![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackThis is something else I always knew in theory but never internalised.
By brain has a great tendency to glom onto "the rules". I always wanted to know what's officially allowed, so I can do that, and not have to constantly worry if I'm transgressing. You may notice I've always tended to worry about "breaking the rules" way too much.
Everyone has this in their own way. Most people's idea of "the rules" is much less fixed than mine used to be, but people get REALLY upset when reality fails to confirm to what they think the rules are!
But I always felt like there had to be fixed rules. For everyone. That people could tell you. That's sometimes stood me well: when there are good rules, I'm good at following them.
And sometimes that's true. Often the law acts like that, although often it doesn't. So do policies, or competition rules.
But usually, in practice, what's "according to the rules" is "what everyone thinks is ok". However inconsistent and nonsensical that is. That usually works out sometimes. People learn their jobs from the people around them. They learn "allowed" behaviour by what people object to. Doing what someone wants is better than doing what someone says, just sometimes neither of you know.
But seeing the "real" rules instead of the "notional" rules is sometimes like hearing a conversation behind the noise of a road drill. It's possible, but the other version constantly inserts itself into my awareness more.
By brain has a great tendency to glom onto "the rules". I always wanted to know what's officially allowed, so I can do that, and not have to constantly worry if I'm transgressing. You may notice I've always tended to worry about "breaking the rules" way too much.
Everyone has this in their own way. Most people's idea of "the rules" is much less fixed than mine used to be, but people get REALLY upset when reality fails to confirm to what they think the rules are!
But I always felt like there had to be fixed rules. For everyone. That people could tell you. That's sometimes stood me well: when there are good rules, I'm good at following them.
And sometimes that's true. Often the law acts like that, although often it doesn't. So do policies, or competition rules.
But usually, in practice, what's "according to the rules" is "what everyone thinks is ok". However inconsistent and nonsensical that is. That usually works out sometimes. People learn their jobs from the people around them. They learn "allowed" behaviour by what people object to. Doing what someone wants is better than doing what someone says, just sometimes neither of you know.
But seeing the "real" rules instead of the "notional" rules is sometimes like hearing a conversation behind the noise of a road drill. It's possible, but the other version constantly inserts itself into my awareness more.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-23 03:59 pm (UTC)It required me to be much much better at modelling what people wanted than I had been though, which meant I was in my late 20s before I got anywhere near it being useful.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 04:06 pm (UTC)I think, I *did* figure that out, sort of, but was somehow blocked on actually DOING it (the way I was blocked from lots of important things, like the last 10% of any project... :)) I think I sort of got better at it in the background, while still failing to DO it, until a bunch of that suddenly got better at once. But even from the inside, it's REALLY hard to describe, I'm really not sure what's going on sometimes.
ETA: Like, I'm sure I went through a stage of failing to work out what people might mean, or failing to pick up cues, but I wasn't really conscious of it at the time. What I remember is a lot of "recognising that it would probably be easier to just [do what leads to a quiet life]" or "recognising that someone probably wants [whatever] even though that's not quite what they said", but then just getting hung up unable to ACT on that.