

Ask HN: Why don't most people listen to timid people? - diminium

I know someone who is very soft spoken, non confrontational, and super smart.  Nobody listens to him even though he is usually right about things.  I'm not sure why.  You only need to look at his accomplishments to see this is someone you really should be listening to.  It's very scary to see how smart he is if you just sit down and listen.  It's also sad to hearing how low his salary compared to what he should be earning.<p>There are very smart people who can solve issues and give solutions to the hard problems many people have but are otherwise very timid.  These are people who need to be listened to but they usually aren't.  I'm not sure why.  (Though, when they are listened to, a lot of interesting things happens.)<p>I'm definitely not as smart as he is but I noticed that people too don't listen to me unless I start making a mess of things.  Even then, there's a 50/50 chance of them listening to me or sending out their attack hounds to chase me away.
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_0ffh
Because of the cult of extroversion and "self-confidence", which leads people
to make their statements over-confident, over-loud, even over-aggressive.

A person which shares these traits significantly less than the average of the
group will of course tend not to be heard.

If he doesn't speak up louder and does not insist on his points, what can he
possibly have to say? :-/

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beagle3
That's American culture, and to a lesser extent, Western culture. It might
also be Asian / Eastern culture, I do not know about that.

But it is not universal - there are subcultures that pay more attention to
substance than to form. I've seen companies like that before - if you look
hard, I'm sure you can find one.

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CyberFonic
There are exceptions. I certainly listen to such people, but prefer to talk
one-on-one rather than in the hurly burly of meetings. As @_Offh points out,
in many situations the loud mouths dominate the meetings but not necessarily
the results.

I would like to think that the person you mention is being appreciated by
their boss. They did hire him for his/her skill and knowledge in the first
place. Sadly style often wins over substance. You only need to look at the
many missteps by executives in our top companies for evidence.

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rgbrenner
_I would like to think that the person you mention is being appreciated by
their boss._

Is "It's also sad to hearing how low his salary compared to what he should be
earning" some new slang for appreciation that I'm too old to understand?

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_delirium
In some situations I think it's just because other people don't _have_ to
listen to them, so people who are overloaded with input ignore the easiest-to-
ignore input. If there are five opinions, and two are non-confrontational and
will probably not cause a fuss if you ignore them, the path of least
resistance is to ignore those two and figure out how to sort out the remaining
three. Not even necessarily a conscious decision in some cases.

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jonascopenhagen
I know a salesperson who's timid and actually sells more than her extroverted
coworkers - probably because people often trust calm and down-to-earth
salespeople more than they trust the loud and slightly obnoxious kind.

Point is, being timid may in some cases mean that people will trust you more.

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Mz
Timidity tends to read as lack of confidence, which is a social cue suggesting
they don't really know or aren't really sure. Most people base their
conclusions on that sort of social cue, in part because they frequently lack
sufficient knowledge to judge the substance in any meaningful way.

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Buzaga
In a word, psychology, try reading some stuff from Ramit Sethi from
IWillTeachYouToBeRich[1] and others who study human behavior and it gets clear
pretty quick...

in an episode in Doug he goes into his friends and suggest they all go
something X in a shy way, everybody goes "hm, I don't know, lets see.." and 2
minutes later a "popular guy" arrives and calls everyone to do the same thing
smiling, enthusiastic and everyone accepts it, Pronto!

This sort of things are absolutely real independently if you think it's fair
or not, the best you/your friend would want to do is start learning those
things so you can learn to actually communicate your thoughts effectively,
because that's what the other dude is managing to do(personally I think
"communicative-intelligence", i.e. soft-skills, is just as important as "hard-
intelligence", what you seemed to mention, having both means you're "the man")

Being soft-spoken has nothing to do with it, I think there's a lot of
aggressive/confident/effective communicators who are.. but being non
confrontational when you know you're right is a really bad trait, no
shareholder or business owner will ever trust a guy who won't speak his mind
for not wanting to confront...

[1]: iwillteachyoutoberich.com

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Buzaga
I'd advise you not listen to comments that mention "cult of personality" and
this sort of stuff, you gotta turn this around... it's your friends fault he
can't communicate properly, not everyone else they don't live inside your
friend's head!

