I come from the opposite direction, where I was thinking too much. In the sense that I am quiet in most conversations, because I need to think about what to say back, and most conversations flow quite quickly, and I end up with a response well past the point it's applicable.
This is bad for two reasons:
1, if you don't say anything, the default assumption is you don't know anything, unless you have well known achievement in the field. Now your peers will eventually learn what you know, maybe even more than they do, but it takes time, and modern life is fast;
2, you don't have to be wise/correct/knowledgeable in all conversations, especially casual ones where people are just shooting the stars and will forget what was talked the next day.
The real tricky thing, the thing that distinguishes a <i>wise</i> man, is to know when to speak like a fool, and when to dive into deep thinking, and when to shut up.
if you don't say anything, the default assumption is you don't know anything
This is an US-ism. In northern Europe it is often the opposite: constant talking heads are regarded as empty and being concise is a valued skill. We're just nice to the talking heads and let them fill the air with words, but we don't regard them as better than the quiet ones.
I've often experienced that the longer the quiet persons don't say anything, the more nervous the talking heads get, until they can't restrain themselves and demands that the silent ones say what they think.
Being a immigrant (to the U.S.) I completely agree. Many people can't stop talking because of insecurity, a little of what Jason said in the article about himself.
I've observed that engineer-driven conversations are very, very fast and dynamic, whereas business and managing conversations are quite slow.
My guess is that the key here is empaty. Engineers discuss ideas, where managers usually evaluate people. Of course, ideas belong to people (at least when they're conceived), but that quickly dilutes.
In order to evaluate people, you need a lot of empaty and some time. My manager is an excellent evaluator, and his tactic is quite simple: he lets people talk. They talk, talk and talk, until they have to shut up because they said something stupid and realize that themselves. He has the ability to make people self-conscious about their own mistakes with the least effort, as he does nothing but listen.
However, when it's time for him to talk, he talks little and observes the reactions. This gives him an aura of being very, very wise, which is absolutely correct (I work in research and he's a big fish)
Sorry, I'm moving away from the article's point, let's get back to the track. Splurting and dismissing ideas is good for brainstorms, but not for regular meetings. As an engineer, this is hard to percieve, but it's true. About a year ago I started copying my manager's tactics and it has worked very well; people percieve me less of an asshole and more of a smart guy who thinks before talking.
It all comes down to the Family Guy conversation between Brian and Peter: "Peter, do you think before you talk?"
The wisest people I have ever known spoke very little however they always asked great questions that cut through the crap once they had all of the facts.
Ideas, seem to rather exist within people, but saying they belong to people, isn't quite as obvious. This of course, strengthens the rest of your point.
At my previous job I had this problem. It was intensified by, what I perceived to be, conversation that was more flawed than accurate. I heard so many statements I couldn't agree with, I didn't know where to start commenting on anything. In other worlds, the whole idea or conversation that was being discussed was wrong. Very often I had nothing to say, because how do you tell a team of co-workers that everything they're saying is wrong?
Of course, many would assume I was more likely to be wrong, disagreeing with so many people. I worked in a very stale industry however, no where near as pioneering or cutting edge as some dream jobs in the valley: some would say legacy, enterprise software. So I beg to differ the opposite is possible also. Also, I worked there for years, knowing most colleagues would do anything just to coast, I had far more than 5 minutes to give the processes consideration.
Regardless, what I learned is, if everything in the conversation sounds wrong, and the appropriate "5 minutes" have been given, perhaps you are participating in bad conversations / keeping bad company. Switching jobs is the best thing that could have happened to me in order to improve my expertise.
> "Sometimes you just have to let people fail. It's quicker than opposing them."
This can be incredibly annoying if you're on the other side, though. One of the most effective ways of killing a project can be to support it publicly but then do nothing at all to move it forward. Anything at all to avoid having a difficult conversation.
> "Sometimes you just have to let people fail. It's quicker than opposing them."
