Montaigne said he found nothing more notable in the life of Socrates than that he was very gifted at playing with children. In his later years, Socrates spent many hours playing games and giving children piggybacks for 'all actions, says philosophy, equally become and equally honour a wise man.' He did not deliver lectures to them. Henri IV, the King of France, was very sweet around children. He once kept the Spanish Ambassador waiting while pretending to b a horse for his children to ride on. He did not sit on a throne discussing how to rule a kingdom.

Famous examples of people who know how to become vulnerable

It's easy to think we possess reasonable social skills because we know how to have a conversation with strangers and can occasionally make a whole group laugh.  A greater test than this, and surprising in its ability to trip us up, is to have a pleasant time with a child we don't know. In theory, this should be easy as we were all once kids. But in reality, it is strangely hard to be at ease around children we're not familiar with.

Limited social skills

The reason why we may feel tongue-tied and inept around shy five-year-olds or a moody 10-year-old is that children are unable to do any of the usual things that ease social encounters between adult strangers. They don't ask polite questions about what we've been up to. They don't consider what might be important to us. They don't do the news or the weather and can't tell us much about themselves and their interests.

Children are the greatest tests of one’s mastery of the arts of charm and kindness

Both King Henri VI and Socrates knew how to engage with children.<ul><li>They put aside their well-known virtues and prestige to make themselves vulnerable - the same way one should be when a friendship is at stake.</li><li>They knew how to find common ground. They imaginatively searched for what unites people and could find within their characters the joys and excitements of someone who has not been on earth very long.</li><li>They feel their way into the needs and points of view of strangers.</li><li>Even if they are confident, they know how to be in touch with the more timid version of themselves.</li></ul>

How to engage with strangers

You’ll know you’ve truly become socially adept when you finally manage to make small talk with that most challenging and unforgiving of characters: a small child you hardly know. If you like our films, take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): https://goo.gl/aLr91M Join our mailing list: http://bit.ly/2e0TQNJ Or visit us in person at our London HQ https://goo.gl/tGq1RG FURTHER READING “It can be easy to imagine we possess reasonable social skills, because we know how to maintain a conversation with strangers and – every now and then – manage to make a whole table laugh. But there’s a test far sterner than this, surprising in its ability to trip us up: the challenge of having a pleasant time with a child we don’t know. Theoretically speaking, this should be so easy. We were all once kids. We know a great deal more than they do and – as far as they’re concerned – hold all the cards: if we felt like it, we could buy 26 packets of biscuits and go to bed whenever we wanted…” You can read more on this and other subjects on our blog, here: https://goo.gl/9APsau MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Our website has classes, articles and products to help you think and grow: https://goo.gl/y51g7f Watch more films on RELATIONSHIPS in our playlist: http://bit.ly/TSOLrelationships You can submit translations and transcripts on all of our videos here: https://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel?c=UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog&tab=2 Find out how more here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6054623?hl=en-GB SOCIAL MEDIA Feel free to follow us at the links below: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theschooloflifelondon/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSchoolOfLife Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theschooloflifelondon/ CREDITS Produced in collaboration with: Martin Pickles http://martinpickles.com/ #TheSchoolOfLife

communication

Communication

videos

Videos

You’ll know you’ve truly become socially adept when you finally manage to make small talk with that most challenging and unforgiving of characters: a small child you hardly know.  If you like our films, take a look at our shop (we ship worldwide): https://goo.gl/aLr91M
Join our mailing list: http://bit.ly/2e0TQNJ 
Or visit us in person at our London HQ https://goo.gl/tGq1RG


FURTHER READING

“It can be easy to imagine we possess reasonable social skills, because we know how to maintain a conversation with strangers and – every now and then – manage to make a whole table laugh.
But there’s a test far sterner than this, surprising in its ability to trip us up: the challenge of having a pleasant time with a child we don’t know. Theoretically speaking, this should be so easy. We were all once kids. We know a great deal more than they do and – as far as they’re concerned – hold all the cards: if we felt like it, we could buy 26 packets of biscuits and go to bed whenever we wanted…”

