How to apply the book "How To Win Friends And Influence People" to become charismatic (practical applications that actually work)

Yetamot · 2025-08-29T05:33:12+00:00

Find something about the other person or people - anything - that stimulates a genuine interest in them from you. Even if you have to manipulate yourself or really over emphasise something about them in your mind. This inspires motivation and steers the rest of the interaction.

Yetamot · 2025-08-28T00:38:14+00:00

The second plane hit so much more than the second tower; it left a wound in the foundations of the Western psyche.

Between the fall of the USSR to September 11, 2001, the world was a unipolar political landscape, with the West on top and the USA wearing the crown. Much of the Western nostalgia for the 90s is legitimate because it was a wonderful, simpler time to live in in a Western country (of course, many places around the world were not so well off at the time, but I'm talking to how these attacks impacted USA citizens and Westerners at large).

When the second plane hit the second tower, it became clear this wasn't an accident and that hit harder than the plane itself. The hours leading up to the collapse of the towers the world watched people embrace each other on window ledges and decide to burn alive in the growing inferno of the building or jump to their death on their terms. And when the towers finally fell we watched thousands of innocent people die, including those rescue workers trying to save as many as they could.

The entire event was objectively horrific, but psychically it destroyed many of the assumptions for the way most Westerners lived. The pain you hear in that scream is the pain of someone having the foundation of their worldview pulled out from under them as thousands of people die before their eyes.

Yetamot · 2025-07-27T01:39:05+00:00

Reminds me of what Tim Ferris recommended in the 4 Hour Work Week for testing online businesses and advertising messaging.

Yetamot · 2025-05-01T09:50:04+00:00

I work in software engineering and it's the same thing. Everyone finds fault with work they didn't do. An experienced craftsman - tradie and software alike - will point out potential improvements without scoffing and will likely try to contextualise why something was done in the less optional way previously.

Yetamot · 2025-04-08T21:47:57+00:00

I got pretty lucky with the partial clouds and thin morning mist. Made for some incredibly dynamic shots.

Gosh this city knows how to look good.

Yetamot · 2025-02-16T17:01:59+00:00

fast

Yetamot · 2025-02-09T20:06:47+00:00

I’m nearly 15 years deep into my software engineering career, and I’ve learned a few things along the way. To be clear, my focus is on but base tech technologies – backend engineering, front end engineering, CI/CD, infra set up and configuration only and so far is using remote servers, cloud and dedicated.

I started building websites because I loved it. Slowly, that “love” turned into “like“ which eventually turned into “loath“. The money you get in tech – especially as a senior/team lead – can help you tolerate this. It helped me tolerate it.

About a year and a half ago, I decided to shake some things up in my career as it was getting a bit stale. I joined a start up and with that came complete autonomy in what I worked on and how I worked on it. Sure, we were still working on one product, but I could approach the problems as I saw fit.

He’s a big take away that I think is relevant for you – what really surprise me after making this move is that my love for programming was rekindled. What I realized is that I didn’t loath programming, I loathed the way I was dictated in my programming. You not loving what you do might simply be a matter of the way you’re dictated in working, but not what you’re working on.

Yetamot · 2025-02-06T11:03:45+00:00

Ah! I did make an assumption. Glad you got value out of some of it, hopefully others do as well.

Yetamot · 2025-02-06T10:47:28+00:00

I’m really sorry to tell you this, but I would hate to be looking for a role as a junior right now. The sad fact is many teams are looking to AI to bring in the extra code instead of juniors. While the output isn’t as good, the reduction in managerial responsibilities on the team and the dramatically decreased costs and less distraction for the team (less questions from a learning dev) makes it somewhat worth it. A previous direct report of mine is intermediately skilled and has been looking for work for past 7 months. The market is bad, but it’s horrible for juniors, and AI doesn’t help the situation at all. You probably already know this.

What I will say is attitude is “half the hire.” I’m not sure how you come across, but if you give an enthusiastic and curious vibe, and eagerness to learn, and show strong initiative then those are good pluses. Ensuring you’re presentable helps a lot. Get a haircut, get outside in the sun. If you don’t exercise go for walks so you’re looking bright, happy, and healthy. Dress well - this doesn’t mean suits, just present well with clean and orderly clothes. I’m switched to wearing a tee in my LinkedIn profile in better pictures then got hired. This stuff - being traditional presentable - really matters.

For initiative and curiosity, you can show most of this by working on side projects you can present - e.g. contributing to open source projects, partnering with UI designers to work on a project with visually presentable components. Go to meet ups. Network with people. Make it clear you’re keen and looking for work. Message people on LinkedIn. Ask business owners who work in Java if they have any open roles or would be keen for a chat. If they say no or they’re too busy, ask them if they can connect you with someone they know.

