Reply To: Hot to approach with legitimate reasons?

[The_Hurricane]

@ryano

I think of an approach like an interview. If you had a day to demonstrate your skills, aptitudes, and interests, and you actually had the skills for the job, everyone would be good at interviews. But an interview is short, and there are some strategies that work better than others. A skilled interviewee will not only get across the point that she is a valuable asset to the firm, but will also get an answer to the question of whether the firm is right for her. That pressure that the firm feels to satisfy the ambitions of a really good candidate makes the firm want her more, which in turn makes the firm more willing to spend more to get her.

Now, what advice would you give to the interviewee? Just wing it? Make mistakes. Say whatever comes to mind. Don’t prepare. Tell them you lost your resume and attempt to recite they key points from memory? Go into the interview with no strategy at all? Have fun with it and say whatever comes to mind? Ha!

There is nothing natural about approaching a woman on the street. It’s not how men actually met women over the last 30,000 years. We are not naturally wired for this the way we are naturally wired for sex. For basic sex, we need almost no instruction. But, as this article reports – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1270271/Beautiful-women-bad-health-raise-stress-hormones.html – when most men approach beautiful women, their stress levels spike into dangerous territory. What this shows is that we are not wired to approach beautiful women.

My advice to students of social dynamics is to stop the pretense that this is the most natural thing in the world. Stop the pretense that you already have all of the tools you need to be effective, and learn some good strategies for doing it well.

Having a good strategy for interviewing doesn’t mean that you’re going to say the same thing as everyone else. You have your own skills, aptitudes, and interests, so what you say should be unique. What won’t be unique – or at least shouldn’t be – are the strategies that you will use to present your value to the interviewer. It’s ok not to reinvent these strategies. Using them doesn’t make you a clone of other job applicants. The same goes for pickup.

–Lee