Yes, that seems to be the case more often than not… As a consultant I see it almost as a guarantee for success in projects that come after/are replacing failed ones. I think it’s all about ego at the end of the day… people have to have their say and pursue it even if they’re not experts in the field (while they certainly think they are experts - hence the ego thing). I wonder - how can this thinking be undone?
I think the assumption there is that if we do everything right we will always succeed. I am not sure that is the case. I would say that failure (and success) both give one an opportunity to analyse what was done well and what was done poorly.
In my circle of friends I'm known alternately as smart and slow, for basically this reason. I get embarrassed by wanting to add something to a conversation and hearing "we moved on from that over a minute ago; keep up!" (to which I feel like replying, "we just barely got into it").
This reminds me of And the Rock Cried Out, a short story by Ray Bradbury. The story revolves around two American tourists who are in South America when the US and much of Europe is wiped out by nuclear attacks during the Cold War. With the US in rubble, everyone is out to get the tourists as payback for all of the terrible things America has done in the past.
Anyway, they eventually meet a man named Garcia who offers them help. They're shocked, since everyone else wants them dead. Garcia explains:
Do you read the papers? Of course, you do. But do you read them as I read them? I rather doubt that you have come upon my system. No, it was not exactly myself that came upon it; the system was forced upon me. But now I know what a clever thing it has turned out to be. I always get the newspapers a week late, from the Capital. And this circumstance makes for a man being a clear-thinking man. You are very careful with your thinking when you pick up a week-old paper.
I like that. I may use it next time someone hassles me for reading week(s)-old newspapers.
I've always maintained that it gives the news a chance to mature, so it becomes a lot easier to separate the filling from the meat, but the flip side means missing out on the leading edge (forecasts of storms / shortages) that may prove to be very important.
I frequently fall victim to this and I've gone through considerable effort not to.
One example: at my previous job, our ecommerce site had individual templates for each product. We only had around 20 products, but I came from a job where you might have thousands of products, so a single template was used. I just couldn't wrap my head around why you would have individual templates for each product.
The pages were mostly static (aside from a header and footer, and the pricing), and they took quite a while to make.
Then I realized that because we had so few products, we could really customize and market each page to highlight the features of each product. I went on to build a personal site with only a handful of products the same way as well.
Like Jason said, spending that extra time (even if it isn't literally 5 minutes) can really change your perception of something.
This realization occured to me about a year ago, and when it came to me, everything was so clear. I had been an asshole in too many meetings because of wanting to speak first. My manager, on the other hand, was a very quiet, enigmatic guy, and he seemed wise.
While the engineers discussed some ideas, he listened. By listening, he was able to detect who was full of B.S. and who was has the best ideas. In the end, when he finally broke his silence, he was usually right.
Silence is very, very powerful, and it's never too late to learn to shut up
I have found this approach to be quite useful with my co-workers, friends and even my spouse.
Sometimes I hear an idea and my initial reaction is "No," when what is really going on inside me is "Let me mull it over." The trick for me is to not open my mouth too soon before I've truly given the idea a chance to breathe a little.
I feel you, I also have this little voice that shouts "NO!" inside my head during meetings. But I've learned to say "I don't see it that way, but it's a good idea, let me think on that, please", which has won me a lot of respect.
Even if my final answer is negative, the fact that I took some time to consider it is perceived as very positive by coworkers and managers.
There's another tactic too... one I use frequently for better or worse.
So I see someone who says something I don't entirely agree with but I want to see where they are coming from. I start arguing with them, asking the harder questions, pointing out things I see as problems, not to push back or prove that I am right, but to prove the merit of their ideas. Sometimes I will say something to indicate why I am doing it, but for people who know me, I usually skip that part.
The goal is then to argue, hash things out, force people to defend their ideas, and then what's left after that session can be assumed to be better than any of us could have come up with otherwise and we go forward on it.
However, there are two secrets to making this work:
1) You have to be known for actually using the ideas that are effectively defended. People need to know it's not personal and that it is both professional and empowering to them. If I argue with your idea, it is because I see potential value in it but I want to make sure it doesn't easily collapse. In some cases I will offer to stand aside remaining objections or in some cases, I will endorse the idea.
