Everyone should take an improv class, in secondary school and again in college.
Like the bard said, everyone's an actor; most people are just really bad ones. Knowing how your own facial expressions, gestures, voice and words really work is a crucial survival skill in human society, and one which you are very unlikely to pick up without a little training.
> Knowing how your own facial expressions, gestures, voice and words really work is a crucial survival skill in human society
You may want to rephrase this. I'm willing to accept it's useful, but it's clearly not a survival skill or there would be a lot of dead nerds out there.
Thanks. I meant nerds in the common meaning, derogatory or not. Let's try again and elaborate in more neutral terms:
I'm willing to accept it's useful, but it's clearly not a survival skill or there would be a lot of dead people with weak social skills but otherwise reasonably successful white collar lives out there.
Very very few cog-in-the-machine can't-talk-to-people tech people that otherwise lead reasonably comfortable middle class lives in our current society die because they don't know their own facial expressions, gestures, voice, or words.
In that case, I'll readily admit I was using "survival" in the hyperbolic sense of "NYC survival skills" than the literal sense of "wilderness survival skills". I'll downgrade it to "crucially significant determiner of success" if that's easier to stomach :)
And I'll again point out that most cog-in-the-machine can't-talk-to-people tech people are successful by the standards of majority of North Americans, let alone the world :)
I never said it was the sole determiner. If you can't talk to people but you can do tech, you can do all right for yourself; if you can talk to people and you can do tech, you can write your own check.
People in tech need this most-- we're way too willing to write off the primary importance that other people have in our lives.
Like the bard said, everyone's an actor; most people are just really bad ones. Knowing how your own facial expressions, gestures, voice and words really work is a crucial survival skill in human society, and one which you are very unlikely to pick up without a little training.