LISTEN TO YOURSELF | 2004-10-21
Texas holdem submitted the following:
"I lay it down as a fact that if everyone knew what others say of them there would not be four friends in the world."
I have cleaned up my act on that. I used to make a lot of people very suspicious of me. When I was in a bad mood I would say something nasty about someone I knew. I finally realized that the people I was talking to had seen me being very friendly to those people to their face, so they wondered what I was saying about THEM behind their backs.
Unless I have to warn somebody about someone else, my rule is never to say anything about anybody that I don't want them to hear, criticism included.
To my surprise this was very easy. I thought it would take a lot of discipline, but it didn't.
By the same token I almost never write anything in an email that I wouldn't let the world read.
We used to have a saying on Capitol Hill and in the Administration, "Never write anything down that you don't want to see on the front page of the Washington Post."
That was especially true of conservatives.
It was a rule not a law so we had to violate it sometimes. But we did so very seldom and we used a shredder.
I think my learning not to say what I do not want people to hear also came from my experience as an interrogator. I found that if you let a person talk and you know how to listen, he will tell you everything about himself.
So I learned to listen to myself from the outside.