2) You have to be open to (and appreciate) everyone else doing the same to you. The point here is that it is a vetting process, and my ideas can be challenged just like everyone else's. In fact if you challenge my ideas, that's again a sign of respect. If you didn't value the ideas, you'd probably ignore them or (if they go against your stakes in the project) argue instead that they are dangerous or problematic.
Being argumentative, like being defiant, is a powerful tool, used right. It just takes some time and effort to make sure that it is used right instead of being used in a way that is destructive.
So this is the "trial-by-fire" approach. I inadvertently use it a lot as well. I'm trying to soften the approach however.
However, you can also wrap that in a friendly approach as youlost_thegame mentions - simply acknowledge the potential of the idea first (ie, positive energy) then go in with the tough questions.
I find even with friends and close colleagues, if I stick to the "nice first, then difficult questions combined with enthusiasm", I can often critique the idea while making the entire conversation positive. Often the faulty idea gets discarded by it's owner after consideration.
Yes, and there's one more thing. Instead of making the other person responsible for your lack of understanding, which we all have done at some point, it's better to let them know that you don't understand their approach and let them explain better. Actually about half of the times their idea might be good, but they don't know how to explain it or maybe you can't grasp the whole thing because of a lack of context.
You know, explaining an idea to somebody, from scratch, it's the better way to develop it. If it's stupid they will realize. If it's good they'll get enthusiastic.
In a previous comment I mentioned that this is the tactic that my manager uses, and it works wonderfully: let people talk from the beginning and ask questions later.
Of course, if you end up disagreeing, even though if their idea is good, they'll like that you let them explain and took time to consider
It's not that I disagree with you in all contexts. In many cases, the explain-from-scratch is a great way to learn something new, or at least get a foothold for further discussions. However I see it as not very useful where I prefer the trial-by-fire approach, namely in decision making in deliberative environments.
Part of the use case of a "trial by fire" approach is that the idea is to come up with a better approach than any one of us could ideally. One isn't interested in trying to use their idea as-is, nor in simply disregarding it, but in probing, understanding, and adapting it to the case at hand.
That means arguing about it in detail. Explaining from scratch may be a necessary prelude but it doesn't help really with the final deliberative process. The key is to ensure that everyone knows that these are good-natured and that most people will shape the outcome even if their ideas are not adopted wholesale.
The goal is to have an argument where everyone collectively wins, and where each reasonable participant (meaning, most of the time, every individual participant) individually wins as well, in the sense of having their concerns incorporated into the final view.
Yeah. Basically you can divide people into two groups:
1) Those who know what's going on and treat it as a sign of respect.
2) Those who don't and where you have to show externally that there is respect involved.
For the first group, getting into an argument on technical merits doesn't have to involve a whole lot of pleasantries. It's largely informal. I try to save this for groups I am a long-standing member of.
For the second group, you are right, a softer approach is necessary.
I have to remember this with co-workers as well, but from the opposite perspective. It's a variation of the idea that "the confused mind always says no." I've learned that when people take the time to process the idea they will be able to give a more reasonable response, so I'm now more patient with the initial "no" response.
In fact, I have one colleague who immediately says "no" to every one of my ideas before almost exactly one month later saying yes emphatically (and then going on to claim it as his own idea all along). It's uncanny - I have worked with him so long now that I can almost time it to the day when he will agree with my idea and claim it as his own idea all along. It used to really bother me, but not anymore - as long we get things done I don't care who "owns" the idea.
>I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.
I'm just future-fantasizing here but ...
Wouldn't it be a ripe topic of neurochemical study to find out what happens in a brain that decides that ego stroking is more important than learning through constructive conversation?
I suspect that "deciding to learn" requires a significantly higher activation energy than simply choosing to prove "I'm right".
> Learning to think first rather than react quick is a life long pursuit. It’s tough.
