Oliver Emberton writes essays on life strategy, entrepreneurship, finding your passion and personal relationships, using game metaphors and humor.
Commenters are split: some find the game metaphor useful and his dating essay interesting, while one asks why programmers feel qualified to give broad life advice.
I read some "pick up artist" literature in college: about two thirds of it is misogynistic garbage, but the remainder has some good tips on general platonic social interaction (and a major issue with insecure men is learning to interact with women in a casual platonic way without acting odd and creepy because they are hoping for more).
- If you aren't good at speaking in a captivating way, literally write out your best stories. People who are good at telling stories get this way from practice: introverts naturally get less practice and thus tend to be less talented at speaking. You can do a significant amount of practice on a story without a partner - develop a few 2-3 minute anecdotes about yourself that have a clear beginning, middle and punchline, and cut all extraneous information that doesn't enhance the listeners enjoyment or teach them something positive about your character. If the conversation with a new person touches on something from one of your anecdotes, you will be able to quickly go into your anecdote and be engaging. The process of editing a couple stories will teach you to revise future stories without writing them down explicitly.
- The Cube is a really great icebreaker when meeting new people and conversation is petering out. https://oliveremberton.com/2014/how-to-connect-deeply-with-anyone-in-5-minutes/ A couple times, I've captivated groups of 4-6 strangers for about an hour with this. Everyone likes talking about themselves, and it gives people…
What's up with freaking programmers of all the people in the world thinking they're in a position to give far-reaching life like this? Of course my perception is biased because this profession is overrepresented here but these kinds of posts keep popping up from time to time and reading advice on how to live your life from someone who spends all their time in front of a computer screen is so cringe. Even the wikipedia (lol) source he cited on "Ego depletion" has an entire section questioning the external validity and reproducibility of that concept.
From https://oliveremberton.com/about/
> Not naturally in tune with people’s feelings and reactions
Yeah dude, I wonder why. Go write a blog post about it.
https://oliveremberton.com/2013/how-do-i-figure-out-what-to-do-in-life/
That photoshopped picture of Bill Gates holding a potato is genuinely funny though, lol.
Didn't seem to me at all like "self grandeur", more like "here are some funny examples based on my background".
The overall game metaphor is quite nice and useful, also in relation to what the author writes about "fairness" [1].
[1]: https://oliveremberton.com/2014/the-problem-isnt-that-life-is-unfair-its-your-broken-idea-of-fairness/
http://oliveremberton.com/2013/you-can-do-anything-if-you-stop-trying-to-do-everything/
One need to read this. Helped me a lot during my 6th semester and I scored an almost perfect gpa that semester.
The author is one of the Top Writer on Quora and writes on productivity.
Instead of trivia I would recommend you this link and specially the author's uncommon formula for dating success:
http://oliveremberton.com/2014/weve-all-been-raised-by-evil-love-stories/
https://www.oliveremberton.com
Vibe coded in 3.5 hrs (content was older, natch), wrote a block-based, WYSIWYG block based CMS from scratch to power it.