Thinking Out Loud
Serving half-baked cake. Go ahead. Do it.
Do you want to be afraid or do you want to grow?
Perfection is the Enemy of Progress
Afraid of revealing ignorance? Afraid of looking like a fool?
How many respectful thoughts and questions on meaningful issues touching your communities or the lives of those you love have you kept to yourself, un-voiced, for fear of a negative reaction?
Asking questions in some subjects might expose you to ridicule or painful pejorative judgment?
Maybe you stop yourself from expressing your thoughts until you are sure they are perfectly ready to share? Don’t speak until you know the answers?
Waiting until you perfectly understand a subject before engaging others in your respectful discovery journey stifles your learning progress.
Progress with the Help of your Friends
I was late to discover the power of study groups. This was very long ago for me, but I have never forgotten how much better my academic performance became once I started learning with other people.
Studying for an exam or completing difficult physics homework by myself left me ignorant of my blind spots. Working through classroom material with classmates exposed my knowledge gaps and my participation, in turn, shed light on their blind areas.
Diverse perspectives on the material readily exposed each other’s knowledge gaps.
Knowledge gaps got discovered and bridged.
We all learned together.
We all did better.
Difficult school subjects don’t burn you
Having blind spots in academic material can be momentarily embarrassing but these failings are never unforgivable.
Flammable Topics
Some subjects like politics, religion, race questions, gender questions, culture, finance, and many others are so volatile that sometimes just asking a question is characterized as lobbing an incendiary or passive-aggressive insult.
Trying to learn more in some topics by exposing your knowledge gaps can trigger moral judgments on you as a person.
So, be afraid to discover your knowledge gaps?
Be afraid to learn?
Do you have the courage to learn?
Does your “think out loud” courage depend on who will hear you? Do you trust your partners to be kind in your learning journey?
Comedians
Sometimes when I’m being serious, people find me funny. Or maybe they are just laughing at me. Not sure sometimes but I try to learn from it.
My understanding is that professional comedians trying to be funny work out the kinks of their material in small venues, among smaller crowds, or even among friends.
They think out loud, among people, to see and hear for themselves if their thoughts trigger laughter.
Not every story or joke gets a laugh. There can be a generous helping of wincing mistakes on the way to cooking up the best punchlines.
Serving the Cake
Not sure your cake is fully baked? Your friends will let you know if your cooking needs more work.
They may grimace and put their fork down as they push the plate away. They may even be kind with informed constructive feedback.
Your (fre-)enemies may criticize behind your back. (Frenemies are toxic: when you find those people, let them go.)
Through feedback, you’ll get a sense of how (in-)complete your understanding of an important thing might be. Cake or whatever.
Your understanding will grow faster and more effectively by witnessing and hearing other people’s reactions.
Don’t try to serve half-baked cake.
If it happens, be okay with learning from it. You’ll gain insight and bridge some knowledge gaps.
Vulnerably growing
I’m not going to live long enough to figure everything out. Pretty sure nobody ever will.
I’ll keep using my limited time and limited skills to learn from others and sometimes that means exposing that I deeply do not understand significantly important subjects.
I want to learn more about subjects that matter to me, the people I love, and the communities I admire.
I’ll keep thinking out loud as long as I can muster the courage to kindly and respectfully do it.
And I’ll be kind to others doing the same.
I encourage everyone to do the same so we all learn together.
When we encourage each other to kindly think out loud, we all learn. We all get better. We all grow.
Some Useful References
