How to Communicate Clearly and Effectively (a life advice from a millennial)

Script

For the longest time I was convinced that I was stupid because I could not think sharply and I could not for the life of me figure out how to communicate clearly.

My brain felt like it was this blender full of thought stuck in some sort of Perpetual mixing cycle that I couldn't shut off or even make sense of what ingredients were being thrashed around inside.

And because I wasn't able to order my thoughts when I communicated it was very unfocused it was very chaotic and I sort of just spat opinions out there.

There wasn't really any meaningful substance behind my words. Oftentimes when I would have a golden idea that I would want to contribute to a dialogue whenever I spoke I always felt like I could never get that idea across.

I might say something and feel that only 25 percent of the idea was communicated, and then I would follow that up with a bunch of rough choppy janky sentences and that might add an extra 10 of clarity to the idea.

And it always frustrated me because I knew that there was a precise arrangement of words that could get my idea across in a single sentence.

What was that combination? I wanted to figure that out.

And even outside of social situations I was so frustrated by my inability to order my thoughts.

Why is it that I can't seem to follow a line of thought for more than 15 seconds without my brain derailing and pursuing a rabbit hole and going down some other vein of thought?

And why is it that each new piece of information added feels like it's another dirty sock added on to a pile of unfolded laundry like nothing is getting done here?

Because when your brain is in a fog it's incredibly hard to make decisions and it absolutely kills motivation for me.

Because when your brain is in a fog it's incredibly hard to make decisions and it absolutely kills motivation for me.

I wasn't able to trust my own decisions and could never fully think through a problem to try to come up with Solutions so I began to rely on other people's cerebral horsepower to validate my decisions as either good or bad

And what I slowly began to realize as I share this frustration with other people and as I interact with others is that what I was experiencing is actually quite a common problem, and more importantly it's an increasingly common problem

Because in this era of information overload that we live in very few people know how to think sharply clearly or to think for themselves in general.

I want to share with you how I've learned and am learning to solve this problem for myself.

And so to that effect I want to start by addressing the culprits the root causes behind this sensation of brain fog that people are dealing with and when I really spent some time about a year ago reflecting on each of these four things that we'll talk about

I was surprised at how unaware people are of how much of a negative effect they actually have on your ability to process information and think and how integrated they've become into our routines and how heavily impactful they were to me for the better.

So let's talk about number one: the mind curse of bite-sized media so particularly amongst Millennials in Generation Z.

The formats that we now consume content in are progressively becoming shorter and shorter.

That's kind of a no-brainer.

The language of the internet in 2022 is short form videos and condensed ideas. Tik Tock, YouTube shorts, Twitter, and Instagram reels that entire social ecosystem thrives on providing digestible information that's often watered down to make it palatable to as many people as possible.

Now I'm not saying that the content is void of value here we're not critiquing the substance but the behavior that the consumption of this content at scale conditions within us is that of engaging our brain for a very short period of time and then recalibrating.

For example, let's play through a common browsing pattern in a lot of people on social media they pull open Tik Tok, for example, they play through a video that maybe is at a duration of a minute.

They might even browse the comment section and maybe they even contribute to the dialogue and leave some two cents of their own.

They leave a comment, and then very quickly they're watching something new.

They're scrolling to the next video in the black hole of the scroll, as they call it.

And they're recalibrating and their brain is forced to restart its focus and they're training their brain in that way.

And to be fair this idea of people having short attention spans is nothing new.

Joe's not getting a Nobel Prize for some revolutionary discovery here.

But what I had realized is that I'd condition myself to only being able to process information in small quantities.

My brain muscles were being trained to being activated for short durations and that carried over to my conversations and my independent thought.

I was alone thinking through ideas

I wasn't used to extended moments of concentration because I was used to always filling the boring moments when they arose with something that was still stimulating and most of that was short form content in whatever form it took, whether it was tweets inspirational quotes very short stories or answers on Reddit they were all short form bite-sized media forms.

As our brains began to adapt to these short bursts of engagement and that conditions this pattern in us and humans adopt incredibly fast .

This also brings another side effect to the surface and one that I noticed also stunted my inability, or my ability rather, to process information.

