20 tweets on the acts of listening and thinking (by Jordan Peterson)

A selection of tweets from the book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote toChaos, by Jordan B. Peterson (Allen Lane, 448 pages, 2018).

1. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.
2. When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening, and talking—but mostly listening. Listening is paying attention.
3. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen. Sometimes if you listen to people, they will even tell you what’s wrong with them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it.
4. True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time.
5. True thinking is complex and demanding. It requires you to be an articulate speaker and careful, judicious listener, at the same time.
6. A listening person tests your talking (and your thinking) without having to say anything. A listening person is a representative of common humanity.
7. I’m communicating, as Freud so rightly stressed, even when silent.
8. The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.
9. I routinely summarize what people have said to me and ask them if I have understood properly. Sometimes they accept my summary. Sometimes I am offered a small correction.
10. There are several primary advantages to this process of summary. The first advantage is that I genuinely come to understand what the person is saying.
11. When someone opposes you, it is very tempting to oversimplify, parody, or distort his or her position. This is a counterproductive game, designed both to harm the dissenter and to unjustly raise your personal status.
12. By contrast, if you are called upon to summarize someone’s position, so that the speaking person agrees with that summary, you may have to state the argument even more clearly and succinctly than the speaker has even yet managed.
13. If you first give the devil his due, looking at his arguments from his perspective, you can (1) find the value in them, and learn something in the process, or (2) hone your positions against them (if you still believe they are wrong) and strengthen your arguments further against challenge.
14. If you listen without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking—and with very little deceit.
15. The input of the community is required for the integrity of the individual psyche. To put it another way: It takes a village to organize a mind.
16. Too-early problem-solving may also merely indicate a desire to escape from the effort of the problem-formulating conversation.
17. A conversation of mutual exploration has a topic, generally complex, of genuine interest to the participants. Everyone participating is trying to solve a problem, instead of insisting on the a priori validity of their own positions.
18. The conversation of mutual exploration requires people who have decided that the unknown makes a better friend than the known.
19. Listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.
20. With careful thought and language, the singular, stellar destiny that justifies existence can be extracted from the multitude of murky and unpleasant futures that are far more likely to manifest themselves of their own accord.
21. Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors. Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter.