During job interviews an evergreen question is “Tell me about tasks you enjoy” or in a similar vein “What were your biggest successes during the last project?” I always found it hard to come up with a good answer on the spot, simply because I did not think about it before. Of course there are some tasks that I enjoy more than other tasks, but what elements do they have in common?

Remedy Proposal In the last post I wrote about ways to damage a conversation (I am sure there are a lot more). This post will list some ways that help a conversation in my experience. start a conversation with something positive and/or a compliment. Telling someone that you are happy to see her/him never hurts, and might brighten his/her day. use a positive conception of humans. Human communication is inherently context dependent and therefore ambiguous.

Problem Description I experience conversations often as a non-pleasant interaction between me and another person. My natural reaction after such interaction is to avoid conversations, but lately I had to admit that this strategy has several drawbacks. First, dealing with unpleasant situations by avoidance is a questionable strategy at least. Of course, some things that one does not like are probably handled best by ignoring. For instance, I don’t like Metal music, so I simply avoid locations and radio stations that mainly play Metal.