I was taught how to meet and greet people, how to conduct a proper meeting, and how to respectfully make my ask, both in politics and in business.
I’ve been told “NO” quite often, and realize that I need to keep on asking to get to a “Yes”. My “participation trophy” was the ability to come back and do it again – on the next call, the next door I knocked on, or the next prospect.
I’ve probably asked for things over 100,000 times in my lifetime, been told “NO” 99,000 times, and there was only one single NO that actually mattered, and that I still remember.
Today’s youth are spending way too much time “chimping” screens, with interactions that have no repercussions other than touching delete. They only visit online echo chambers of what they profess to believe, or go to the opposite, and make cruel and hateful remarks, and call their opponents names, including “Fascist” and “NAZI”.
This is where my sarcasm comes out, and I make a crack like “keeping it classy, I see”. The problem is today’s young people do not see any problem with it.
All insults aside, the decline of fact-to-face interaction and the skills that make it all possible have serious consequences for our society and our constitutional republic. I’m starting to believe that digital interaction is destroying polite society and causing us to lose essential interpersonal skills.
You’re going to be told “NO”. You’re going to negotiate deals that are less than optimal. If you don’t hear “NO”, you haven’t done anything. If you’re successful, you’ll learn from it and move on.
Years ago, I ran a jokes list on the internet, and it grew to have over 17,000 participants. The tagline on every email was “The Electronic Water Cooler”. The water cooler or the lunch table, where great ideas spontaneously appear and are memorialized on the back of a napkin or business card. That’s what it became and it was the opposite of the conference room, which is where ideas go to die.
Online video conferences are much worse than conference rooms. There is a complete lack of decorum, and the ideas put forth die a much more horrible death. So, how much spontaneous creative collaboration are we losing because we don’t interact face-to-face? How many ideas are either not put forth or never investigated because of the disembodied world we are providing for future generations?
I’m watching Generation Z’s horrific response to trying any new ideas because the people they are online with might make a sharp comment, and they are horrified they don’t have exactly the same response as their online group.
Generation Z is allegedly all about experiences, but they seem to avoid the interpersonal experiences that will let them further their chosen endeavors or lead them down the path to fresh ideas and innovation. All interpersonal experiences come with risks. They might not get what they want.
Helicopter parents can’t get it for Junior or Jane. They don’t get participation trophies. They might get their feelings hurt. The Generation Z mantra is “Please stop.”
Not a chance. You learn or earn nothing always being in your comfort zone. Boomers broke free and rebelled from many of the cultural and social norms of our Greatest Generation parents, but we preserved a core set of values, and the primacy of human interaction. Generation X learned well from the Boomers and has done the same while adding the latest technology to the mix.
But I’m worried the ultimate manifestation of this purely digital connection will normalize hate and sharp words instead of figuring solutions to any given problem, and that’s because people don’t learn from a screen.
You can get information from a screen, but wisdom requires human interaction.
I contend that tomorrow’s leaders can only get the skills they need through face-to-face interaction. The current generation is getting a fraction of what they need to develop wisdom, and our constitutional republic depends on communicating ideas, some of which may be needed but not popular.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and if you stare at a screen all day, you’re taught not to ask.
