The Words We Use
The words we use matter. The words we use reveal who we really are and what we really think.
We make small talk all the time with friends and strangers. How many times a day do you make small talk with strangers at the convenience store, the supermarket check out or the water cooler at work?
How many times have you asked someone how they were doing, only to hear the response “I’m hanging in there.”
How many times have you said that?
The subtext of the phrase “I’m hanging in there” is that you are being dragged along by circumstance and you are measuring success by your mere survival. That’s what you are really saying.
I was in a workplace some years ago where a coworker gave an interesting response to that question every time it was asked of him. One would ask him how he was doing, and he replied thusly: “I’m living the dream….but nightmares are dreams too.”
The first time I was taken aback by this. Then upon hearing that day in and day out, over and over, my only conclusion was that this person was miserable at work and was just going through the motions.
In those nine short words, you can inadvertently communicate what is really going on whether you mean to or not. Words matter.
Knowing that words matter, and how we use them says a lot about us, there are some trends that we as creators and entrepreneurs need to keep in mind.
The quality of public discourse is deteriorating rapidly and this is the result of a confluence of several perhaps irreversible trends: 1) the near death of teaching critical thinking skills in our educational system; 2) a failure to teach kids to lose with grace and 3) a misguided belief that everyone needs to consume social media (especially “news”) all day, every day, which has resulted in a hair trigger gut reaction to every social, political or economic story that comes out through social media without any reflection or critical thought whatsoever.
First, there is a body of writing and analysis among academics about the fact that students — especially those in undergraduate programs — make little or no improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills from the time they arrive on campus to the time they graduate. This subject is so complex, that we’ll come back to this one in a future episode and focus just on that issue.
Secondly, the trophy generation ethos is spreading upstream. When Generation X or the Baby Boomers were kids in little league and pop warner football, the team that won the league championship got a trophy. Perhaps the teams that came in second and third got smaller trophies. They were just trinkets and of no intrinsic value except that they rewarded achievement in a competitive environment.
Fast forward to today, and in almost every youth sports league across America, EVERY player on EVERY team is rewarded somehow just for showing up. Well, life and especially the business world, is not like that.
By rewarding the mere participation in an ostensibly competitive environment, we are devaluing competition, devaluing the idea that incentives to succeed should exist. In business, in the freelance world, there are people who land the job, and there is everyone else. When you audition for a role in a film against 50 other actors, one person wins and forty nine others do not.
By accepting the participation trophy model, we are not helping our kids prepare for the world. We have removed the premium on success in competition. An unintended consequence is that today’s kids are not learning how to lose gracefully.
Why is that important? Losing with grace is important because losing is a part of being a creator or an entrepreneur. Failing is part of succeeding.
Pretend for a moment that you are in your car, sitting at a red light at an intersection. Look around you. Everything that you can observe was made by a person. The car you sit in. The traffic lights. The electricity that powers the traffic lights. The shopping centers along the highway. The road surface your car is resting on. All made by people.
All of those things are the product of hundreds of failed attempts until the inventors and manufacturers got it right. The smartphone that you have in your hand or pocket did not spring into existence fully formed out of thin air. That product was the result of years of research and development. Trial and error. Experimentation and failure. Where would we be if the inventors couldn’t work through failure?
Failure, and the analysis thereof, is part of creation. Making sure our kids can fail with grace, have the presence of mind to analyze their error, and then adjust and improve their method to make things work is one of the most critical skills we can teach them.
Third and finally, social media and speed of society does not favor contemplation. As a result, contemplation must be purposeful act now more than ever.
When Twitter was being developed, the engineers determined that people make a decision whether they feel positive or negative about an issue in about 2.5 seconds, which is roughly the time it takes the average person to digest 140 characters of text. Thus, tweets were born.
You cannot evaluate an unemployment report, or economic forecast and comment on it in 2.5 seconds. Yet people do over and over. This is an urge that should be resisted. By conditioning our brains to jump to a conclusion will impact your decision making ability in other phases of your life.
Finally, resist the perceived need to stay connected online at all times. We talked about this on an earlier podcast episode about using social media with intention, and not allowing it to suck up your time. You’ll be most effective advancing your creative project, startup or nonprofit organization when you are free of distractions whether you are a musician, writer, middle manager or CEO.
Until next time, keep building the future; it’s closer than you think.
If you are more interested in learning how to be more persuasive writer or speaker, you can download my guide, The Art of Persuasion, here.
All content © 2017 Bryan Tuk, All rights reserved.
