I once worked for a company where several groups were VERY vocal about their complaints about each other. It seemed like bitching about the other team(s) was part of the job. Lots of walls built here and there between teams.
I kept quiet. I decided bitching was too tiresome / nobody was getting anything done, nobody was getting better by having complainants flung at them.
After I established relationships with various folks across the groups, I had folks from every team come to me / were available to me in ways they never would for each other.
My job was 2x easier as far as getting help / information / cooperation compared to the folks complaining non stop.
There were groups I agreed with / disagreed with (one group was straight wrong about nearly everything), but throwing a fit just made for worse relationships.
I still made suggestions to folks whose job it was to manage these groups, politely, gently, often quietly, but if they did or did not fix it / repeating myself wasn't a big focus for me.
I've long since given up on right and wrong (well outside real moral issues) and more about how to get to the end as best as possible with the relationships / people available.
I call this employing tactical empathy and it is the single most important soft skill I learned. It's the only, only effective way to do cross-team coordination, arguably all the way up to C-level to C-level.
Assuming we're using a shared definition of polite, I disagree!
> having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people.
You can be polite while not facilitating the counterparty in a way that's useful to you but in the short term feels like you're giving up something. People often can't get past that temporary feeling of losing so they don't venture into it.
Was being a bit tongue in cheek, but yes, it depends on your definition of politeness. I’d argue that being genuinely polite, ie being genuinely respectful and considerate, involves the kind of self sacrifice you’re describing. But I also agree that when most people imagine politeness, they imagine what I’d call “superficial politeness”, not “genuine politeness”
I only recently discovered something that is probably obvious to most other people: someone’s immediate verbal reaction to a message is often different than their long-term behavioural response to it.
“Your team isn’t pulling their weight”
The immediate reaction might be “Yes of course we are, how dare you!”
Now you have two options. It sounds like they have rejected your premise. Do you double down and try to force a verbal capitulation? “No, you are all really doing nothing!”
Or do you leave the seed you have planted: “Oh, alright then, good to hear it.”
The second option works way better. What they said in their immediate reaction is not predictive of the longer-term response. The longer term reaction might be that the team quietly increases their performance. If you went the confrontational approach, you would have ruled that out.
> right and wrong (well outside real moral issues)
Even moral issues don't have objective right and wrong. The idea that there are base moral facts is ridiculous, and without fully understanding each others priors arguments about ethics are rarely productive.
Familiar story. Worse when the group that's wrong on nearly everything gets a cozy position from people in charge, where they can get by with minimum effort.
This is why people like Queen Elizabeth (specifically, not the rest of the royal family) are widely held in such high regard. She rarely makes any comments about anything that could be discerned as political, and as a result she has stayed largely neutral. Even people like my dad, who is highly conservative and vocally dislikes all celbrities, still thinks she's a saint. I'm not convinced—she keeps her mouth shut because she's done for if she makes a fuss about anything.
I generally agree, though I don't think the "saintliness" even matters. The queen as seen by the public is probably a persona, sure, but so long as the persona stays put, she's a symbol of stability, and that is the whole point of the monarchy.
This even shows up in tech - Bill Gates isn't exactly known for widespread political opinions, and while we all know he was probably not a great person early on, he's now generally contributing to universally approved causes, and otherwise just there, so to some extent he's a symbol of the possibilities available through tech.
Meanwhile, you've got Elon, who I think would be reasonably similar - if he could stay the hell off Twitter and stop overpromising so goddamn often. He could have ended up as a symbol for the commercial space revolution and the surge of EV popularity, but instead he's polarising and often hated.
Generally, polarisation isn't great for authority figures. Even in politics this is sort of true - relatively centrist parties often have broader appeal than extreme views. (Though because politicians are our means of changing things, there's also an aversion to politicians with no opinions at all.)
>he was probably not a great person early on, he's now generally contributing to universally approved causes, and otherwise just there, so to some extent he's a symbol of the possibilities available through tech.
You probably haven't been following Gates lately. His reputation has tarnished in the last couple of years.
There are people who are adamant Bill Gates is trying to depopulate the Earth through COVID-19 or something. They're wrong, but people do believe that.
I don't really like this quote. Lots of smart people often explain that they ask "stupid" questions and that it's important to get over your shame of being stupid. Questions change you from having a passive role to an active role in understanding. Maybe making the difference between "questions" and "commentary" would be a useful start?
