Jokes are overrated. Stories in general are overrated. Approximtely no-one cares about my fascinating stories. I keep pointing this out to myself in the hope it will sink in.
This is hideous advice. If you can’t make your stories fascinating to other people, you should indeed stop. But signalling is important in many, many contexts, and if you confine yourself to just doing stuff, and never talking about it, you will be at a very large disadvantage to better self-publicists unless you are operating at a very, very high level.
You may want to try to write one down as you say it, getting the structure of your speech onto the paper, and then look for annoying patterns. A couple of the patterns that I’ve found the most annoying are multiple digressions and narcissism.
Multiple digressions can be easy to make as you realize that there is a part of your story that depends on information the other person won’t have, and so you digress for a moment to fill them in, and then realize that that too requires more information, and so forth. Imagine the other person in the conversation as a stack machine with a very small stack limit and a very low memory size, where too many digressions will overwrite either the point you were trying to make or even what the conversation was about at all. The best thing to do in this case is eliminate unnecessary information in the story to simplify it.
An example would be something like: “I had a roommate Steve, that oh wait, did I ever tell you about Steve? Well, (digression of length). Wait, what was I going to say?” The proper way to fix this would be something like: “I had a roommate that used to do , and used to happen every time.”
Narcissism is harder to deal with. All of your stories are of course ones that you are in, but focusing solely on yourself when telling them can turn people off. My advice is to avoid stories like this unless they are very on-topic, and even then try to emphasize what was happening around you more than your actions.
Jokes are overrated. Stories in general are overrated. Approximtely no-one cares about my fascinating stories. I keep pointing this out to myself in the hope it will sink in.
This is hideous advice. If you can’t make your stories fascinating to other people, you should indeed stop. But signalling is important in many, many contexts, and if you confine yourself to just doing stuff, and never talking about it, you will be at a very large disadvantage to better self-publicists unless you are operating at a very, very high level.
.
You may want to try to write one down as you say it, getting the structure of your speech onto the paper, and then look for annoying patterns. A couple of the patterns that I’ve found the most annoying are multiple digressions and narcissism.
Multiple digressions can be easy to make as you realize that there is a part of your story that depends on information the other person won’t have, and so you digress for a moment to fill them in, and then realize that that too requires more information, and so forth. Imagine the other person in the conversation as a stack machine with a very small stack limit and a very low memory size, where too many digressions will overwrite either the point you were trying to make or even what the conversation was about at all. The best thing to do in this case is eliminate unnecessary information in the story to simplify it.
An example would be something like: “I had a roommate Steve, that oh wait, did I ever tell you about Steve? Well, (digression of length). Wait, what was I going to say?” The proper way to fix this would be something like: “I had a roommate that used to do , and used to happen every time.”
Narcissism is harder to deal with. All of your stories are of course ones that you are in, but focusing solely on yourself when telling them can turn people off. My advice is to avoid stories like this unless they are very on-topic, and even then try to emphasize what was happening around you more than your actions.
I smell an inferential distance problem here. This advice seems to be non-generalizable enough as-is that you may want to explain a bit more.