Image via Wikipedia
Recently, I was working with someone. We had a goal to complete by the upcoming Monday. On the Wednesday of the preceding week, we had things pretty well put together, and I asked, “What do we need to do in order to get this wrapped up?” I essentially asked this twice. Both times I got answers that summed up to “oh, don’t worry about it.”
We did not complete the objective.
~
My Dell desktop was crashing with authority. I couldn’t figure out the issue and thought it might be a hardware problem, so I decided to call Dell customer support (which doesn’t really exist, their support is outsourced to an Indian company now). They told me that it probably wasn’t a hardware problem, and that they could run a diagnostic to find the issue. For some reason, I acquiesced and allowed them to do so. They ran some sort of busy, little diagnostic tool that told me I had 112 errors on my machine. The rep asked me, “Do you think your computer can function with all these errors, Kevin?” Apparently not. ”Your computer needs to be cleaned and tuned….” He then went on to tell me what I could purchase to get this fixed and be covered in the future. Assured that it wasn’t a hardware issue, I took my exit.
“Cleaned and tuned”…a phrase that means absolutely nothing followed by a sales pitch. This sounded the “waste of time” alarm for me. I fixed it myself for free later that day.
~
Back in college, when I decided to start seriously pursuing ideas of my own (potential business ideas, academic projects, etc.) , people would ask me relatively rudimentary questions, and I wouldn’t have answers to them. Stupidly obvious things: “now why would they do that?”,”how would this work?”, “who is going to pay for this?”
I hadn’t thought this through completely. (This is an interesting phenomena that happens to creative people when they first start acting on ideas. Perhaps another post on this topic soon)
~
When you or other people can’t talk through the details, be very suspicious. This works when people are lying. However, I think lying is the lesser problem when compared to naivete and incompetence. Many well-meaning people are walking around out there, but they really talk a lot of noise.
If you can’t speak in clearly and in detail about your position, instead of engaging in the debate, say “I don’t have the details” or “I haven’t thought this through yet.” You probably feel strongly about your position, but you’re most likely going to be engaging in a debate over feelings and beliefs, not thoughts, which is a debate that is best avoided. How many worthless debates have you seen where the two people are “debating” but communicating nothing?
If an individual can’t talk in detail about their idea, ask them a few questions. Let them think about them. Eventually, you’ll probably need to say, “it’s hard for me to tell right now if you’re on to something here. I think you need more clarity around X, Y, and Z.” If X,Y, and Z are clear issues, you’re actually helping them a lot.
We spend a lot of time talking, and it’s pretty hard for our thinking to keep up. And the devil really is in the details.
If you really know something, you can talk about it in detail. I’ve found this observation extremely useful. Let me know if you have as well.
-Kevin
8.21.2011
