I’m sure you remember that old chestnut, '2 ears and 1 mouth to listen twice as much as you speak’.
This is perhaps something that develops as we get older and certainly something which I’ve noticed developing in myself as I've got and am getting older too.
At the moment on my little book shelf beside my desk in the ever changing little number of books that sit there. There are three Seth Godin books (Linchpin, Whatcha Gonna do with that Duck? And What to do When It’s Your Turn).
There is a hardback library-binding copy of Dan Pink’s ‘To Sell is Human’ (see the consultation master class) and ‘Leaders Eat Last’ by Simon Sinek.
There is also a book about Tommy Simpson, the British cycling legend who died on the ascend of Mount Ventoux where my friends and I had an extraordinary cycling adventure in 2019.
These books are of course useless unless you read them and reading the books is useless unless you listen to what you’re reading.
It turns out over the last 20 years I’ve read or listened to a lot and I’m gifted with the ability to remember much of that and so I find myself boring people in conversation with saying “have you read this or have you read that?”.
I’ll buy people books that they never read and ask them to read them and let me know what they thought and pass them on to other people and they’ll nod and say yes and then carry on.
Wherever we set our inputs (and we all have a choice as to where our inputs come from) means that we’re deciding what we’re listening to and whatever we listen to informs what we say.
And so, when we’re younger we shout as loud as we can to be heard because in actual fact we generally have less to say because we have listened less and taken on more information but as we get older we should be considered more in what we say because we should filter the information that we have gained in our life’s experience of listening to the things around us.
The concept of listening, assessing the information that you obtain and then speaking in the hope to positively influence others, is all well and good but it works on the foundation and principle that your input is solid and reasonable.
What the internet did and in particular the toxic poison of social media, was to either corrupt our minds with information that we didn’t want, need or believe in or worse, even fill our minds with information which is pure and utter garbage.
It seems that all my children want to do is show me funny videos of dogs trying to get on couches that aren’t there or people falling off roofs.
I’m all for comedy and I love it but surely it has to be interspersed with something that is at least of some value to the rest of us, against the problems that are coming down the road.
Blog Post Number - 2779
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