No One Understands You and What to Do About It

those with higher socioeconomic status are somewhat dehumanized by their experience of wealth and power. Because they depend less on others to get what they want, they become more self-focused, less aware of those around them, and less likely to experience empathy.

People are much more impressed, whether they realize it or not, by your potential than by your track record. It would be wise to start focusing your pitch on your future, rather than on your past—even if that past is very impressive indeed. It’s what you could be that makes people sit up and take notice.

Statistically speaking, there are only weak correlations between how others see us and how we believe we are seen.

We don’t communicate nearly as much information as we think we do. When you say, “He knows what I meant” or “I made myself clear,” chances are, he doesn’t and you didn’t.

Without realizing it, you—like everyone else—are very likely operating under two very flawed assumptions: first, that other people see you objectively as you are, and, second, that other people see you as you see yourself.

He showed that while most of us rank intrinsically motivating factors—such as skill development—as the most important to us in our careers, we believe that other people care primarily about extrinsic motivators, like compensation. In other words, we believe that when it comes to work we do, our own values are more noble and authentic than those of

Psychologists call this tendency to believe that others feel the way we do the false-consensus effect, and evidence for it is all around you.

Human beings have a strong tendency to distort other people’s feedback to fit their own views. We know this intellectually, and yet we rarely seem to recognize it as it’s happening.

So if you are a very shy and reserved person who reveals next to nothing about your thoughts and feelings to the people around you, then they will know very little about you—aside from the fact that you are shy and reserved, obviously. The danger there is that people will generally fill in the blanks themselves, imagining a whole personality profil