking obnoxious questions in lecture wants to feel smart. Taking a look at the other person’s perspective lets you understand what kinds of transactions they’ll find appealing and what kinds they won’t.
If you know a certain type of transaction is unappealing to the other party, don’t waste your time proposing it. If a recruiter says all the internships have been filled, don’t waste time applying for the internship. If the professor makes it clear that they only care about research and not the course, then don’t waste time at their office hours for help with the class. If a kid asks obnoxious questions to feel smart, never talk to them like they’re inferior. Avoid unappealing transactions to avoid unnecessary tension and failure.
Instead, think outside the box for transactions that appeal to the other party. If you’re looking for internships and the recruiter says all internships have been filled, then have a pleasant chat, exchange contact info, and ask to be in touch for the next recruiting year. For the professor who only cares about research, consider working with them as a research assistant in the future; you might get special treatment in the class or learn a lot doing research. For the kid who wants to feel smart, perhaps they’ll be a hard-working teammate on a project after you’ve stoked their ego and given them a reputation to meet. In general, go with the flow instead of against and you’ll have productive transactions with other people.
Once you understand what you can give to the other party and what the other party can provide in return, you can decide if the transaction makes sense. Here are two examples of common transactions:
In the first example, you give your time to your boss and they give you back money. In the second example, the salesperson tells you a lie that evokes positive emotions and you give him/her your cash for those emotions. As with all transactions, you give and you get.
Each transaction may or may not make sense depending on if you’re getting a good deal or not. In the first example, are you comfortable trading an extra hour each day for an extra $1,000? If you can find another job that pays you much more than $1,000 for the same amount of time, then consider declining the transaction and finding a new employer. This scenario is straightforward to analyze because time and money are both quantifiable.
The second example is deeper than the first and begs the question of whether you are getting what you truly want. The salesperson doesn’t care about your style and lies to you to give you good feelings, which convinces you to make a purchase. Are you comfortable paying $100 for a worthless piece of metal and good feelings? If you supervise your emotions, then you can decide logically: if your budget has room for it, it’s totally okay to buy something you’ll wear! But if you’re drowning in debt, don’t let a sudden burst of excitement override your logic and cause you to buy something you can’t afford. As long as you supervise your emotions and analyze from a logical perspective, you are in position to see through any emotion-evoking lies and understand the exact worth of what you are getting.
The second example also brings up an important theme in transactions: lying to give someone what they want. Lying happens everywhere and everyday: just look at the exemplary leaders of the United States on Capitol Hill: broken promises, questionable bills, the number of elected officials whose sole mission is to “serve the people” and coincidentally become multimillionaires on a $175,000 salary. Every society is built on countless transactions of comforting lies. In the next theoretical example, we will discuss the nuances of lying when it pertains to your side of the transaction.
Suppose you’re in a job interview and your interviewer asks, “tell me about the biggest obstacle you’ve overcome.” Internally, you scold yourself for not preparing thoroughly because you can’t remember any obstacles on the spot. There are two possible outcomes. In the uninteresting scenario, you tell the truth, “I can’t think of anything,” and you don’t get hired because that’s not a response the interviewer is expecting to hear. In the interesting scenario, you make up a story on the spot:
I struggled a lot with my academics in middle school and other kids bullied me for being “dumb.” In reality, I just had trouble memorizing stuff. I shut out other people’s discouraging comments, and over the years, I discovered that I just needed to re-analyze bottom-up from the basics. I could retain the information only when it made full sense from bottom to top. A lot of people said it sounds strange, but I guess that’s just me. Today, I’ve gotten much better at my learning and people won’t notice the difference.
The interviewer thinks, “Wow, this candidate had a tough upbringing and some unique experiences — they could really add some perspective to our team.” And then you get hired.
In the uninteresting scenario, your interviewer declines the transaction. You give the interviewer a boring response, which is not what they want. So, the interviewer does not give you what you want from the transaction: a job offer.