You can read more on this and other subjects on our blog, here: https://goo.gl/9APsau

MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE

Our website has classes, articles and products to help you think and grow: https://goo.gl/y51g7f

Watch more films on RELATIONSHIPS in our playlist: 
http://bit.ly/TSOLrelationships

You can submit translations and transcripts on all of our videos here: https://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel?c=UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog&tab=2 
Find out how more here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6054623?hl=en-GB 


SOCIAL MEDIA

Feel free to follow us at the links below:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theschooloflifelondon/  
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSchoolOfLife   
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theschooloflifelondon/ 


CREDITS

Produced in collaboration with:
 
Martin Pickles
http://martinpickles.com/ #TheSchoolOfLife

We're interested in self-understanding, calm and emotional maturity.

We have thousands of articles about emotional life for you on our website: www.theschooloflife.com

We offer online psychotherapy: www.theschooloflife.com/therapy

We publish one film a week, on Wednesdays at 14.00hrs GMT.

The School of Life

The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills

Messaging and language can shift how you think about things. If we view our schedule as "full" instead of "busy", we can regain control and reframe our entire day. Being "busy" means you're running nonstop. But "full" means it is rich, happy, and content.

Changing our perception

When you ask most people how they are doing, they will respond by saying they're busy. Being busy is seen as a currency in our society. We've cultivated the myth that busyness is the same as value, which equals worth. While we're struggling to maintain this status, the stress of busyness is leading to major public health concerns. More concerning is that if we think of ourselves as busy, we make ourselves victims. "I have too many things to do that are out of my control. I feel overwhelmed."

Being “busy” wrongly demonstrates value

When you view your life as "full" instead of "busy", <ul><li>You become grateful for all the different roles you play.</li><li>You learn how to prioritize. You view everything on your to-do list and decide if it adds to your day being full or detracts from it.</li><li>You take back control of your life. When you live a full life, you're content.</li></ul>

How your mindset can change

There’s a better way to reframe busyness (a negative!) by using different words, this comms exec and self-described word geek says.


productivity

Productivity

timemanagement

Time Management

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

You’d be a lot happier if you stop saying you’re so busy

Part of the new display of aesthetic enhancements is about status: You're saying you can keep up with the Kardashians if you can get procedures like them. Part of self-care has been stretched to such an extent that it might include getting injections in your face every six months so you don't look "tired". Yet, no one can achieve the ever-escalating beauty ideal without training, diets, and cosmetic interventions, which is becoming a part of a normalised beauty routine.

Status and aesthetic enhancements

Justine Bateman, 55, a filmmaker and former actress, writes in her new book, "Face: One Square Foot of Skin," that women's faces are not broken and don't need to be fixed. The book reflects on women's faces and the cultural pressure to be ashamed that their faces aged naturally. Ms Bateman says she can either look in the mirror and think she looks horrible, or she can think it's a super cool face. But Dr Devgan points out that plastic surgery allows people to look like the best version of themselves.

Pushing back

Dr Herluf Lund, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Chesterfield, Mo., started performing aesthetic enhancements 30 years ago. Then, most of his patients wanted their surgeries kept a secret. Now, his patients expect their pictures to be taken, and they want to post them. Procedures used to be done discretely, but in the post-Kardashian world, transparency is just part of the process. Social sharing, particularly among celebrities and influencers, has reduced the stigma about plastic surgery and medical aesthetics.

Plastic surgery is becoming more transparent

Dr Devgan, age 42, uses her social media to extend her medical practice by educating viewers and managing their expectations around what is possible.  @celebface on Instagram shows the amount of work that goes into making famous people look the way they do. Though social media has been part of removing the stigma of aesthetic work, keeping up with the Kardashians is ushering in a new transparency around undergoing procedures.

