Are We Falling Into Word Traps?
Beware of all verbal advice, suggestions, and descriptions
There’s a kind of speech that generates order from chaos, breaks down large problems to manageable bits, and organizes clutter in thinking. Obviously, speech and words are a phenomenal tool.
But there’s a fine border, which when crossed in overuse of speech, we end up misleading and distorting ourselves. We forget that words are an approximation of that which we experience.
Because when we speak, we’re dealing not in the real thing — but in our estimated projections of the real thing.
Too often we find our own words and proclamations betraying us, for instance:
We might say we’re passionate about music, until we realize the real translation as: “We’re ‘passionate’ about music as long as it comes easy.”
We might say, we furiously despise a person, until we meet him in face to face and realize our bipolar oversimplification. That the real translation for the words “He’s a bad guy and I hate him” was “I can’t tolerate people opposed to my opinions”, in which case the arrow points back to us.
The latter comes out in action when we hit actual walls in our pursuit. Reality escapes that feeble hold of our words. We mistook what we said for what is, as we crowned speech the king and leader.
What if I tell you (and what if you already know):
That speech is a 10-year-old, tantrum-throwing child, and hardly the wise ruler we claim him to be.
And even the best amongst us fall prey to word traps.
Case Study: Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said
Cal Newport in his book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’ uncovers an unlikely contradiction in one of Steve Jobs’s iconic speeches, in an attempt to study what makes for compelling careers. Clearly, Jobs was a popular choice.
Jobs, in his speech, vouched for the need to find one’s passion — to find work we’d love.
Hearing this, wouldn’t we say that Jobs found his “passion” for technology early on, and the rest was history?
Wrong.
What if he himself wasn’t an example of what he preached?
Cal points out to Jobs’s early years, right before he started building the first Apple computers with Wozniak in a garage. Looking at this period, with sharp eyes, Jobs doesn’t show much of an inclination towards technology, or a “love and passion” for computers.
In reality, Jobs was confused at the time, lingering around, dabbling in spirituality, attending Zen classes, and whatnot.
So, No, he did not receive some spark of divine realization, revealing to him his “calling”, or “passion”, his “oh-so-big and mighty destiny”
Let’s strip away the decorative words and see it again:
Jobs jumped into Apple because he saw an opportunity, a quality door.
His virtue was his response to that opportunity — he answered it. He and Wozniak got an offer to build fully packaged computers to sell to a local computer store — that was their first break. Jobs dived for it. Everything else built from there. All the words captured into legendary stories are only decorations, covering the real thing — That Jobs seized an opportunity he found compelling.
As Cal says, What Jobs did not do was go on a passion hunt until he found this thing — Which is what he said he did.
Because we’re misled by our own words, all the time. And Jobs was no exception.
Moving Beyond Words
Relying on talks and words is like describing an exotic dance to a friend over the phone, verbally. Your first sentence will be a limitation and vulgarization of the real thing playing before you — at best, you might provide a loose estimate, but never the real thing. Never.
Our ancestors realized this.
Do you ever wonder why avenues like dance, poetry, paintings, music, theatre, and the opera even exist? Maybe they weren’t merely “art” or “enjoyment”, but rather a natural and logical consequence of this inability of ours to describe reality through talk and words.
Words just weren’t enough.
Implication: The best “advice” on the big questions, from our most adored role models could be severely misleading.
That’s right, don’t listen to your role models completely — that’s the nutty key I offer here. It calls for a set of sharp eyes rather than ears, in that we watch our role models carefully, but leave any excessive talks and speeches at the door. Because actions do speak louder than words.
Yes, some cliches are true and deeper than we know.
“Speech it seems was devised only for the average, medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Next time you hear someone speaking:
- Don’t listen to their words. Rather watch them and what they communicate, which will always be greater than the talk.
- Don’t accept their words as it shows(and even your own). Rather take them as an oracle who speaks tangentially, always pointing to a mystery, but never the mystery itself. Taking words only as a map, but not the territory itself.
Experiment with this, with whatever you hear and speak.
Respect words, but not too much, knowing that words are the shadow of a tree, but not the tree itself. Why not fight and live for the tree?