Personally, I always read it as "advice" rather than as an insult. Unfortunately, can't seem to find much context for that quote so it's hard to determine what was intended.
The advice has been written and uttered in various forms for millennia.
> If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).
Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications.
> But I read the quote as essentially saying: "You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".
How many of your personal experiences are you reading into a context-free aphorism of the ages? Friendly suggestion: you may be making this same mistake when interpreting words in other situations.
"Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications."
What meanings or implications does the aphorism have other than "some people (fools in this case) shouldn't ever talk?"
We've established you think I've misinterpreted the aphorism and that you suspect there's something socially off with me, but we haven't established what you think the aphorism means. Go on, educate me.
Definitely, these two things are about two different kinds of statement though. One which directly affects you, where voicing will dramatically improve your situation. The second type of statement is where you discuss something as a hobby, which might not affect you or your close ones, and where you are under informed, and have little to gain personally, while running the full risk of offending someone.
There's a reason why "...and the wisdom to know the difference" is the end of the serenity prayer.
In the end it's the crux of the whole thing. Is [X terrible thing] something that's like the weather, something that it's useless to yell at? Or is it something like climate change, also nearly useless to yell at, but with enough fighting and unity we could actually make a difference? And the answer for any really difficult question is going to be an hard one, no pithy saying will tell it to you.
(Though, agreed, far too much shouting is of the irrelevant, angry, useless kind.)
When I was young someone told me something similar (but not exactly the same) - "imagine you have a zip on your mouth and you have to unzip it before speaking". The point was not the zip, but to take the time to think before speaking rather than just saying the first thing that pops into your head.
Social media not only removes that moment of reflection, but it actually spreads explosive verbal diarrhoea. The commercial platforms are incentivised to encourage conflict and divisiveness because it drives traffic therefore profits. If everyone was encouraged to be nice and friendly on social media, people wouldn't spend as much time on it, so less eyeballs on ads and less profit.
I don't think that is the complete picture though. Having spent some time on alternative platforms that don't have the profit motive, I have noticed there is still a tendency for many people to be slightly outrageous, presumably simply because it attracts more engagement, and those sort of people like the attention. Say something sensible and you're not going to get loads of people replying "I agree", so after spending a lot of time writing sensible comments you end up wondering if anyone has actually even read them and you start to think - what's the point?
I wonder how (or even whether) you could design a platform that encourages sensible and penalises outrage.
Most online discussions regarding divisive political topics are unwinnable (mind made up, bad faith discussion) and more importantly...inconsequential.
I think there's a lesson to be learned from this wisdom, but putting yourself out there, making mistakes, and learning from those mistakes is invaluable.
I would rather reveal my ignorance or say the occasional dumb thing than remain bogged down by my own ignorance or stupidity because I adhere to some proverbs about silence that I read on the internet. Making those mistakes is how I grow.
Not really. Anyone can open their mouth. The challenge of "moving up the ladder" is in leveraging your resources (which might include your voice) to provide value to people who can help you. Most of these value exchanges do not happen on Twitter or even in public. Besides, how do you even quantify the series of events that leads someone to (for example) an Ivy League university, a job at McKinsey, a private equity firm, and eventually the top echelon of a company? There is a lot more to this than "opening your mouth" – in fact, "closing your mouth" is probably a better representation of the soft skills required for corporate success than "opening" it.
I bet if you tallied the executives of F500 companies, you would find a vast majority of them do not have a blog, or even a Twitter. And of those that do, you'd find most of them using it as an explicit asset (e.g. a VC tweeting for "thought leadership" that increases dealflow, a CSO building an audience to sell to, etc.). You will not find many of them tweeting personal political opinions, certainly none outside of the orthodoxy.
IMO, it's a miscalculation even to post thoughts aligned with the orthodoxy — you don't know how the environment will change. Five years from now, maybe we'll be cancelling all the people doing the cancelling today.
How do you think recruiters will find you if you dont self promote. How do you think you will compete with others in the same org when you dont talk about your achievements. Even best products and services needs great marketing to suceed. When you can talk about F500 executives, you should know that the auto company valued most in the world is run by a twitter troll thriving on attention and promotion.
What you talk about is what I would prefer the world to be, but the reality is everything depends on marketing and especially marketing in social media.
Words my Dad taught me as I was growing up, but only really sank in the last 5 or so years ago.