The Power of Straight Talk

People are constantly selling you things, or spinning things to make them look better to you. And good lord, I'm so tired of it. No one seems capable of just telling you the honest truth and having a straight conversation anymore. I've compiled some examples from every day life to show what I'm talking about.

Your connected devices are spying on you. People report all the time that they talk about topics around their phone or their helper devices like Alexa and Google Home, and suddenly ads show up in their web browser next time they log on for that topic. Or do a google search for something that may have just been a whim, and now get ready for ads to appear for whatever that was. Just constantly trying to get your attention and distract you from whatever you may be doing, and sell you something you may not have had any real interest in, just a passing whim.

Corporate emails. Why oh why do you need to send out an email to all your employees that is just obviously spinning events? I've seen this for years. While an informational email that keeps employees up to date on changes that are happening is great, and a welcome addition to the information stream, if you take events that everyone in the company can see and try to spin them in a much more positive manner than what people can see with their own eyes, it creates a sense of disconnect between people at the higher levels of a company and the general employees. It's just a bad practice, and avoiding it is good advice even in your personal life. Just be straight and don't try to BS everyone. Pro tip: we can all see it. It doesn't help.

I'd even bet that you've done the same thing to some extent in your personal life. Who among us hasn't put the best face on something when telling someone else about it? In that moment, we are selling that idea to whomever we are talking to. It happens all the time, and most of us don't even think about it anymore.

Advertising is everywhere, and it is constantly trying to get and hold your attention. Every square inch of free space seems to be getting transformed into advertising. Nearly every personal interaction involves you being sold on something. Advertising has gone to static, to moving, to digitally served mini-commercials, and now is being worked to show more targeted personalized advertising just to the people standing in front of it by getting information from your phone. It's all vying for your attention, and it's all shortening your attention span. Just being able to focus and cut through the noise is becoming a super power.

What I'm endeavoring to do is cut through the spin in my own life. Those of you on twitter know that I get to the meat of a topic pretty quickly, and tend to try to cut through the sales hype surrounding something. It's a big thing for me, but I'm trying to walk the walk as well. I am working on myself to stop trying to spin things when I talk to people, and just give them the straight answers. It's a more honest way of dealing with people, and it's something I'm striving for every day.