Dave Winer is at it again, throwing down with Tim O’Reilly. I’m not even going to bother quoting or linking to the specific posts in question — you can go to Winer site above and search on O’Reilly to follow the sordid tale.
To sum it up, Winer always tends to make outlandish accusations very publicly and then gets upset when people point out that he’s acting rudely. In the latest blowup Winer was actually angry at O’Reilly for posting a very public explanation of why he didn’t invite Winer to participate in a Peer-To-Peer conference, saying essentially that Winer is too disruptive.
And why, you’re asking yourself, should I care? Because it’s a great illustration of how you can have the greatest product in the world and still get yourself into a lot of trouble unless you have rudimentary people skills. Winer has written incredible programs, but he tends to alienate folks and burn a lot of bridges with people who should be his strongest supporters. It’s almost like he’s intent on sabotaging himself.
One of the most difficult things in the world for most people to do is to accept criticism without it eating at their self-respect or self-esteem, especially if the person receiving the criticism thinks that it is unfair. Winer doesn’t seem to have learned how to do that, and moreover like many people he compounds the problem by regularly dishing out unfair criticism (such as his bizarre suggestion that O’Reilly backstabbed him over RSS), which inevitably provokes tons of fair and unfair criticism in return.
It amazes me that after all those years we spent as kids singing silly “Sticks and Stones” rhymes that people still freak out because of comments made by others. Seth Dillingham mentions a common situation where relatives in an extended family say one thing or another about each other and then those things tend to snowball.
I have a similar experience both in that most of the people in my extended family really don’t understand pretty much every decision my wife and I have made and a lot of it comes back to us through the grapevine, but who cares? The bottom line is that if you are secure in who you are and know where you want to go with your life, what somebody else thinks is a minor annoyance at worst.
The key in dealing with other people, from my experience, is to become good at distinguishing between unreasonable requests and opinions, which can be safely dismissed and ignored, and between reasonable suggestions and views which are worth listening to and considering even if you do ultimately go your own way.