I've thought quite a bit about agency and how people exert or limit influence over their own lives. Local, national, and worldwide events have prompted thinking about openness, inclusion, and community in ways I never bothered to consider when I was a student. I've spent way too much time thinking about how to get the most out of my exercise and nutrition routines. But of all the things I've considered during my twenties, the clear number one idea, the one returning to the top of my mind over and over again, has involved mulling over the varying comfort levels people have with ideas and with people.
At first, I represented it as a duality. A person could be more comfortable with ideas or more comfortable with people. One or the other, nice and easy. A person comfortable with both people and ideas seemed pretty unlikely given how rarely I'd encountered anyone exhibiting both qualities so far in my life.
Thinking back on my experiences, I think my initial reaction makes sense. The K-12 school years are designed to group students based on their comfort with ideas. I always did well on tests and thus ended up with classmates who were top academic performers as well. Put another way, someone uncomfortable with ideas was highly unlikely to become my 'peer' no matter how comfortable they were dealing with people.
The college admissions process was yet another opportunity to further limit my peers to those comfortable with ideas with no significant consideration given to how they dealt with people. By the time I graduated, I'd spent around a decade and a half surrounded by people who valued ideas first and dealt with everything else later. It was no wonder, I suppose, for me to think about this ideas-people concept as a duality for most of my twenties.
It took some time but, slowly, my construct eroded. Of late, I've started to see these as two separate skills. The first time I thought deeply about this came just a couple of years ago. When my mom was becoming sicker, she spent a few weeks going in and out of the hospital. Over the course of these many hospital trips, she was visited by a number of doctors who were meeting her for the first time. I started to notice during these interactions how some doctors were better at expressing themselves than others. This is traditionally referred to as 'bedside manner' and the variance in 'bedside manner' among these doctors was very noticeable whenever we received a new visitor.
I really noticed this as a skill when the 'wooden' doctors dropped by. It was as if these doctors had once read a hypothetical textbook- How To Interact With Patients and Their Families, Volume 1- and memorized each step perfectly. They told us what was going on and answered our questions honestly. But I never felt like these conversations were natural. During these exchanges, there was something formulaic about how these doctors spoke and responded to us. To put it another way, if the conversation was scheduled to end after fifteen minutes, the conversation would take exactly fifteen minutes.
Who would have written this hypothetical book? Why, the doctors naturally skilled in 'bedside manner', I suspect. These doctors were comfortable visiting with us and being present with our dread, anxiety, and uncertainty. I never felt rushed speaking with them and they were perfectly fine with a conversation ending after (or ahead) of schedule (2).
Put another way, I saw first-hand through these doctors how developing a comfort level with other people was a skill to work on. I suspected it was no different than developing a comfort level with ideas. In either case, there were probably a few 'naturals' out there. The rest of us would need to buckle down, hit the books, and try to learn from experience whenever we messed up.
I suspect most people around my age have a lot to work on in terms of developing their comfort level with other people. The (probably overstated) challenges posed by new technology and 'screen time' are not making this challenge any easier. And maybe, looking back, it would have helped me a little bit if school focused a little more on cultivating these 'people skills'.
But once a person reaches a certain age, it is time to stop worrying about the shortcomings of the past and start taking responsibility for filling in the gaps. I'm not sure when this exact point is, of course, but I'm more than happy to just say 'during your twenties' and leave it there.
The best reason to develop this comfort level with others whenever (and as soon as) possible is the indispensable role this skill plays in convincing others to amend or abandon harmful ideas. Those who cannot relate or are uncomfortable around others will see their well-intended efforts to make things better perceived as jockeying for the upper hand. Given how much negative influence certain powerful ideas are having today, developing a sense of empathy and learning how to understand others is perhaps the only skill important enough to always find a way to work on.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. The tricky bit regarding writing about other posts or articles is that, usually, the thing I write about is far more interesting than the result I generate...
Graham's essay also explored the consequences of having the wrong idea as the 'one top idea' at any given point. If the wrong idea is at the top, all the mind's drifting and subconscious processing goes to cultivating the wrong idea. The value of thinking in the shower is lost if all the thought is given to the wrong idea.
I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.2. What about the doctors who had no bedside manner?
What made this clear to me was having an idea I didn't want as the top one in my mind for two long stretches.
There was one or two but I don't think this fact is relevant to the post. I'm sure these fine servants of Boston's top hospitals are in the library as we speak, reading up and taking notes out of How To Interact With Patients and Their Families, Volume 1.
Look out for volume two when it hits the bookshelves in time for the holidays!
