Writing like so many creative acts is hard. Sitting there, staring, mad at yourself, mad at the material because it doesn’t seem good enough and you don’t seem good enough. In fact, many valuable endeavors we undertake are painfully difficult, whether it’s coding a new startup or mastering a craft. But talking, talking is always easy.
We seem to think that silence is a sign of weakness. That being ignored is tantamount to death (and for the ego, this is true). So we talk, talk, talk as though our life depends on it.
In actuality, silence is strength — particularly early on in any journey. As the philosopher (and as it happens, a hater of newspapers and their chatter) Kierkegaard warned, “Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakness action by forestalling it.”
And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. SO what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.
Strategic flexibility is not the only benefit of silence while others chatter. It is also psychology. The poet Hesiod had this in mind when he said, “A man’s best treasure is a thirty tongue.”
When facing a new challenge, making silence your first response gives you a chance to reflect before you speak.
Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress. The same goes for verbalization. Even talking aloud to ourselves while we work through difficult problems has been shown to significantly decrease insight and breakthroughs. After spending so much time thinking, explaining, and talking about a task, we start to feel that we’ve gotten closer to achieving it. Or worse, when things get tough, we feel we can toss the whole project aside because we’ve given it our best try, although of course, we haven’t.
We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty “Void”. It is almost as if we are assaulted by the silence or confronted by it, particularly if we’ve allowed our ego to lie to us over the years.
A voice of generation doesn’t call itself out. In fact, when you think about it, you realize just how little these voices seem to talk. It’s a song, it’s a speech, it’s a book — the volume of work may be light, but what’s inside it is concentrated and impactful. They work quietly in the corner. They turn their inner turmoil into the product — and eventually to stillness. They ignore the impulse to seek recognition before they act. They don't talk much. Or mind the feeling of others, out there in public.
The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.
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