There’s not really a way to get around the fact that life is ultimately a game, and one that involves cooperation, competition, and more as you try to navigate towards whatever goals you set for yourself.
In this sense, it’s important to recognize which unforced errors you make and correct them to increase your expected value on what you’re interested in doing. if you’re disgusting people by oversharing your personal beliefs too soon, you should stop doing that. If when you interact with people you make them feel warm and fuzzy through little effort, and it opens doors that bring you down paths you want to go, you should continue to do so.
A lot of low hanging fruit with this approach comes down to self-awareness. If you recognize the effects that you have on others, it’s a lot easier to make incremental or experimental changes to fix or to augment things. Take the things you notice yourself doing poorly and ask yourself if you could alter them. Notice if things are getting better. If they aren’t, change your habits.
When you get deeper, it’s good to think about you’re trying to accomplish. Most of the time building relationships is better than a one-off advantage, but if you think you’re leaving an area, and you can outrun whatever disadvantages you incur as a result of reputation, you may be inclined to go in a different direction. However, notice that it becomes increasingly expensive to continually move around, as there are less desirable places to go once you’ve exhausted other places. An example where this might go the other way is when you think you’re leaving the corporate world, and you know your former employer isn’t going to keep any doors open, it might make sense to exploit the situations around you.
The other major thing to think about is expected value. In games, you want to win the most amount of points possible, and sometimes you need to prioritize. Think about what your big ticket items are, and whether the smaller stuff is distracting from what’s important.
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