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A man’s best treasure is a thrifty tongue.
Former professional athlete Bo Jackson, known for his superb athleticisim as well being the only person ever to be named an All-Star in both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Football League (NFL), had two goals ever since the beginning of his career:
He would win the Heisman Trophy
Be taken first in the NFL draft
Do you know how many people did Jackson told about his dreams?
Nobody but his girlfriend.
Talking depletes us.
Worst of all, talking and doing, fight for the same resources.
Thus, it’s either one of them, but never both.
At the beginning of any journey we’re always scared and nervous, so it’s only natural that we seek to comfort ourselves externally rather than inwardly.
Talking fills this gap. This void that exists between thought and outcome. The uncertainty.
It allows us to feel like we’re doing the thing that we’re actually avoiding.
This is the problem with talking.
By allowing ourselves to immerse in this imaginary world, we’re unconsciously telling our brains to feel like we’ve achieverd something, when in reality we’re pretty far away from it.
Worst part?
We feel that we can toss the wole project aside because we’ve given it our best try, although of course we haven’t.
Success requires a full 100% of our effort and talking filters part of it before we can use it.
Mere gossip anticipates real talk, and to express what is still in thought weakens the action by forestalling it.
So why do we talk so much?
Well, there’s a weak side to each one of us, one that isn’t precisely malicious but at the end of the day still wants to get as much attention as it can by doing the least.
We call this EGO
And we shouldn’t entirely blame ourselves for this.
This is a form of natural defense system. We’ve learned to avoid feeling bad by any means necessary.
In this case, just like former blogger Emily Gould did when she needed to write her book, we avoid as much as possible the task at hand and do everything else but focusing on it.
Many endeavours in life we’ll eventually undertake are going to be difficult, and talking will always be easier.
We’ve wrongly assumed that silence is a form of weakness, tantamount to public death, when in reality being silent requires strength and control.
Silence is the respite of the confident and strong. - Ryan Holiday
Quite literally anyone can talk about themselves, even a child knows how to gossip and chatter.
But the ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without it is pretty rare.
And it works the other way around as well.
In 1934 during his governorship of California candidacy, Upton Sinclair decided to release a book authored by himself, in which he described in past tense how he was able to enact some amazing policies as well as helping the financial situation.
The book was an immedaite hit, selling thousands and thousands of copies, yet his candidacy failed catastrophically.
As Upton close friend, Carrey MacWilliams descirbed in an interview:
Upton not only realized that he would be defeated but seemed somehow to have lost interest in the campaign. In that vivid imagination of his, he had already acted out the part of “I, Governor of California”… so why bother to enact it in real life?
He talked so much about him succeeding as new governor that he convinced himself he already did it, thus losing any motivation in enacting it in real life.
Talking about a possible future success is a temptation we all have, but talk replaces action, always.
Even though research shows that goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress.
The same applies for verbalization.