Since most of what we consume online are the end conclusions of someone else's own thoughts life or experiences, we are not guided through the steps that they had to go through to arrive at those conclusions to be able to defend them.

It's like trying to be a chef but only ever getting to work with the meal that's already been prepared ready to serve to people.

You don't know what the individual ingredients are or how you got to the point of having this meal that is ready to be served.

The impact of this is that it's led to a population that knows of a lot of great recipes, AKA ideas thoughts, arguments, whatever, but they're not able to understand them well.

They don't understand them well.

They take up dead weight dead space in their mind and that's because of one of two reasons:

A. They've never explored or researched them beyond the person that they heard them from

How often does that happen to us?

B. more importantly they haven't been exposed to the nested steps that it took for the person that they heard that conclusion from to be able to reach that conclusion because those conversations that discussion is boring

Or oftentimes because it's simply cut for time which leads us to the second problem and that is we hastily adopt opinions instead of evaluating them.

Here's why this affects your ability to process information and think clearly:

Because if we merely adopt a thought without understanding how someone else had to step through information to get to that thought, to arrive at that conclusion, becomes incredibly difficult to think through it to communicate it to defend it effectively.

Your understanding is only ever going to be limited to the basic summation of that argument, the one that you've adopted from someone else.

We do this with so much that comprises the convictions that we have as individuals.

We can't defend it because we simply adopted it because it sounds good.

Concepts to describe this situation experts call it confirmation bias.

It's where we sort of just blindly upvote things that that we agree with not because it's rooted in any sort of fact but because it aligns with the previous beliefs that we had, even though the fact of it is potentially wrong.

The amount of times that I've been in dialogues with people where they've introduced high-level concepts into the conversation and I've offered maybe just a little bit of pushback.

They cannot even begin to remotely defend their position because their understanding of that high-level concept is limited to what they heard from someone.

They're just parroting those opinions.

And to be clear, I'm not some masterful debater poking the perfect holes and arguments.

I've just begun to realize that society is full of people who have a very surface-level understanding of oftentimes very strong opinions.

I noticed this within myself.

It always frustrated me that I can never think through these opinions myself or communicate them effectively because my exposure to them was either limited or a copy of someone else's conclusion.

I didn't realize it until I really had to confront myself with that behavior.

And so I started asking myself these questions.

All these ideas that I have in my head, have I ever really thought through them?

How do I know if they're true what does the opposition say?

Because there's a huge difference between merely adopting a thought because it sounds good, and then really internalizing it through your own due diligence, research, having a vast foundation of knowledge on a subject.

And there's a confidence that comes with that.

I think that's what I was missing.

Because when I had an unstable foundation, I found it incredibly hard to think and speak from a position of clarity.

And that was so frustrating because I didn't have a comprehensive understanding on anything really.

My exposure to those ideas at best was a 10 minute long YouTube video that took a high resolution idea, blurted down, diluted it, watered it down and make it palatable to the masses.

And I'm not banging on any particular channel here or a format of content.

The issue lies in the fact that organization of thought and clarity on any particular subject is a long-term discipline.

There are no shortage of individuals out there who can tell you a lot of fascinating ideas thoughts and opinions.

But where is the individual who has exercised the mental discipline to study a topic in depth to explore the different experts in the industry and who's been able to step outside and look beyond what.

I call the processed version of the idea the the fast food version, the one that's there to hook you in.

It's simple and sugar-coated to appeal to our short attention spans.

And this leads us to the third problem I want to highlight:

Information input is massively disproportionate to information output.

We live in this era of information overload where we're all forced to pay attention to this Mosaic of information.

We all have these different information diets and all the input requires a system of order in order for us to sort through the information to process it or else our minds become overloaded.

And we humans are incredibly incompetent at sorting things in our own heads.

Now, some people are incredibly gifted and they're able to have real internal dialogues with themselves to clarify murky thoughts.

But most of us including myself need to output information in order to clarify thoughts and arguments and sort through the ideas that are just scattered in our brains.

It's like we've been stuffing things into a closet and spring cleaning is here.