I must admit I stopped reading about here. I don't think I'm among the intended audience for this post. It personally takes quite something for me to stand up and criticize someone's work. I certainly couldn't do it within five minutes - I need to soak an idea up first.
I often explain to people that I'm a slow thinker. I actually don't know if it's that, or that I just have a higher threshold of thought before I have confidence to speak about something. That usually means I'll be the last to speak on a subject, but I'd hope that my contributions when I do speak are then at least a little more considered than those who spoke first. That's what I'd like to think, anyhow.
Interesting. I read this as saying "have some respect for those brave enough to present a novel idea for consideration" which I think we would all agree with. How we do that is always a function of our personalities and consequently of our personality disorders of which we should be mindful. However, good ideas need to be tested and must therefore survive robust discussion.
I'm an ENTP/ENFP on Myers-Briggs personality tests and thus I do tend to get very enthusiastic about ideas, bombard people with questions and point out any issues I observe. This is just how I learn but can be annoying for people unless they know me so I try temper my behaviour. I'm from England where the workplace can still be a little more reserved.
"Seek first to understand, then to be understood." - Habit 5 of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People[1].
Trusted, influential and successful communicators are trained to engage with people this way. It's less about "thinking" before you speak, than what the intentions are behind your interactions with others... are you seeking first to understand or to be understood? Everyone wants to be understood, and when you consistently give them that, you get much more in return.
Another case of common sense being not all that common. If you're like me, then you too need to make this a conscious pursuit.
This relates quite closely to the idea of thinking "fast" and "slow" as proposed by Daniel Kahneman. Here is an interview from the other night: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12185
The basic idea is that our brains have two methods of thinking, first on intuition, like when we are driving a car. Natural reactions based on intuition are very powerful, but the flip side is that they are often wrong and we won't realize we are making a mistake. That takes going into the second mode of thought, thinking "slow". It is important to realize when to step back from the intuition of fast thinking to the rationality of slow thinking.
This is really difficult sometimes. I wholeheartedly agree with Jason about giving new ideas some time (and thought). Most people are resistant to change and their immediate reaction is to reject new and/or novel ideas. Some ideas take days of rumination before you fully grasp the implications so you just have to take the time to let them sink-in.
That's solid advice. AND it JUST happened to me. Another entrepreneur with ZERO credibility in the space that I'm operating in flat out told me that another company is ALWAYS going to deliver a feature better than we are. My knee-jerk thought was "Who do you think you are? Jeff Bezos?" I disagreed and later said I would think about options.
I should get into the habit of stepping back and absorbing what just happened or what was just said. Although I still disagree with the delivery of the message, I do see some insightful gems from the casual conversation. And you always have to have thick skin in the startup game. Nay-sayers are everywhere but there is wisdom all around you. You always need to listen for it.
This advice reminds me of "The Soak". Here's an excerpt:
Back to the original flame mail from your friend. You’ve received these before and you know the absolute wrong thing to do is immediately respond. Of course, your animal brain is dying to do so because IT FEELS SO GOOD TO PUNCH BACK, but it’s never the right move because your animal brain is defending itself, it’s not resolving anything other than proving BOY CAN I PUNCH BACK OR WHAT? My advice regarding flame-o-grams and hard decisions is the same. Sleep on it.
I think this is a pretty simple but important little piece of advice. I am certainly guilty of speaking before thinking a lot of times.
In the day of 140 characters, blogs and a steady stream of self-anointed 'expert' bloggers and media pundits, you don't get too many examples of the eloquent thinker.
I'm glad I came across this post, as it applies to my actions, in professional and certainly in private life. Thanks again Jason!
Imagine an environment where you did TWO things:
1) You gave your opinion immediately without fear for others thinking of you as an asshole.
2) You thought about it for more than 5 minutes later. You might even think about it for hours later that night.
It's not one or the other. Both are very important. I've seen more annoying and bureaucratic things happen because people are too afraid to say what they think. Not because people think too less.
