The Silence Is Deafening | devonzuegel.com

They’re hurt, confused, and defensive. Instead of embracing your feedback, they see it as an attack. You worry about retaliation because now things are awkward. You wonder if you should have stayed silent… Here’s a better way:

The Power of the Perfect Pause

The quietest person at a dinner party often leaves with a reputation for brilliance, while others talk themselves into corners.

You see it in boardrooms too – the executive who tilts her head thoughtfully during presentations, somehow radiating wisdom without speaking a word. Even therapists build their practices more o... See more

It’s tempting. There is a natural desire to make our voice heard in the cacophony. When confronted with loud voices, discord, and disagreement, the reflexive (and mimetic) response is simply to get louder. To say more, and to say it more forcefully. To do more, and to do it faster. To add rather than to subtract.

I’m thinking out loud about this, but there’s something interesting about the idea that social-media platforms now create this real distance, in part by being text-heavy. And that distance can lead you to say things or do things you’d never do in the physical world. It also lowers the bar for engagement, which means that firing off a shitty tweet i... See more

When it’s just you and me, taking turns is easy: you go, I go, repeat. When it’s you and me and Nina and Marlon, who should talk next? It’s often unclear, so we all stand around waiting for someone else to take their turn or to invite us to take ours. Givers try to salvage these situations by turning them into laborious seminar discussions (“Why do... See more

Moreover, the metaphor breaks down entirely in a post-scarcity, algorithmically mediated world, where there is no obvious relationship between the opinions a person puts forth and where that opinion shows up, often in a mechanically distorted way. The marketplace of ideas assumes a relatively even distribution of megaphones, or a random distributio... See more