Navigate Human Behaviors (and Conflicts) Like a Pro! 🪑
Navigate Human Behaviors (and Conflicts) Like a Pro! 🪑
Beyond a certain point, being very good at your job won't be enough! 😱 You need to learn to navigate the sea of human emotions, desires, and fears.
At some point, whether you are working for someone else or working for yourself, success will require more than you being very good at the fundamentals of your job. It will require you to understand human behavior.
In the following video, I set the stage further and talk about four books that can help with this understanding:
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Some Background
For the longest time, I was laser focused on increasing my technical and product skills to help get things done better. At some point, I realized that simply getting better at the fundamentals of my job was starting to give diminishing returns.
The added effort I put into honing my skills did not give a corresponding return on that effort - in either career growth or impact on what I was working on:
That is when it clicked for me. I was wasting time. This became more obvious when I started looking around and observing the behaviors of others who were in a position that I aspired to be in one day. They were very good at communicating. They were very good at dealing with organizational chaos. They had a worldview that allowed them to compartmentalize distractions and focus on what mattered most.
It was when I started to balance the fundamental skills needed for my job with the “soft skills” part of dealing with human beings competing for finite resources (people, budget, marketing time, etc.) that I began to see my job in a whole new light.
The books I have listed in this video (along with a few bonus ones!) were ones that helped me think differently:
For quick reference, the Amazon listing for these books are:
Beyond reading these books, I will reiterate a point from an earlier post - combine your own “knowledge seeking” with guidance from a great mentor. If you do these two things, you’ll become unstoppable.
Till Next Time
I hope you are finding these tech-adjacent topics to your liking. If you have any questions or comments about this, feel free to reply back, post on this forum thread, or find me on X / Twitter.
Cheers,
Kirupa 😇