Contentious discussions can be stressful for the best of us. Some people are formally schooled in the art of debate, and I am not one of them, so often I blamed my discomfort in confrontation or extended debate on the fact that I really wasn’t sure how to do it properly.

Even watching debates online between other people makes me cringe. (At some point I realized that it was more because those ended up being mud-slinging, juvenile name calling fests more often than actual discussions or intelligent debates about valuable topics. But I digress.)

I thought something was wrong with me because I didn’t want to dive into the fray and start some kind of argument or throw myself straight into the middle of a heated debate or discussion. It also crept into my personal life, because discussions that were…uncomfortable often led me to be much more upset than the topic itself actually warranted. And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why.

Then it hit me one day.

I can’t remember what prompted the introspection, but it struck me hard and has stuck with me ever since. And as a result, it’s actually made me much more effective in my writing, my work, and it’s making me much less panicky when I find myself in a discussion that’s uncomfortable or difficult. I’m not perfect at it yet, but the awareness of it helps. My breakthrough?

I need time to process things. Sometimes a lot of time. And I need to ask for that time or take it for myself.

Sometimes, what bothers me is that something bothers me, but I can’t figure out what it is. That gnawing, back-of-your-mind feeling that comes with feeling something askew but not being able to put your finger on it. And in the midst of a discussion with someone, you can feel a bit like an ass when you say “you know, something about this isn’t sitting well with me, and I need some time to think about what that is or why.”

Especially when tweets are flying or the Facebook or blog comments are piling up, and I promise you text is your (read: my) worst enemy because it lacks every bit of the body language and facial expression that comes with talking with someone in person. It’s also the time when real-time works against you, because it implies a certain pressure to think and respond now, not later once you’ve taken some time to think.

The internet especially is fraught with quips and witty retorts and know-it-alls that have the answer to everything in a given moment. It can make you feel a bit like if you don’t have an instant answer, you’re slow on the uptake somehow.

The truth is, though, when I practice slow thinking, it makes all the difference.

The issue at hand can be the answer to a business problem, or figuring out my stance on a political or social issue, or understanding the reason why something someone said or did hurt my feelings personally.

Reflection itself has a few benefits, from cool-off time to the ability to let thing sit and process for a while, like steeping tea leaves. Sometimes I notice something I didn’t before. I notice that I didn’t say something or make myself clear enough, something that might have made the conversation easier, and I know to be more articulate and specific next time.

Other times I can spend slow thinking time gathering more information to help guide my thinking (and therefore realize where the gaps are in my knowledge or facts), which in turn helps me ask better questions. Once in a while, I realize that I was bothered by something or confused by it or sidetracked simply because I was short on sleep, or distracted by something else, or not in the right frame of mind to think through everything in that moment.

In short, my epiphany was that I need to think more slowly sometimes, not more quickly. And that I’m often better off, better educated, and more open to information, input, and alternative knowledge when I step back, think slowly, and breathe.

Small thing, but big impact for me. Maybe it’ll help you, too.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
The Power of Slow Thinking

The receipt of attention is earned, both initially to capture it, and continually to keep it. No one is entitled to it, ever.

The online experience you immerse yourself in is, to a large degree, under your control. You can give your attention easily with a click, and add information to the stream you take in. But never forget that you can remove it as easily, and sometimes you absolutely should.

I’m not a fan of the piling-on, lynch mob tactics that seem to be doled out as routine punishment for online misbehavior. I’m also not particularly a fan of the public announcement that you’re no longer a follower of so-and-so. Sometimes I suppose it’s beneficial to let someone know that you see what misbehavior they’re up to, or why they’ve lost your interest. But I think those occasions are few and far between (like, say, gross breaches of ethics or the law), and are much more likely to make us look as much like the jerks we’re trying to “call out”.

By contrast, quiet removal of attention can have several benefits. For your own sake, it’s one less fly in the online ointment to make your experience on the web shaded with unnecessarily upsetting or irritating things. Collectively, we can make an awful lot of impact by simply removing our attention without saying a word. Malicious malcontents and consistent jerkbags without audiences to feed their antics are as useless as a two-legged stool.

There is so much good information on the web. So many good, interesting people with outstanding ideas. So many causes to support. So much to learn and enjoy and entertain you.

Why would you spend one more second of your time – the one non-renewable resource that you always wish you had more of – on someone or something that doesn’t continually remind you why you spend it there?

Now before you give me the bit about having too much homogeny and groupthink in your stream if you only follow people that agree with you…

There’s not one shred of this post that says you should surround yourself with only people that think the way you do. But you can have diversity of thought, even disagreement, that can be unabashedly awesome. Uncomfortable, maybe, but in the way that your muscles hurt so good after a workout. You shouldn’t walk away from anyone or anything repeatedly feeling like garbage. It’s possible to disagree with someone, step way outside your comfort zone, and still have it actually be a rewarding experience.

Your line is almost certainly different than mine, which is fine. But do have one. Respect your own time as you would insist that someone else to respect it. Click unfollow. Unsubscribe. Unfriend. Edit relentlessly, and constantly as your interests and experiences change. Your criteria can evolve, but the ultimate accountability for the quality of your online experience will always be yours alone.

Take back your attention, and allow it to once again be focused in the places that enrich you. If we’re ever to really realize the potential of what the web has brought us, how we continue to bestow and devote our precious attention makes all the difference in the world.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Take Back Your Attention

I took a sizable breather from writing and doing a lot of participation on social networks over the holiday season to think, to observe, and to lay the groundwork for the early days of SideraWorks. But something happened when I sat down to write again.

