The Best Self-Help is Free: Gaining Value from Other People

Chapter 20

This is Chapter 20 of The Best Self-Help is Free, a treatise by Mr. Stolyarov. You can read all chapters of this freely available treatise here.

Hitherto, we have focused on how you can best produce values for yourself and persuade other people to recognize the merits of your endeavors or at least to not interfere with them. But this is not all that can be done to improve your life when it comes to interacting with others. After all, other people are also individuals with their own skills, ideas, and accomplishments. Implicitly, we all recognize how much other people have to offer us. We all choose to live in a highly advanced, specialized society whose very economy and infrastructure could not have existed without division of labor and trade. We rely on other people for anything from our food to our entertainment - and there is no way around it, unless we wish to lead an autarkic existence in a one-room cabin in the middle of a forest, without sanitation or any of the modern conveniences.

But we can be much more effective value traders and value gainers if we take our implicit recognition and make it explicit, using it to guide our everyday actions and our treatment of other people. There exist tempting errors of judgment that many people who do not focus explicitly on value trading lapse into. Here, I hope to convince you that these ways of thinking ought to be avoided and replaced by ways more conducive to value exchange.

Avoid totalistic judgments of people. For most people, the temptation to classify other individuals as absolutely good in all respects or absolutely evil in all respects has been present since childhood. These judgments are almost always simplistic and, more often than not, they prevent what might have been fruitful interactions with those whom one judges negatively while cultivating an unwarranted intellectual dependence on those whom one judges positively.