Shut up and listen
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I built my entire career on talking. Then I realized the person listening had the power the whole time.
I remember sitting at a lunch table in high school. There was always one person telling the story. Everyone leaned toward them. Laughed at the right moments. Hung on what came next. That person was the center of the group. They mattered. You could feel it.
Then I’d look at the quiet kids. The ones sitting there, taking it in. Nobody looked at them. Nobody asked what they thought. Nobody texted them about the party this weekend. They weren’t being bullied. They were just being forgotten. And at 15, being forgotten is worse than being disliked. At least disliked means someone noticed you.
I decided at that table that I was never going to be the quiet kid. If having a story was how you got attention, I’d have the best story. If being loud was how you stayed visible, I’d be the loudest. If talking was how you proved you mattered, I was going to talk until everyone in the room knew I was there.
What I didn’t understand at 15 is that there are two completely different kinds of silence. There’s the silence of having nothing to say. That’s what I was afraid of. The empty kind. The kind where you’re just sitting there because you’ve got nothing.
But there’s another kind. The silence of choosing not to say the thing you could say. That one isn’t empty. It’s full. It’s the silence of someone who’s actually paying attention. Someone who’s taking in more than they’re giving out. Someone who’s choosing to listen instead of perform.
From the outside, those two silences look identical. A quiet person is a quiet person. But from the inside, one is weakness and the other is power. I spent the next 15 years avoiding both because I couldn’t tell them apart. So I just never shut up.