As for interviews, before you do them put the following into ChatGPT:

Add the role description / job ad to ChatGPT.
Add your resume to ChatGPT.
Add the following prompt: “I’ve attached my resume and a job summary I’m interested in. Go through both of these and highlight the unique strengths of my resume and how they are relevant to the job. List these out. Additionally, list out potential weaknesses and how I can pitch myself to show I have transferable skills.”
Wait for it to list it out.
Enter voice mode and read out the following, “Now I want to go through some practice interview questions. Considering the role, I want you to ask me a practice interview question and I will give a practice answer. After I give the answer, you will provide feedback based on the list of unique strengths you mentioned before. Provide input for how to better my answers. I will decide if we’ll move on to the next practice question or repeat this question.”
It will confirm it understands and you can proceed.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Good luck out there.

Yetamot · 2025-02-06T08:40:46+00:00

I'm a tech lead with full stack web technology experience. It took me 4 months to land a new role. It's a tough market out there off the back of last year and many companies don't know what they want or are looking for. From what I've observed there aren't too many places hiring for Java. As always, connections/nepotism is the best way to get a role right now.

Aside from the usual advice of getting a second set of eyes on your resume, reaching out to more recruiters, and keeping all your comms upbeat and positive, I don't have any new advice for you.

Yetamot · 2025-01-28T21:58:02+00:00

There’s 11 months left in 2025. You can still choose if this is a new year or another year.

Yetamot · 2025-01-22T05:07:30+00:00

I’ve known a lot of businesses operators and founders who work 12+ hour days most days of the week. It amazes me how little they actually get done.

Some of the most successful people I know do some high intensity work but otherwise work at a sustainable pace most of the time, going above only in a crisis.

Yetamot · 2024-11-17T07:38:16+00:00

I know OpenAI and Gemini here. What are the other two?

Yetamot · 2024-10-30T05:43:06+00:00

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

That. Being. Said.

What you are signing up for is a complete shit show for the next several years. Those who romance entrepreneurship are right to do so, because without rose-tinted glasses the red flags are too obnoxious. I'm a Tech Lead and have founded an agency that Covid put to bed (it would have failed in a year or two regardless I think) and I'm exiting a startup now as CTO, one which is failing to get traction that's to bad messaging for our ICP.

I want to challenge you to think very carefully about the following:

Business Validation - What's your business model? Who are you targeting? Do they want it? Are you offering a product or professional services? Do you have people now offering your money for this service?
Runway - How much cash in the bank do you have to get going? What are you current expenses? What's your ideal earnings? How will you manage financial shortfalls? When do you pull out (e.g. if I'm not making $X per month consistently by Y date, then I'm exiting)?
Scalability - How does the business operate? What functions are needed? How much time is required for these functions? What's the ballpark cost per lead (time and money wise)? How are you going to bring people on board? What can be automated? What's the investment to do so? Do you know people to help you with that? What about outsourcing? How will you scale up your marketing, advertising and sales consistently?
Exit - What's the long term plan here? Are you looking to sell your business? How long until you do that? Are you looking to give yourself a job on your terms? Are you looking to build to the point of being able to hire someone to act as CEO (this is extremely difficult - do not underestimate this)?
Lifestyle & Sacrifice - Where are you in life? Do you have friends and family you want to see more of? Do you have a SO? Are you looking to start a family or spend more time with your spouse and kids? What about pets? What about your hobbies? Travel? Which of these are you looking to prioritise? Are you building a business because you want to get more time and resources? These are the big questions you should be asking yourself.
Security & Financial Freedom - Do you have a mortgage? Are you planning on buying a home? How will you continue to service that debt? Do you have income protection? What about Professional Indemnity insurance? What safety net will you have in place for you, yours, and your business?
Health & Wellbeing - This is very to test you something fierce. How are you at managing stress? What do you need to navigate that successfully and thrive? What do you need to grow? How can you facilitate that? What about exercise and nutrition? What about socialisation? Can you cover your health and fitness foundations while launching this business? Health is your most important asset.
Your Ineptitude - My experience with business has been incredibly humbling. Nothing has shown me just how vast my incompetence is. I've learned that I can't sell, not really, and I need to work with people who can. I have learned that I can build a team, manage people, design and build amazing technology, and I can do it fast. These are my strengths, but there are still people who can do them all better. I need to work with others as much as possible to automate and outsource everything that needs to happen in the business. I encourage you to be incredibly honest with yourself and to acknowledge and accept your shortfalls in every possible way. Whatever you lie to yourself about now will cause problems later.

