Way back in the day there was a series of commercials for a financial management company called EF Hutton. The commercials typically had two people speaking in a noisy location like a restaurant. At one point in the commercial one person would say something like “… My financial planner is EF Hutton, and EF Hutton says …” At that point everyone else in the restaurant would stop speaking and lean in to listen. The tag line for these commercials was along the lines of “When EF Hutton speaks people listen.” Those commercials and the old saying about “He doesn’t say much but when he does it has meaning” have always made me think about the power of words and the power they convey when spoken frankly and with conviction. It also made cautious when speaking about anything of import.
And that brings me to the when to listen part of this post. The answer: always. We need to make sure we listen to everything being presented to us as well as what we are saying. When we tweet does it make sense, is it legible and does it truly convey what we are trying to say. When we post media is it reflective of who we are and what we are trying to say or is it such an inside joke that only you and one other person “get it.”
When life moved at a slower pace (that was so 27 seconds ago, to paraphrase a different commercial) we had more time to get our facts straight, cross our t’s and dot our i’s. The expeditious rise of social media from trendy to mainstream has provided us with a overdose of information much of it correct and on-target but tomes of that information is simply wrong. When we fail to listen to what others are saying as well as what is coming out of our mouths more often than not we contribute to the “compilation of wrongness.”