Education and expectations

Procedures used to be done in secret, but in the post-Kardashian world, transparency is just part of the process.

fashion

Fashion & Beauty

health

Health

The Mesmerizing Pull of Plastic Surgery Videos

Social+ companies usually surpass their non-social counterparts. TikTok and Fortnite have higher values achieved on shorter time frames than Spotify and Assassin's Creed.Categories that remain open for Social+<ul><li>Fitness</li><li>Food</li><li>Money</li><li>Real Estate</li><li>Education</li></ul>Social+ allows us to layer social into the activities that we already enjoy.

The future is Social+

<ul><li>The social interactions should feel authentic.</li><li>Has an interactive layer, which appeals to the user’s emotional and cognitive side, and a transactional layer which appeals to the rational and functional side.</li><li>These layers should be mutually reinforcing.</li></ul>

Challenges to building a Social+ company

Growth loopsEngagementRetentionDefensibility

The benefits of Social+

<ul><li>Having a social graph that is unique and inseparable from the product.</li><li>Own the community – building a product on top of a pre-existing social graph means the network is owned by someone else.</li><li>The social element needs to be integral to the experience.</li><li>Peer-to-peer social engagement is essential to the product.</li><li>The community should engage with each other rather than being a passive audience.</li></ul>

What makes a company Social+

Companies like TikTok and Fortnite have built an integrated social experience around music and gaming. They are Social+ companies.

No category is really won until the social product is built. These are challenges and the open opportunities in building "social+" companies.

business

Business

product

Product & Design

Community Takes All: The Power of Social+

Offering a utility to your user base is the most stable sort of long-term competitive advantage that you can have.A lot of network-based utility only is realized at some level of scale.That’s where status comes in.A lot of networks that have achieved super scale had some sort of status incentives or status games built-in, very early on. It helped them to get that kinetic energy that you need in order to achieve the scale that then increases your utility. Those networks were paying you to contribute — paying with ego, with status, with a sort of an emotional payback rather than money.

Status Drives Scale

Social media, ultimately, is mostly just about entertainment, not utility. But, if you have a network like Uber or Lyft, you’re ultimately about getting someone from point A to point B. That’s not really an entertainment-based product. So your competitive set may be more limited.
It’s very critical if you’re doing a startup to understand if you are going to be offering a product that is actually an entertainment-based product — because that really widens your competitive set.

Products Are Often Entertainment-Based

If a centralized provider can guarantee the scarcity of that virtual good, then it actually does have emotional value. People who play League of Legends all know how hard it is to acquire certain types of equipment in that game and there’s a flourishing aftermarket for it.

Virtual Scarcity = Real Value, Real Status

In the early days of Instagram, there was a sense of progression in that they had filters and things that allowed you to feel like you were improving as a photographer. But the part of Instagram that’s challenging now, is a lot of that network is about if you have a lot of wealth or something, and the average person is going to be like, “That’s not my life. I can’t compete with that.” And so there is a point in which you start to feel you could churn out of that network because you’re not going to feel any progression.

Instagram May Be Imploding

<ul><li>There’s something to the idea that humans are wired to be very, very conscious of status. It may have come from another time in mankind’s history when your status within your small tribe or group was actually critical to your survival.</li><li>That carried over to the modern world — and the fact that we have these social networks that knit together the world, that allow us to see the activity or status of other people all over the world has sort of risen the stakes.</li><li>These social networks have pushed the emotional stakes of status games to, maybe, an unhealthy place.</li></ul>

Humans Are Wired To Be Conscious Of Status

In the first decade or two of the web and the smartphone, everything was really focused on efficiencies achieved from going asynchronous.In every field, you can see there are huge gains to going asynchronous.But we’ve lost that social feeling of community that comes from synchronicity.Over time we will once again say: “It actually does matter occasionally that a society is all watching something at the same time, or that you and a group of people benefit by doing something together.”You start to feel like societies start to fracture when you don’t have that feeling of communal harmony.