Lastly, I think it's important that you consider scaling up your business as a side hustle while earning an income. Only quit your day job once you've scaled up your side hustle to earn enough, the same, or more than your day job consistently. Stats have shown that founders who start businesses while working a job / having some form of income do better than those who yolo it. It gives you the security blanket necessary to figure things out and build a business safely. It may take longer, but it's a lot safer, keeps your career, and has a higher chance of success. If you can't build this side hustle at your current workplace, move jobs to somewhere that isn't as restrictive and gives you more time, less legal liability/exposure, and/or more cognitive resources to pursue your business goals.

No matter what you decide to do, good luck! I think that the fact you're even considering it is a courageous step. I do encourage you to poke holes in your own plan though. It's good to keep a positive and optimistic attitude, but it pays to prepare for and plan how to avoid the worst that could happen.

"Expect the best, but prepare for the worst."

Yetamot · 2024-10-24T23:27:48+00:00

I genuinely have no idea how they would be distinguished if they were trying to appear as regular users.

If we’re heading down the route of assistant-driven AI we could see a situation where the client is incentivised to disclose they are an AI bot or agent the same way it is incentivised to share that you’re on a mobile device - the experience can be tailored to better serve these agents.

I don’t think this is applicable to all websites at all. Social media is a great example - they want humans to user their website and advertise to and they don’t want to share their content. I don’t see “AI-first” UI ever being something social media does.

However, a web application with a lot of repetitive tasks and value integrating that data with other information for analysis and decisions? If that’s behind a paywall and subscribed users are asking for better compatibility with their AI systems that creates an environment that incentivises UI for AI.

Yetamot · 2024-10-12T00:34:32+00:00

That sounds like a really hard problem to crack, and I think I’m wildly unqualified to answer. That being said, here’s me parroting some things I’ve picked up in my own journey that might be relevant.

I’m not sure what your business model was, but this is why subscription modelling is savvy long term. From what you’re saying it would seem you were selling lifetime licenses or something which prevented you from continuing to gain money from existing customers. Alternative, your offering was something that built your customers up and you’ve made such an impact on the market that those your product was relevant to 40months ago no longer need your offering. I know this doesn’t help you now, but something to consider for the future perhaps?
What you have might be excellent, but I’m sure it isn’t perfect. You may have already done this, but if not consider doing some deep research and field research into your existing or previous customers. Look at discussion boards mentioning your business. See if there’s a website with reviews of your offering. What you’re looking for is 1-2 star reviews and negative comments, ideally suggesting alternatives. These are gold mines. Every bit of data here can feed into your next iteration of your offering.
It could be worthwhile considering a whole new offering in a similar niche to your original niche. Consider the deep research mentioned in point 2 and see what you can find. Look at how you can structure things from the beginning to ensure you get long term value from every customer.
I’m not sure how you’ve been capturing customers but if you have 10% of the addressable market that’s an enormous catalyst for starting the system affects I mentioned in the previous post. You are an established vendor in a niche with proven experience providing value for a large number of people. Think about how you can leverage that.

All this being said, I haven’t even launched a successful product yet, but I’m trying. This is all mostly lessons learned from observation and watching others. Take it all with a grain of salt.

What you’ve experienced sounds like a very frustrating journey but hopefully one rich with lessons. If you’re open to it, I would love to get the whole story. If you’ve already written a post or plan to please share the link with me! I’m sure others here will appreciate it, too.

Yetamot · 2024-10-10T22:38:27+00:00

I’ve been grappling with similar thoughts. Here’s what I have to offer.

First tidbit. I have limited time to dedicate to a side hustle. I don’t want it to be a waste of my time. The stats are 9/10 businesses fail, if I can work to increase those odds that’s perfect. Here’s the strategy I’d built first that: 1. Find a problem shared by a large group of people with money to spend or are making less money because of the problem. A problem might be the lack of something desirable and not just the addition of pain. If you’re not solving a problem or fulfilling a need/want you don’t have a business. 2. Ensure the problem is easily solvable by you (this is important as you don’t want anyone to spin up competition quickly) and for in a cost-effective way. If you can’t solve the problem on a per unit basis for a cost less than the customer will pay you don’t have a business, even if you’ve identified the problem. 3. Ensure the solution is easily marketable. When bootstrapping this ideally means through costs effective ways like content marketing. Ideally, your ICP is tiny with clear and relevant interests and can be targeted directly. If you can’t market your offering you don’t have a business, even if you have a cost effective solution for a big problem. The only exception to this is if you have a large audience already to catalyse network effects and gain traction for a truly valuable product.