It’s great advice. When somebody is talking, people are very rarely listening. They’re waiting to speak or preparing their next argument. By doing that, you don’t hear what the other person is saying and more often than not misinterpret what they are saying.
It’s a skill I’m still learning and it’s a combination of patience, humility (I’m not always right) and a desire to learn (other people will know more and have better ideas than me).
As recounted in Carnegie's classic book: When General Meade squandered a great opportunity to capture General Lee and his army after the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln wrote a harsh letter to Meade. The letter was found after Lincoln's death, still in his desk drawer, never sent.
If I get a negative remark, I usually take a step back, kind of like a out of body view, and see if there is any validity, if there is truth in the remark, I thank the person and ask questions; else I just smile.
Some people mistake a smile for agreement and I use smile to put a full stop to the argument. In my limited experience I have seen there is no point winning a pointless argument :)
I absolutely agree with you. I try to avoid fighting about some stuff, especially if I have the feeling that the responsible to implement some feature is going to do whatever he wants anyway.
Great stuff. I dont blog, but I want to. I recently came to the conclusion that I don't think about things enough, I dont form an opinion.
I read a lot of stuff and wonder how the author came up with what they wrote or how they managed to piece two points together that otherwise would have seemed unrelated. The answer is as simple as they gave it five minutes.
I think 5 minutes is too little time when you've taken offense to something. A day is usually the right amount. For idea consideration, I think 5 minutes may not be enough for some and may be too much for others.
At the same time, the world is full of ideas, and a pretty tiny fraction of them are any good. The world feels especially full of ideas these days, since a lot of folks now fancy themselves "creatives" (that is, people who come up with ideas without having to get into the yucky business of actually executing on them).
Here's the real challenge: What deserves your five minutes in the first place? Many intellectually bankrupt ideas benefit from the notion that both sides of an argument should be considered. This is partially why we have dumb ideas like "intelligent design" floating around -- they get their oxygen from the mistaken notion that both sides should be considered, when in truth the issue is much more one-sided, or should be. Because ideas have power, there is an incentive to pitch such ideas and to persuade others with them, however hollow they may be on examination. There is value in talking about "clean coal", even though no such thing actually exists in the world.
You can't waste five minutes of your life every time someone says their ideas at you. So, what do you do? I suppose my approach is to try to develop a filter, to try to focus on things that are actually worth thinking about. But honing that filter is a challenge in itself, trying to keep oneself intellectually honest, trying not to indulge in parochialism. This is a tough subject, there are no easy answers.
"A pretty tiny fraction of them are any good"? I really don't agree. Most every idea is pretty good, at least in a couple of circumstances. Most every idea also has very serious flaws. But that does not mean the idea is worthless. I guess the most obvious example is democracy; it has some very serious flaws, but it's the best we've got. Usually, the same can be said for any popular political philosophy; good, but with some serious flaws.
Also, in the vast majority of cases, both sides of the argument should be concidered. Sure ID should be dead by now, but the first time it was proposed it very definatly should have had both sides heard. Look at when evolution was first proposed as an idea. Had both sides not been heard on that idea, had it not been given it's 5 minutes, we would live in a very different world. Of course this is an example that will make many people wince, as I am comparing an evidence backed theory with pure religious dogma, but I fail to see the difference. If religious based dogma cannot be successfully argued against, then maybe some more research should be done to counter it. But until a rational/scientific argument can be formed against it, I see no reason why it should not receive its 5 minutes.
I disagree with you. Every time you deny an idea 5 minutes, or the time it takes to form a convincing argument against it, you are presuming guilt. It's standard that we put the burden of proof on the person proposing the idea, but just recently I've been trying to put the burden of proof on myself. If I cannot form or find a convincing argument to counter the idea, then what reason do I have not to accept it? Or if not accept it, at least give it a space in the great library of valid ideas. Maybe "giving the idea 5 minutes" is a bad way to look at it, but coming up with a purely rational/scientific basis for the dismissal or acceptance of any idea is a very good exercise.
