Thanks to my previous employer, I actually went a step further and took a Dale Carnegie class called Effective Communications & Human Relations / Skills for Success Course. I think it was $1600 or so a couple years ago. My manager thought that I was doing a good job but that I was not particularly nice to people, which was accurate. So, thankfully, he paid for me to take the course and, as far as I can tell, it had a strong influence on me in a positive way.
The course was geared towards professionals of all flavors--engineers, salesman, executives, etc. And, while they teach technical-ish stuff about remembering names, giving presentations and the like, the essential elements of the course were positivity and high energy. The primary instructors never said a single negative thing and they never let their high energy levels dip. The classes were each three hours and held on like Tuesdays after work. So they were charged with keeping 40-50 people who just finished a full day of work interested. They succeeded each night. It was quite an accomplishment. They were probably the friendliest people I've ever met.
As for me, while I was never particular friendly, I've always had a knack for public speaking. Not only do I not get nerves when speaking to a group, but I feel energized by it. IIRC, every class each student had to speak to a small group and then most of the time we all had to speak to everyone. I did very well and won a couple awards including the highest achievement award, which all my fellow students voted on. I was pretty surprised to win that but it was cool. The experience instilled in me a lot of confidence. So much so that I eventually switched careers to sales.
My favorite memory of the course occurred the night that we each had to get up in succession and give a 3 minute speech on something or other. I was to go about half way through. There was a stage in the room that everyone so far had stood on while giving their speeches. I thought standing on the stage was too impersonal, as the stage was set back and not very well lit. Ever the contrarian, I stood in front of the stage and gave my speech when it was my turn. Everyone after me stood in front of the stage.
I took part in a recent discussion in the current Open Thread about how instrumental rationality is under-emphasized on this website. I've heard other people say similar things, and I am inclined to agree. Someone suggested that there should be a "Instrumental Rationality Books" thread, similar to the "best textbooks on every subject" thread. I thought this sounded like a good idea.
The title is "resources" because in addition to books, you can post self-help websites, online videos, whatever.
The decorum for this thread will be as follows:
I think depending on how this thread goes, in a few days I might make a meta post on this subject in an attempt to inspire discussion on how the LessWrong community can work together to attempt to reach some sort of a consensus on what the best instrumental rationality methods and resources might be. lukeprog has already done great work in his The Science of Winning at Life sequence, but his reviews are uber-conservative and only mention resources with lots of scientific and academic backing. I think this leaves out a lot of really good stuff, and I think that we should be able to draw distinctions between stuff that isn't necessarily drawing on science but is reasonable, rational, and helps a lot of people, and The Secret.
But I thought we should get the ball rolling a little before we have that conversation. In the meantime, if you have a meta comment, you can just go ahead and post it as a reply to the top-level post.