In the interesting scenario, your interviewer accepts the transaction. You give the interviewer a comforting lie: what you said never happened, but it’s the intriguing story your interviewer wanted to hear. As a result, the interviewer gives you the job offer that you want.
Yes, it’s okay to lie. You can’t avoid lies because they’re everywhere, every day: you ask an acquaintance how they are and they respond, “good” even though their relative just passed away. The advertisement you see on TV exaggerates the results of a product. Search online for “do all presidents lie?” and see for yourself. Sooner or later, you will be presented with an opportunity to lie.
Effective liars get ahead in life; they pick the best opportunities to lie and profit. When considering an opportunity to lie, there are a few questions to evaluate:
The first question, “What do I gain from lying,” defines the transaction. There’s no point in lying if you can’t gain from it. Assuming you stand to gain from lying, we’ll examine questions two and three next, and talk about question four in the subsequent section on ethics.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not intended to be legal advice. Use the following guidelines at your own risk)
To start, let’s understand three general categories of lies:
When I mention lying, most people jump to category one. For example, you can claim you are the Prime Minister of the United Nations and everyone can verify that position does not exist. Similarly, if you fabricate an award you received, a phone call to the award committee can disprove your statement. Lies about verifiable facts are easy to catch.
Never lie about verifiable facts because they are flimsy and backfire with dire consequences. If you fake your transcript on a college application and get caught, you will be expelled. If you fabricate work experience on your resume and get caught, your employer will fire you. If you sell fake gold while claiming it is real and get caught, you’ll end up in jail. Never lie about cold, hard facts — there are no exceptions to this rule.
Category two contains powerful lies often referred to as embellishment. Nobody ever detects embellishments with unmeasurable qualifiers. If you tell an interviewer “growing up, I had trouble memorizing stuff” even though you didn’t, they can’t check the veracity of your statement. If you write in a college essay that you loved chess even though you hated it, nobody can read your mind and catch your lie. Nobody can measure “trouble,” “love,” or other subjective terms. Lie all you want with unmeasurable descriptors to morph reality into whatever strengthens your position.
Finally, category three encompasses a gray area: semi-verifiable facts and semi-measurable descriptors, which you usually get away with. For example, if you lie and say your biggest obstacle was “being bullied” in middle school, then someone could theoretically interview your childhood teachers and peers, review surveillance footage at your school, and discover you were not bullied. But nobody would bother doing that, and even if they did, you can still argue that you felt bullied, and nobody can dispute how you feel. With semi-verifiable facts and semi-measurable descriptors, there is insufficient evidence to verify.
There are no legal consequences for lies from categories two and three, but you could lose people’s trust. If you tell someone your product is “amazing” and they buy it and don’t like it, they can’t sue you because there’s no legal definition on what an “amazing” product is. Although customers can’t take legal action, you give them higher expectations, fail to deliver, and lose their trust. They could spread negative press about you, damage your reputation and harm your future transactions. Think carefully about how a direct counterparty may react if your lies boost their expectations and you fail to deliver.
Once you’ve calculated what you gain from lying, the likelihood of getting caught, and the consequences of other people discovering your lie, evaluate the transaction and decide whether or not it’s worth it. If it’s worth it, then lie. If it’s not worth it then don’t. Your reasoning should end here, but many people bring in another dimension: ethics.
Unless you’re a philosopher who thinks long and hard about ethics, you rarely apply ethics correctly to your decision making; you’re just applying emotions. For example, suppose your parents are well-off and paying for both your college tuition and car. You might feel uncomfortable writing in a scholarship essay that you’re struggling to afford college and the $5,000 grant would make a “night versus day” difference for you. On the other hand, you’d probably feel fine going to a car dealership and telling the salesperson “I can pay $20,000 max for this car” when your parents gave you a $25,000 budget. Both scenarios involve you lying to get $5,000, but somehow it feels more wrong to trick a scholarship committee than to trick a car dealership. These scenarios illustrate your emotions disguised as ethics.
