1. Trying to maintain motivation in the face of confusion
So I was a little bit upset with unanswered messages. We had followed-up on some prospects that showed initial interest and we got radio silence, which I found confusing. Were they no longer interested? Were they too busy? Why not say so? Had they read the message?
There’s no point on making those questions, as Epictetus would say (kind of): “focus on what you can control”. What I can control are my expectations. The yogic response after an unanswered message would just be: ”This is the reality of the world I live in” (at least in the words of Alok Kanojia). So how to go about changing my expectations? At first I thought about never expecting a reply, but that made it hard to write messages in the first place. Then I figured it’d be nice if I could set up a random event that would have more or less the same probability of success as I have when I actually send something.
For instance, I throw a die, and only if it’s a 6 I get a reply. Thus, most of the time immediately after sending the message I can already adjust my expectation to ‘no reply’, but not in a way that makes me lose motivation. Now, a probability of reply of 1/6 felt like too low, and I didn’t have a die anyway. I felt like 1/3 (the likelihood of no answer is twice that of an answer) was a good figure, but I only had coins at hand, hence the puzzle:
- How would you create a 1/3 chance event with just one coin?
Feel free to give it a thought if you like these kinds of exercises, we will post the answer soon.
You may wonder, why not use a computer? Because playing with physical objects is more fun, it also has some kind of ritualistic component that makes the process more meaningful.
2. In defence of silence
I have to say that as much as radio silence has frustrated me, I’ve also found it quite valuable. Silence can mean many things, but it definitely means one: you are not top priority at the moment; which is fine and actually the expected default. Busyness, forgetfulness and all kind of stuff can get on the way, but many times it’s reasonable to also assume you are not high priority in a broader sense. This is useful information too, not acting is an act, and silence is also a kind of response.
In this particular case, it brought us to reflect on our low priority status and to realise that, even though our proposals for R&D projects were received with interest, we had failed to make clear the specific benefits (for instance: how much money they save) in a concrete time frame. Hence we were seen more as a nice to have than as a need.
Additionally, we’ve realised that we tend to be very wordy, as we want to provide as much potentially relevant information as possible to the receiver, but this can end up being somewhat overwhelming and reduce engagement.
Silence can be a way of communicating something that’s hard to make explicit.
3. Beyond expectations and the middle way
A high ratio of unanswered messages is something to think about, but for any particular interaction, absence of reply can mean so many different things that it’s not worth devoting much time or effort to interpretation. This is basically the old sceptic concept of epoche: suspending judgement with respect to the things we cannot know.
As we discussed here, ideally we would work with no expectations, devoting ourselves to action, as opposed to results. Of course, at some point we need to review whether our actions are valuable, so there’s no complete escape out of expectations. But one can preserve this functionality while reducing their negative impact by 99%.
Still, getting rid of expectations is quite hard, as our mind is so used to bringing them up again and again. The second best thing we can do is make our expectations more reasonable, by using tools like the one we’ve discussed.