How I stopped being an asshole in conversations

Transcript

Disagreeing with people on the internet has become an international pastime. We all think we're right all the time and nobody is scared to say so publicly online. It's like our goal is to make other people on the internet feel as dumb as possible. Now in my 20s, I absolutely was somebody who liked to ask incisive questions and point out other people's shortcomings.

And usually that took the form of me trying to catch them out in some sort of logical trap as opposed to just trying to understand their argument, figure out what the real knowledge was that I wanted to acquire and then challenge my own worldview. And I think this is the main thing that I want to talk about in this video is the response to your worldview being challenged is usually to attack. That is how I existed in the world. And that is when you're a young and egotistical person.

And I mean, to be frank, even if you're an old and egotistical person, you want to win. You want to be right. You want to know everything, but you never recognize your shortcomings. You never recognize where you are struggling with a knowledge gap.

This is often referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect. The people with the smallest amount of knowledge are the ones who believe they know the most. And the more knowledge you require, the less you believe you know. That's an important point for this video.

There was a moment. In 2014 where an article genuinely changed the way I thought, changed the way I see everything. And that article was written by one of my favorite entrepreneurs. His name is Jason Fried.

Jason Fried is the co-founder of Basecamp. And to be honest, I don't use Basecamp. It's not a product for me, but I love everything about the way that Jason Frieden DHH, his co-founder build Basecamp and exist in the world. And the article in question that changed my life.

Was titled give it five minutes. And those words are simple but extremely powerful when you dig into them. The story goes as follows. Jason was speaking at a conference and he was listening to a fellow speaker, Richard Saul Werman talk on stage.

And as Richard came off stage, Jason told him how great the talk was and then immediately started to challenge him in the most aggressive way possible. Jason wanted to be right. He wanted to poke holes in Richard's arguments. And Richard just looked at him and simply said, thanks so much.

But why don't you give it five minutes? Jason asked him what that meant. And Richard explained that if you give it five minutes, you get to let these ideas sink in. You get to consider, you get to acknowledge the knowledge gap between what you think is real and what the speaker or the person you're challenging knows is real.

And don't get me wrong, just because Richard had been talking and thinking about these things for 30 years doesn't mean that he can't be wrong. But it means that it's more likely that he's thought about the breadth, width and depth of this thing. A thousand times more than Jason ever had. And so let's go back to how I used to be.

I used to be a militant opinionated person. And I use the word militant quite specifically there. I used to want to fight with people. I used to intend to engage with them to the point where they lost.

And I won. That was why I was there. I was trying to intellectually challenge every smart person I could come across. And to be frank, any person that I came across to the point that when I was in one of my psychology sessions, my psychologist asked me what happens when you start to challenge people this way in a dinner setting.

And upon reflection, I realized that the more I question people, the more I aggressively challenge them, the more intens I became. The more likely it was that the dinner would end. And that's not a good look. That's not how I wanted to be.

And I found that I was pulling people away from me. I was winning. But in the long term, I was losing because I was losing relationships, losing respect of the people and making them feel worse after being around me. That's the opposite of what I want to be now.

Today I went to acquire knowledge. I want to engage with people to learn what it is they're saying in case I don't know it. When I was younger, I believed that reading very lightly on a topic meant that I could talk with a lot of authority. That's just foundationally not true.

The more you read the Dunning-Kruger effect, the less you realize you know. And that means that you should ask incisive questions to gather knowledge from people who've done the reading rather than challenge them with the intention of winning or beating them. It is totally okay to have strong opinions. And it's absolutely fine to challenge people's ideas.

But in Jason's example, Richard had actually spent 30 years thinking about this topic. And Jason was just pummeling him off gut reactions. And I'd like to challenge what the world might look like if we all took five minutes to think about our response online or in person before we gave that response. What would Reddit look like if people didn't use gut reactions or knee-jerk reactions to send pithy responses to people?

Work environment instead of making somebody look stupid and bad. Through some kind of realization that they might not have seen if you had been badgering them. So there are two things that I think I can leave you with in this video that will help you not fall into the strap. The first is called the Chesterton principle and really simply stated you can't dismiss what you don't yet understand or the reason this is also called Chesterton's fence is because you can't tear down a fence if you don't know why it's there.

Think about that for a second. Imagine walking towards a farmer's fence and saying, oh, this is a stupid fence because I want to walk here and the grass will probably grow better if the fence wasn't here. Meanwhile, the fence is protecting the farmer's cattle from poachers. You can't dismiss what you don't yet understand.

And if you take that into every engagement with another person, then the default becomes how can I understand the context before I throw my opinion at trying to change the way this works. And now, this is not saying that you can't challenge someone, but it should change the way that you foundation, the approach everybody that you would like to challenge and engage with. And the second one is something that's used in facilitation and coaching very often. And it's the acronym wait.

Why am I talking? And man, I wish I'd asked this much more in my life because more often than not in my younger years, I was talking because I like the sound of my own voice. I was talking because I thought other people were dumber than me. I was talking because I thought other people were more boring than I was.

And the truth is now I'm usually talking to understand somebody else's context. I'm usually talking so that I can understand what my knowledge gap is so that I can fill it. And that's definitely my curiosity coming to the fore in a net positive way. I'm going to do a whole different video on curiosity coming up in the few weeks, so subscribe to this channel if you're interested to learn more about all of these interesting topics.

But for now, remember that you can't dismantle offense if you don't know why it's up. And you should always ask yourself to wait. And give it five minutes. Why am I talking?

Let me give it five minutes to understand first.