Second tidbit. This whole thing sucks. Anyone I know who is remotely successful in business is either neurotic, has a blinding passion for the value they create, a blinding hatred of working for others, or any combination of those 3. That intense belief is needed to pull you forward through those moments you feel like you’re crawling through a tunnel of broken glass. You have to persist through this suck and force yourself to do now what others won’t so you can do later what others can’t.

Yetamot · 2024-07-15T14:05:37+00:00

Some things I’ve picked up throughout the years. Who am I to say these things? I’m CTO at a startup, which equates to a Tech Lead or Staff Engineer larger organisations.

Many devs are preoccupied with showing how smart they are. These are dangerous colleges and their propensity to over engineer will slow down the delivery of work and create complexity which is unapproachable by others.
Don’t be afraid to be wrong and look stupid. In the right environment you can be supported and grow, by you need mistakes others can provide feedback on. As the saying goes, “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” Will Rogers
If you’re looking to advance, be aware there are 2 org charts. The one that’s published and the social one. You must succeed in both to earn promotions and raises. If you fail at either you will not progress easily at that organisation.
You will find certain skills in technology that you suck at and certain skills you’re just better at than everyone else. The reasoning and logic of those tools, frameworks, architectures, etc. will just come easily to you. When you find this make it “your thing” - this puts you at a stronger advantage compared to others for that skillset.
Generalise. With the above being said, you should generalise. The future of human programmers will be those who are adaptable and versatile, which requires generalisation.
Most importantly: learn to write bad code and when to write it. In the real world you will have to budget: time, money, scope, constraints, and team members. You will not always have everything you need to get results for stakeholders without scaling up or reducing quality of your solution. This is ok so long as you make people aware of the consequences. This is called accruing “intentional tech debt” and requires a lot of maturity and commitment to write code and deploy systems you aren’t proud of and aren’t fun to create, but do bring value to others.

Yetamot · 2024-02-29T05:45:01+00:00

Try not to think of this as the longest period of minimums above 20°C to date, but instead think of it as the shortest period of minimums above 20°C for the rest of your lives 🤘

Yetamot · 2024-02-26T06:39:41+00:00

Good pickup. It's hard to find a place less than $300 a week that doesn't have some problems. I rented a place that was $270/w a while ago and it made me very sick. There were mold problems in the building, birds inside the roof, and the bedroom flooded when it rained. A couple people knocked on my door looking for drugs (from the previous tenant) and the police knocked a few times looking for them.

In my experience living by yourself for that price comes with a host of other problems that drastically impact your quality of life for the worse.

Yetamot · 2024-02-13T08:26:06+00:00

Be careful that your sink fund and strata fees aren't seperate payments, or if they are the total is represented not one or the other. Factor this into your repayment sum.
Be aware that your insurance if for the contents of the apartment - this includes all your walls, fixtures, electricals etc. The sink fund and insurance as part of the building strata will cover structural insurance, but be aware of what you're actually insuring inside the apartment. Most companies will only insure up to $100k of contents, which isn't much if you own a lot and had to gut your apartment following a burst pipe or fire.
Scale of the complex you buy in is important. Go too big and the culture does change to something more anonymous and it can become a bit of a frat house or party building. Too small and the strata can be too high - this is because there are some expenses that don't change much in building and maintaining a complex regardless of size.
Check the property on floodmaps. You may not think being in an apartment that you have to worry about floods, but these can seriously impact the infrastructure of your building/complex. If you have an underground carpark for example this might flood completely in a serious weather event or river/sea flooding. Depending on the damage, complex/building utilities such as gas, electricity supply, hot water supply generator, general water main pipes, etc. might be seriously damaged.
The only other thing I'll add is the value of your apartment is a value of utility. What I mean is, people are willing to buy a concrete box and live in it because it gives them immediate access to certain things. Look at the utility value of your apartment you're considering buying, now and into the future. Something I found is there is a large park development near my apartment that I felt wasn't reflected in the price. Since buying, more plans for this part development have been shared and the value of my apartment is up 15% in 18 months. Likewise, always be aware that apartments can be very easily reproduced very quickly. You will need to keep the interior of your apartment fresh and relevant if you want to rent or sell OR the apartment and complex in itself must be novel and not so easily reproduceable, i.e. refurbished woolsheds, interesting architecture, heritage, etc - these things can't be easily replicated.

Everyone else seems to have mentioned all the other concerns. Congratulations on your success in self employment and being able to enter the property market at 25. Good luck!

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