What’s Your Point?

Have you ever sat in meetings where someone goes on and on and on? All you want to do is throw your arms up and say: “Please get to the point, already!” In this era of 140 characters – or less –expressing ourselves succinctly is valuable.

Have you convinced yourself that it’s more important to be succinct than it is to be accurate?

Which is the flip side of this discussion. With everyone devoted to 140 characters or less (115-120 if you want folks to RT you), tweets are composed with a less is more strategy. Or basically cut down to something that is tweetable. Which creates a lot of interesting tweets, that sound provocative and juicy.

Everyone wants to feel that they are the one with the scoop, the sensational “information” which everyone RTs. After all, the more viral your tweet, it must be right, it must be accurate, it must be real. Yikes!

Do you even read the stuff you react to? How about adopting a “read b4 u tweet” mantra? Why? Read on.

For those of us who grew up with formulas, algorithms, and equations, the pathway you take to derive the answer is far more important than getting the perfectly correct answer. It has a lot to do with whether you think things through, or not.

Do you?

And if you think things through, then you need to ask yourself whether the information you pass on to others makes sense to you. Or not. That part is huge.

Recently, a discussion was raging on a LinkedIn group of which I am a member. Someone had quoted a well-known individual who had cited a statistic about social media. There was a lot of tweeting and twittering and a grand flap about this provocative statistic being thrown, around as if it were the right – and only – answer. It had to be the truth. Why? Because a well-known person had tweeted it.

I kept reading the discussion and shook my head. Seriously, does any number with a percentage point after it represent “the truth” about anything? Just because someone “important” tweets something, does it make it factual?

Welcome to my world: the world of hypothetico-deductivism, where any data point is the subject of scrutiny and validation – by you.

After all the flapping had gone on for a while, some individuals in the group decided to stop talking about the “statistic.” Instead, they contacted the original source of all the excitement, for clarification. Bingo! Once they went back to the source of the information, the individual unveiled the strategy: the statistic essentially was a percentage point created for provocation.

Talk about letting someone else’s perception completely bias your reality. Has it really gotten to the point where anyone who throws around numbers has all the power over your perception?

Briefly recall the most recent Presidential election, if you need an example. Depending on what media you were plugged into, the same data set was reworked (some feel the correct term is manipulated) to give you the statistics that you wanted to hear, depending on the candidate you supported. These folks were really working over that data set. And you believed them. Whichever way that data set was presented.

So much for making a point. It’s much more important for you to scrutinize the point that someone is making.

Use your grey cells to figure out whether what they are saying makes sense to you. Perhaps their data source is unreliable. Wait another 15 nanoseconds. Perhaps their conclusion will be refuted by someone else.

Perhaps the point that they are making isn’t relevant, is stretching the facts, and doesn’t seem to make sense to you. You do take the time to figure out whether something you read makes sense to you, don’t you?

Do you own digging. Come up with your own data. Read up on that topic, instead of taking someone else’s word for it. Arrive at your own conclusions. Yes, that’s left brain stuff, but the last time I checked, you were wearing your entire brain.