I agree. You know how so many diets fail because it relies on people having strong willpower? Ideally, if your eating habits are a long term threat to your health, you should be able to summon enough willpower to correct that. And ideally, people should distrust appearances, and take their time discovering people's internal qualities, and arrive at their judgments that way.
But that's just not the way most people (including ourselves) are most of the time. And if we want to be successful, to have a real positive impacts in the world (e.g. design a diet that most people can follow), we always need to take that human imperfection into account. In fact we should try to use that to our advantage whenever possible. There are times when moral victory is more important than real victory, but this issue about appearances does not need to be elevated to that level.
The other issue is not trying to have things both ways. If we decide here despite how the world is, we want to assert our individuality with no compromise, and we are less successful as a result, then we should be able to view the situation with calmness and say "those are my priorities, those are the choices I made based on those priorities, these are the results, which I expected. And I am fine with that".
And to those of us who insist on dressing as casually as we want: in our personal lives, what do we do when we're on a data with someone we really want to impress, still Hawaiian shirts, or something nicer? Why would that be different in our professional life?
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I agree. You know how so many diets fail because it relies on people having strong willpower? Ideally, if your eating habits are a long term threat to your health, you should be able to summon enough willpower to correct that. And ideally, people should distrust appearances, and take their time discovering people's internal qualities, and arrive at their judgments that way.
But that's just not the way most people (including ourselves) are most of the time. And if we want to be successful, to have a real positive impacts in the world (e.g. design a diet that most people can follow), we always need to take that human imperfection into account. In fact we should try to use that to our advantage whenever possible. There are times when moral victory is more important than real victory, but this issue about appearances does not need to be elevated to that level.
The other issue is not trying to have things both ways. If we decide here despite how the world is, we want to assert our individuality with no compromise, and we are less successful as a result, then we should be able to view the situation with calmness and say "those are my priorities, those are the choices I made based on those priorities, these are the results, which I expected. And I am fine with that".
And to those of us who insist on dressing as casually as we want: in our personal lives, what do we do when we're on a data with someone we really want to impress, still Hawaiian shirts, or something nicer? Why would that be different in our professional life?