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Creutzer comments on How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre - Less Wrong
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The egoistic perspective on people as a resource-to-be-developed doesn't help at all, because it's not what I understand by "genuinely caring about other people's success". It also breaks the analogy with the case of children, because the potential that parents and educators see in children is (hopefully) not the potential to be a useful resource for them later on.
I think we're looking at a huge inferential distance between us due to a difference in life situation and probably personality...
If you understand the concept that other people have value, then it sounds like your primary issue is just with the semantic meaning behind "genuinely caring about other people's success". Which is fine, it's an overly complex idea to try to distill into a single sentence and I would expect there to be a fair amount of clarification needed.
But to be clear, it's a semantic disagreement rather than one about the underlying meaning. If I had to be less succinct with my explanation I'd say: "Being confident enough in one's own self-improvement processes that one expects more incremental value in dedicating unallocated time to other people's success than one's own." If you have a disagreement with that, I'd much rather discuss that than semantics.
(The reason I chose one phrasing over the other is that, "I care more about your success than my own" sounds a lot more palatable to the person I'm helping out than, "I expect to see more value if I spend this time helping you than if I spend this time helping me.")
Of course it sounds more palatable to other people, but actually it's a completely different attitude from the one you're actually taking! You're just viewing other people's success as a means to what is eventually your own success after all. This is not at all the bizarre universal love and self-abnegation that the initial post suggested to me.
I also suspect you might be in a relatively atypical life situation if you manage to leverage this business-like perspective into universal social skills because you can just apply it to practically everyone you meet. But then it might be my own situation that's more atypical. (It's also not clear how "spending time helping you" translates into felicitous interaction - most people I meet don't need and couldn't use my help; but I'm not asking you to explain because I don't think I can use your approach anyway.)
There's a pretty noticeable difference between someone doing something for their own sake and someone doing something for the sake of another. Compare two pretty universal experiences: "Talking to someone who is only interacting with you because they want something" and "Being the recipient of a no-strings-attached favor".
This attitude is universal; it's not specific to business. Everyone has wants and goals, not just business people. What you imagine my life situation to be isn't really very relevant. Unless you live in a solitary confinement, this is applicable to you.