Making things better?

Chapter 324

The only reason to open your mouth is to make something better. If things are worse when you’re done speaking, you failed. Dan Rockwell

If this was happening, there would be far less speaking going on. Nine out of every 10 words I hear further the pain and disharmony of the world, not make things better. Online is even worse. People say things online they would never dare in person, and you can see there that what many think is even worse than what they are willing to speak out loud. There should be long stretches of silence, where we are thinking and considering and figuring, before opening our mouths, but around here, silence can’t be tolerated for 10 seconds, so thinking is in very short supply.

We have all experienced at one time or another, making things worse by speaking up when we should have said something different, or nothing at all. If you have a heart, you feel badly about the part you played in making things worse. If you don’t have a heart, then you are likely doing it again and again. But from a human being point of view, you have failed, if you make things worse. Unless of course, you made things worse on the way to making things better, this is the exception to this rule.

Often in leadership, I have to say things people don’t want to hear, and they may (and often do!) get upset and be angry, but if they follow those words, things will get better. So this is a case where you make things worse on the way to getting better - some corrective input will always seem to make things worse at first.