I wanted to be challenged. I didn’t want to do the same thing I’d always done. Looking around, I found a couple of things that made me screw up my face in consternation.

Bite-sized Content

The blogs being lauded as “leading” our industry these days are the ones that are adept at the clever analogy or the frequently and arbitrarily curated Top Something list, or most especially the preachy, prescriptive advice that’s packaged as some kind of reality check about where we’re going wrong. The rearview mirror sure makes for easy writing fodder, doesn’t it? Drawing the uncharted maps is a heck of a lot harder.

Digestible content, lessons learned, how-tos and and levity are wonderful things to have in the mix. The problem I’m finding is that our desire to consume something rapidly and without too much effort is becoming a dominant, self-fulfilling cycle.

Simple isn’t the same as easy.

But easy content is what drives clicks, because we can read it, retweet it, and promptly forget it. We can bookmark it, never to come back to it. We don’t have to stop our brains in the middle of thinking about more complex things in order to process or digest a blog post.

Content on the web, especially about social media, has become our brain break. Not the discussions that challenge us to think harder.

It’s not fair to make that a universal statement, and I’ve written plenty of fluff posts myself, so I completely acknowledge the hypocrisy.

There are also some outstanding writers whose posts are gritty, well thought, and often progressive and provocative. They ask the hard questions and don’t shy away from writing things that require two or three reads and some reflection to digest. Their game isn’t tweets or comments, but rather poking things with sticks in order to present new ideas or reframe familiar ones.

For my money, it’s people like Julien Smith, Saul Kaplan, Valeria Maltoni, Mitch Joel, Dave Gray, Matt Ridings (disclosure: my business partner), Edward Boches, Ben Kunz.

If your goal is to be the next clickmeister of the web and get lots of fast and loose eyeballs, that’s totally your prerogative. But as our industry progresses from gawky adolescent to a mature young adult and many professionals are working to demonstrate not only its short term value but its long term viability, there needs to be a cadre of content creators that want to ask messy, crunchy questions instead of writing endless lists.

So I’m thinking about how I can do my part, to keep challenging myself to do better, not just more. I hope more people do, too. There are some brilliant thinkers out there that just need to have the courage to push their comfort zone a little more. Don’t think I don’t see you.

Data Laziness

We’re coming up against this frequently. Just ask Tom Webster.

I applaud our hunger for facts to back up our hypotheses. It’s encouraging that the industry wants accountability for the practices we’ve been building and evolving over the past several years.

But in our haste to prove something - anything – we’ll take almost any data or statistics presented at face value and we’ll even share that data liberally through our love of the almighty infographic, research report, or “study”. We’ll bookmark the hell out of it and put it in every single one of our presentations and pitches. But rarely do we stop and ask ourselves how that information came together.

Where did it come from? How was it gathered? What assumptions were made when it was presented? How were the questions formed, and what kind of bias do they reflect? What information might have been left out, skipped, or even deliberately skewed (ever look at who sponsors a study, for example)? Were those survey responses from fifteen people on Twitter on Friday at midnight, or was it a statistically valid and representative sample? Was someone just presenting data that supports a conclusion they already wanted to make?

It’s okay to question data. It’s healthy to look at things with a critical eye, to refuse to accept something as a fact simply because someone creates a nice graphic and says it’s so. It’s also okay not to know how to evaluate data, and to spend the time to take it bit by bit and learn, or ask someone who does.

Down the road as we seek to provide credibility to all the hard work we’re doing, if we’re all citing a bunch of crappy information, guess how good our conclusions, strategies, and ensuing questions will be? Guess how insightful and discerning we’ll look?

Exactly. Question stuff. It’s healthy.

Oh. But while I’m at that, let me talk about one last thing.

Controversy, Not Debate

We’ve talked about this before, but there is a vast difference between disagreeing, and being disagreeable. 

Yet it’s practically de rigueur to get into some kind of tiff in a public forum, complete with dripping sarcasm, condescension, personal barbs and insults. And we pull up chairs and watch the carnage like a trashy movie.

That doesn’t make us collectively look very smart. And we’ll post endlessly on Facebook about stopping bullies in schools, but we’ll let the trolls take over Twitter or our friend’s Facebook wall, and still proudly share their posts and laud them as some kind of hero who “tells it like it is”.

Our industry needs to question stuff, just like we talked about above. We need to debate issues, bring up complex considerations, clarify what we mean as we define what we do and how we do it.

But don’t forget this:

Pro Tip: Expertise is important, but being enjoyable to work with counts for more than you might think.

— Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) January 12, 2012

Sure, you can be polarizing and provoke people to action. That works sometimes, can’t deny that. But I am so hungry for more discussions populated by people who don’t need to leave their ego hanging out of their pants to make a point, or resort to tearing someone else down in order to make themselves look tough or gritty. I’m seeking out the people who love to talk, learn, push, challenge, consider, and actually enjoy doing that with other people without being threatened, defensive, or argumentative just for the sake of it.

The sad part is that I realize the relative futility of writing this into a post, because the people who like to get down and scrabble in the dirt aren’t likely to do any self-reflection because of this much less change how they operate. Instead, perhaps I can hope that one person reading who sees this stuff happening is willing to point it out. Or at the least, refuse to indulge in that stuff in favor of initiating a valuable debate with someone willing to actually have one, or spending their valuable attention on the people who do.

Hey, a girl can hope.

So that’s what’s on my mind as the new year starts, as the new business gets off the ground, and as I’m considering how I’ll create content and participate in discussions that make me a better professional and a better thinker.

Lazy brain sucks. I’m demanding more.

Is that good enough to be a motto for 2012? I’m going with it.

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Social, Progress, and the Lazy Brain