When Our Asynchronous Society Starts To Fray

We have long held this idea that there will someday be this kind of Metaverse-like world that more of us live in. We actually have already partially transitioned into it with our smartphones. We’re not necessarily wearing VR headsets and spending all our days like those people in Wall-E. But most people today spend a good fraction of the day with their faces in their phones, interacting in software-constructed environments. The fact that it’s not 3D doesn’t matter — it’s still a form of sort of low-fidelity Metaverse.

Status in the Metaverse

Because games are continuous, interactive experiences. The user in a game will churn out if he’s not feeling the right balance of:<ul><li>Challenged</li><li>Motivated</li><li>And rewarded</li></ul>That same principle can be applied to a lot of other products. How products take off = a lot of it is in how they make you feel.

The Right Balance

Mental frameworks that are more common in business and analysis tend to be more focused on things that are measurable or easily measured, which often is some sort of utility-based function. It is much harder sometimes to measure that emotional quality.

Emotion And Utility

If you’re in a tech world where you have winner-take-all dynamics and network effects, where you have things that are absolutely free and infinitely available, well, at the edges of that, the old prescriptions kind of break down.If you’re allowed to define scarcity on any axis, that is a form of power.Video games have become leaders at figuring out how to define forms of scarcity. You can also look in the retail world for similar things where you have flash sales and things like that, where it’s just constrained inventory or limited time for something.

Scarcity Is A Form Of Power

<ul><li>It’s easy to forget that product development in the tech world, in the software world, is actually still a relatively young profession in the scheme of things.</li><li>If we study traditional status mechanisms in society, just generally, it’s always the case that someone is always going to create something even more scarce to differentiate.</li><li>One of the important things to understand in the long run is that managing a network and the status dynamics within it evolves over time.</li></ul>

The Precarious Nature Of Status

An understudied and overlooked aspect of product design is that a lot of times, people use products that just make them feel good.People in the gaming world have an intuitive understanding of how important this is — how important it is, moment to moment, to track your user’s emotional valence.

How Products Make You Feel

All product people have had it beaten into their heads that, “Hey, you’ve got to remove friction from every process in your app. From the signup flow to this flow, everything has to be fast and easy.” That is not necessarily good.We have to start distinguishing, at the product design level, between positive and negative forms of engagement.You actually need proof of work. You do need some friction in the product, and it can be used for something good. It can be used to motivate.When we think about product design, we have to think about those positive forms of friction.

Designing Products With Positive Friction

Every product person or entrepreneur moving forward needs to have familiarity with the tactics and strategic understanding of this important point: Structurally, when determining how you build your product, part of what you’re doing is defining what scarcity means on your platform.

The Underlying Mechanics of Scarcity

Why do some networks succeed and others fail? One consistent pattern of successful networks is that they have scarcity early on so that people can signal status, and then over time the network moves toward providing more utility. Humans are hard-wired for status games, so product builders would be wise to understand how status & scarcity function.

Status Games: The Premise

You can think of all of the things like sales ranking and customer review ratings as a game. There is always some sort of proof of work. There is some hurdle that you have to do to capture that amount of status. And if you can define some unique form of proof of work, then you may have something that jumpstarts a new game.These restrictions, in order to create scarcity, drive initial white-hot centre type activity, which then can bleed into bigger products.

Scarcity-Based Games

James Currier & Eugene Wei (product lead at Amazon, Hulu, Oculus), discuss the underlying status games that drive us all—in technology and life.

The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills

You’d be a lot happier if you stop saying you’re so busy

The Mesmerizing Pull of Plastic Surgery Videos

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

Community Takes All: The Power of Social+

CURATED BY

The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills

You’d be a lot happier if you stop saying you’re so busy

The Mesmerizing Pull of Plastic Surgery Videos

It's time to Read like a Pro.

Community Takes All: The Power of Social+

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.