Some people try to justify why it’s okay to lie to the car salesperson but not the scholarship committee; these explanations always have logical flaws. Here’s one argument: “if you lie and get the scholarship, you could be taking money from someone else who really needs it.” This argument doesn’t consider “what if the car salesperson is about to miss a mortgage payment, and needs the commission, but can’t sell the car for less than $25,000?” Or, “what if the dealership is a locally-owned small business that’s been struggling and really needs revenue?”
Here’s another argument: “car salespeople lie as well and start higher than what they’re actually willing to sell for, so you have to lie and start low.” This argument doesn’t consider “what if everyone else applying for the scholarship is also lying and so you have to lie as well to start at the same level?” Or, “what if the scholarship committee assumes everyone will lie and is already discounting everyone’s accomplishments?” In a world full of hypotheticals, there is no umbrella logic that perfectly justifies lying to get X in some scenarios but not others.
When most people think they’re applying “ethics” to a situation, they’re unintentionally applying their gut emotions. Mainstream media conditions people to associate car salespeople with slyness: they’re out there to swindle your money. On the other hand, mainstream media associates scholarships with benevolence: helping those in need. Lying to a benevolent scholarship committee feels unacceptable while lying to a wily car salesperson feels acceptable.
Your feelings lead you to a premature conclusion though. You have not measured the frequency with which scholarship committees make poor decisions and award money to undeserving candidates. And you have not counted the number of car salespeople who are transparent in their pricing with clients and reveal the dealership’s invoice cost for the car when asked. Your feelings cause you to ignore relevant data and jump to premature conclusions.
My recommendation is to remove your emotions and accept that you should lie when the benefits of a transaction outweigh the risks. In the car dealership scenario, the benefit of lying is that you get the car for less money. The risk is the salesperson says that your offer is too low, in which case you can still offer more or try another dealership. Since there’s no risk, feel free to lie about how much you can afford. In the scholarship scenario, the benefit of lying is that you get the scholarship money. The drawback is if the committee smells a lie, they don’t award you the money. Again, there’s no downside, so go ahead and exaggerate the “night versus day” difference the scholarship money makes. Remove your emotions disguised as “ethics” and analyze whether or not to lie as a logical transaction.
It’s also fine if you don’t wish to immediately discard emotion-based “ethics” from your decision making. As I mentioned earlier, many people have a knee-jerk reaction when asked to abstract their interactions with others into transactions. Removing emotions could be a big leap for you and if you can’t live with yourself for doing something, then don’t do it. Take small steps and start by just acknowledging when emotions lead you to suboptimal decisions. You can still act on your emotions initially. Once you feel more comfortable, take a step back from your emotions, reanalyze from a logical perspective, and adjust your course of action.
Interactions in life can be simplified to a transaction and analyzed as such: determine what both parties want, and decide if it is a good deal for you or not. Deals can involve both quantifiable and unquantifiable attributes. Quantifiable attributes such as time and money are straightforward to measure. Unquantifiable attributes such as feeling great after getting a compliment or losing someone’s trust after getting caught lying require you to estimate the worth. Next, we’ll take an in-depth look at a theoretical example of someone applying for a scholarship and how that simplifies into a transaction.
Harold is trying to reduce his student loan debt for the computer science major by applying to scholarships; however, he knows scholarships are highly competitive. Harold believes if he applies for scholarships totaling $100,000 in awards, then he has a good shot at winning at least $1,000. He decides he is willing to spend 20 hours writing a core essay and then tailoring it to each individual scholarship application. This ends up to be a rate of $50/hour if he wins $1,000 — a better rate than a student can make.
Many of the scholarship prompts center around why he chose his major. Harold analyzes his transaction with the scholarship committee and determines that to get scholarship money, he needs to make the committee feel good about him in a few dimensions:
Although Harold is simply in the computer science major for the job and salary upsides, he knows saying the truth will not win him scholarship money. Instead, he chooses to center his narrative around a “life-changing” experience.
To hit the honesty attribute, Harold brainstorms a list of realistic, down-to-earth experiences he’s had so that the committee won’t suspect he’s fabricating details.