We need to take everything out put it into the open and only then can we sort through it and discard the Amazon boxes that are just taking up dead space in our closet

We need a process to bring order to our thoughts and ideas and this is often why conversation is so valuable

When we dialogue with another person it forces us to channel all these unfocused ideas into a particular selection of words that we communicate to another person that allows us often to modify our stance on our ideas you receive feedback.

And oftentimes it alternates your thoughts based off the reactions that others give us we're able to gauge the impact of our thoughts sometimes we're met with validation and acknowledgment

Other times pushback in disagreement both are healthy responses because both modify our understanding and bring clarity to what our stance is on these thoughts to be able to better defend them in conversation, by the way, is just one form of output.

There's also journaling, writing, video, audio. Teaching is another one as well.

The dilemma in society is the fact that people are engaged very little with any meaningful form of output, at least on the thoughts that overwhelm them the most the ones that are just screaming and begging for clarity.

The input of information is skewed to be far greater than our ability to organize those thoughts through output.

And I don't know what the happy medium is; whether we should engage in one hour of output for every hour of consumption.

But I do know that input has increased dramatically over this last decade especially with the prevalence of social media and we all know the internet can be this fire hose of information and people get overwhelmed very quickly when they're not able to digest and make sense of that flood of information.

I would honestly encourage you to ask yourself this question:

Let me see if I can phrase this right.

What chances are you giving yourself to process the different levels of input that you're engaging with?

because I can tell you my answer when my brain fog was added Zenith even just a few months ag, my answer was None.

There was no output I did not allow myself extended moments of concentration.

One thing I've learned about recently actually is many of the great philosophers and mathematicians, the Romans, the Greeks, like the really big names in those domains of knowledge 

Whenever they would be engaged in some sort of Senate debate or any moral dialogue, they would always spend a few days afterwards retired in their quarters writing down their thoughts.

Giving speeches, giving very short mock operations about these ideas so that they can clarify them in their minds.

That ability to process something and have the best thought in the world in the moment after you hear a fresh new idea is rare.

It's a superpower that only select few in the history of humanity have ever been endowed with.

And it takes time to process information.

And so this actually leads us into one of the four solutions that I want to share with you that are not necessarily in combat to the four problems that we address, but they will indirectly check some of those boxes.

The first solution I want to share with you that has massively helped me is to engage in outputting more now speaking from my own clunky attempts at trying to organize my scattered thoughts.

Your first try at trying to make sense of what is up here is going to be difficult.

It was for me. Writing doesn't come naturally and don't expect it to be easy because I don't think people realize how often we really just parrot points that we hear from others.

And when you're forced to communicate through output, you're training your mind muscles to clarify what you mean and the beauty of it is that you're using your own words to do so.

One method of output that I take some level of personal pride in inventing for myself is Mock Presentations.

It is a method where you pretend to be in front of a fake audience.

What I would do is I found an old projector you can easily get one off of Amazon for relatively an inexpensive fee and I found some old footage of a live audience from YouTube and I would project that onto the wall, and then I would deliver.

Have a one-way conversation with that audience on a topic that I wanted to sort through in my mind.

The purpose of the audience was just to simulate that stage environment to give myself multiple touch points of focus (i.e., the different people that I had to make eye contact with).

It's actually uncanny how nervous I got in preparing to do these mock presentations.

I would keep the speeches maybe three to five minutes just speak on something that I wanted to clarify and work through and figure out how I would deliver this if I had to communicate this to another person.

I really do enjoy those. I actually still do them to this day. Those mock presentations are a great form of output.  

I also tried writing, which is actually considered to be more focus-intensive than conversation itself.

Writing, I actually found to be more effective than speaking and performing the mock presentations to the fake audience, because writing allowed me to gauge the effectiveness of each sentence in relation to the whole point that I was making.

I could revise and change the order as I wanted in order to bring further clarity to the thought that I was trying to put on paper.

I would also often revisit writing about the same topic multiple times. I would pull up a blank document again, from scratch, and write about shipping containers for the second time, which is actually just a book that I finished reading.

That second round would allow me to bring a further level of clarity to that thought. And the best part of all this is, here's the beauty: those ordered thoughts now serve as a reference for when you engage in speaking or dialoguing with someone.

You're not forced in real time to piece together all these unfocused thoughts in a conversation; you have a reference, and that is your written output that you've engaged in.