To be fair, your "floating around idea" example has been "floating around" for quite some time.
You destroy the value of the article by bringing up a topic people fight wars over.
And I don't agree that thinking about anything is ever a waste of time, even if it is in fact a stupid idea. A waste of time is vegging out in front of a TV.
I think this 5 minutes applies to a lot more than just right or wrong. Intelligent design isn't an engineering decision you are talking about, it's politics. If you take the 5 minutes to think about why people believe what they do, you can learn a lot about the mindset of a large group of people on this planet. This might end up being a lot more important than proving intelligent design is wrong. There are lots of ways to spend your 5 minutes.
It's funny that you've responded to a post about not giving a knee-jerk reaction with the most obvious knee-jerk reaction.
Did you actually read the OP and think about what it was saying? Are there any lessons that you could apply to your life? It wasn't meant to be a sweeping generality - it was meant to convey a sense, a feeling, an intuition. Namely, the idea that you (yes even you) might not be thinking things out carefully enough before responding to them.
For instance, take your idea of the reason for intelligent design. Are you 100% positive that this is actually where the idea comes from, why it persists? The anthropologist in me disagrees. In fact, I'd say that such ideas actually get carried along because no one stops to think about them...even for 5 minutes.
Another idea is to deliberately practice the skill of discarding opinions you've previously expressed, and cultivate a social circle where this doesn't cause you to lose status:
Six days ago, during the last HN cycle of 37signals blog/marketing, I said that I thought they were desperate to prove that their path was so awesome because there was tension about not getting acquired and not really working on anything world-changing (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3629729). I think this post of introspection from 37S supports my point. It confirms that all the other 37 Signals stuff was part of their program of constantly churning out contrarian pablum because it's good marketing, because people (young men usually) like to do that and because they have this uncertainty about them which needs to be masked with an aggressive stance.
Whatever the past reasons for posting I welcome this blog, if it's genuine, because it might be the first signal of a change from the usual blogspam from 37 signals that magically makes it's way to the HN front-page on a regular basis.
I think you're looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Sure this blog is marketing. All blogs serve at least a partial marketing purpose, whether they be from individual software developers, small businesses, big companies, or nonprofits. The difference is that "good blogs" are ones where I can extract value from the post. Signal vs Noise is one of these blogs.
I don't understand your complaint at it's core. Are you upset that multimillionaires are sharing their key decision points, advice, and retrospectives in exchange for promotion? Most people charge for such disclosure, and highly so[0]. We're lucky that the culture and technology of the web has torn down this glass ceiling access to insight.
Just look at the forum we're discussing this in -- new.ycombinator.com -- if you're anti marketing, you may not want to raise issue within a forum owned and run by an extremely active investment fund
But they don't share anything of worth to my mind. I like most HN links that make the front page but I've yet to find a 37 Signals post that's really anything but smoke and mirrors designed to indirectly praise themselves. Someone made that same smoke and mirrors criticism of PG's essays a while back and I think that's false, he puts work into his "blog" and it's interesting. More than that he gets other people to read it and give feedback before he publishes. The quality of the 37 Signals stuff is just incredibly low and it only makes the font page for "hip" reasons.
There is a foolproof solution to this. It doesn't even require any time or effort on your part. It's this: Don't click on the link.
Just don't click it.
I'm not even going to speculate why you are so worked up over the fact that other people find value in something you don't. We get it. You don't like what they write. Just don't read it. Problem solved. Ask yourself if this is really worth any more of your time or emotional investment.
This is bad for two reasons: 1, if you don't say anything, the default assumption is you don't know anything, unless you have well known achievement in the field. Now your peers will eventually learn what you know, maybe even more than they do, but it takes time, and modern life is fast;
2, you don't have to be wise/correct/knowledgeable in all conversations, especially casual ones where people are just shooting the stars and will forget what was talked the next day.
The real tricky thing, the thing that distinguishes a <i>wise</i> man, is to know when to speak like a fool, and when to dive into deep thinking, and when to shut up.