To hit the goodwill attribute, Harold chooses to write about a volunteer opportunity teaching computer science to poorer students in a less-developed nation. Although the students Harold taught were actually upper-class, he understands “poorer” and “less-developed” are subjective terms. Furthermore, he knows the scholarship committee will not travel to the exact school where he volunteered and interview the people. He feels bad about embellishing his goodwill, but he knows there is no risk.
To hit the ambition attribute, Harold talks about an epiphany he had while teaching: that there is so much untapped potential across the world, and the world should work towards getting everyone access to computers and programming. Although Harold didn’t actually have an epiphany there and then, nobody can verify the veracity, so he describes it that way to strengthen his narrative.
Finally, Harold outlines a side project idea he’s been working on: a cheap device to make learning programming accessible to everyone. To top it off, studying computer science will help Harold perfect his project. Although Harold came up with the project idea as he was writing his essay and he has no plan to ever pursue it, he knows it’s what the scholarship committee wants to read.
Harold submits variants of his essay to different scholarships totalling $100,000. Some of the scholarship committees are especially impressed by the side project idea and Harold wins $7,000. Although Harold would’ve liked more money to reduce his debt of nearly $100,000, he is content with earning $7,000 for working twenty hours on his essay ($291/hour).
Harold’s story is full of lies; however, don’t blame Harold: he simply gave the scholarship committee what it wanted to read. Furthermore, even if the scholarship committee took him to court, it couldn’t prove he was lying. Harold had a successful transaction with the scholarship committee that won him money, so let’s review why his decisions were effective.
First off, Harold correctly determined that writing the scholarship essay is worth his time. If he earned $1,000, that would equate to $50/hour. Plus, he could earn way more than $1,000, and this upside was plenty to offset the risk of not getting any scholarship money.
Next, Harold correctly analyzed that the scholarship committee wanted to feel good about their award recipients, so he decided to highlight his goodwill and ambition while maintaining his honesty through a realistic experience he had. This is a classic, “I’ll say anything you want if you give me your money” scenario.
When amplifying the goodwill attribute, Harold had to decide whether to tell the plain truth that he was teaching upper-class students, or to embellish the truth. While he might feel bad about it, Harold correctly determined there was no risk in altering the description of his students as poor and from a less-developed area; the committee can’t verify and even if they could, the terms are subjective. There was only upside in that it strengthened his essay and improved his chances of winning a scholarship. Thus, Harold overrode his emotions and embellished the description because the payoff would be scholarship money.
When amplifying the ambition attribute, Harold fabricated his inspiration to create a cheap device and enable everyone in the world to write code. Again, he might have felt bad about misleading the committee, but it was what the scholarship committee wanted to hear and there was no risk because nobody can verify Harold’s thoughts. Finally, the ambition attribute elegantly tied the narrative back to the essay prompt by providing a noteworthy reason for why Harold chose to study computer science.
Overall, Harold correctly analyzed what the scholarship committee wanted. Furthermore, he checked for any potential legal repercussions for his misleading statements and determined there were none beyond the scholarship committees denying him money. Thus, it made logical sense for Harold to give the scholarship committee exactly what it wanted to read, despite reservations he had about lying and embellishing. The transaction was successful and he received $7,000.
Human nature is complicated: some people value positive emotions more, some people value physical results more, and others might value something spiritual. To get something from another party, you need to understand what the other party wants. Once you understand what the other party wants from a transaction, then you can determine if it makes sense for you to complete it. A lot of times, lying will be involved in a transaction. If you are receiving an emotion-evoking lie and you are supervising your emotions, then you can see through the lies and prioritize the results that truly matter to you. If you are in a position to give a lie in return for something, first ensure there are no legal consequences. Then, weigh any consequences, especially loss of trust, against what you are receiving. Analyzing transactions lets you make logical, sensible decisions and successfully manage your interactions with others. For the purposes of this book, if you manage your own life well and also manage your interactions with others well, then you set yourself up for success in the computer science major.