First Post
I’ve been promising myself to write on this blog for a week now. I get good writing ideas often, but I just don’t elaborate on them. Mostly because writing is hard. I get disencouraged easily -our writings need an audience- otherwise they’re words for no one but ourselves. And although that’s fair, its sad; We wish people were more interested on us, or at least our very refined thoughts, right? It’s been a recently hard (for me) discussion topic with my close ones, how I’m most times too honest and lengthy with my professional emails. It is true, I love oversharing, it appears. And beacuse I can’t do it on my emails, I apprehend I’ll do it here. That’s why I forced myself today to write this, disregarding this post quality, I needed to start filling this webesite, for me. This First Post is a registered, determined act of self-kindness. And I encourage you to do the same. Write for Yourself.
I’ve noticed that I write better when writing to someone else. No matter my relationship with the recipient. Three times it has happened now, that I start writing a letter/essay handwritten or not, and just struggle. But when I pull the Outlook email, type the recipient’s name, and start writing that same text: I’m much more efficient. I don’t know if this is a psychological phenomena or so, it’s just something I’ve noticed. We indeed, need an audience; and the smaller the audience, the easier is for us.
I’ll now start philosophizing. We humans, or anything really -other mammals, corporations, computers, et all- communicate better when communicating to just one recipient.
As I am writing this I’m developing a sensor system. Thus, I recently learned about serial communication devices, and I2C’s (Inter-Integrated Circuits). In these devices one computer, one chip, will talk to others, in a very defined and sophisticated manner. This one chip is called master, or main; and the others, are called slaves or peripherals (There is an ongoing ethics debate of the master/slave denominations). The master requests particular data, and a particular assigned slave samples and delivers it. A master however, will never communicate to different slaves at the same time, not only because its impossible in a way, but when it happens (a slave computer mistakes the call and returns data, so 2 slaves signal at the same time, distorting the message and confusing the master), the system crashes. This is better explained in the video below. Computers communicate better 1v1.
Diverging a little about videos. I’ve recently been watching YouTube, more than ever before. You can learn anything there now, even doctorate level knowledge can be found. During COVID online classes, it was painfully ironic for me, how I would prefer -for efficiency- YouTube lectures rather than the ones from my professors, for which I was paying thousands of dollars.
Someone who predicted the immense knowledge that would be accumulated in YouTube was the infamous psychologist Jordan Peterson (Yes, I like him at some discreet level). I’ve read his book “12 Rules for Life”, and I used to watch his lecture videos. Sometimes, I find find him very insightful, and sometimes I have no idea what he’s talking about. Going to my point and back to the thesis, he knows about communicating. Let me quote from one of my favorite lectures from his: “How to Overcome Social Anxiety”:
“If you’re ever speaking to a group of people, never speak to the group of people... Talk to individuals and then they’ll reflect for you the entire group”
Maybe for communication or social majors all that I have stated could be evident. But for me, no one thought me this. It was until I happened to review that lecture while learning about those I2C’s when this became clear to me. Now, when I happen to talk to a couple, or a small group -in person or emails- I direct myself towards just one individual.
Although its hard sometimes, and I get the fake feeling that I was rude to the least spoken person: I feel more much confident, and my speech is usually better.
We communicate better when talking to just one person.
I think that’s it. This is my first post. Thanks for reading.
