感情のはけ口について

Chander Ramesh What follows below is a speech I gave to Motion employees. It was designed to fit Motion’s culture, but the heart of it is something I deeply believe and carry with me to my personal life. When folks interact with me, I often skip past the emotional complaints. It is not because I do not care about their problems. Rather, I find engaging in it to be less productive. Most importantly, I do not believe one most listen to ardent complaining in order to be a good friend.

Why am I talking about this today?

A large portion of my free time is reading biographies of really great people from all industries, and as I learn things I’m always thinking about how to apply this to Motion. Specifically, three books I’ve read recently have all said a very similar message, which spurred me to go do some research on my own.

Internal threats are the greatest threats to Motion rather than a competitor taking us out through some clever maneuvering (as David Packard says, “more companies die due to indigestion than starvation”). There are two reasons for this. First, “indigestion” is the most common failing of businesses. Second, we already have very niche opinions on how project management should be done. It’s very unlikely that Microsoft or some other company would suddenly change their point of view to adopt all those unique insights we believe to be true.

This talk is basically the synthesis of my research, spurred by the books No Rules Rules, Creating a Drama Free Workplace, and Poor Charlie’s Almanac. I’ll periodically give other such talks when I feel strongly about something and amend our culture guidelines.

This talk is to convince you all that venting is the greatest internal threat to a high-performing company’s culture.

Venting is like obscenity - you know it when you see it. But in case you don’t, there are three obvious signs that someone is venting:

They are upset when people are giving solutions to problems. Usually, they just want a release valve to talk more about their problems.

They’re having a hard time coming up with specifics - overly focused on generalities and feelings. (“X is bad!” “Oh, how so?” “What do you mean how so? It’s obviously bad!”)

They are likely exaggerating or saying things they would not feel comfortable saying in front of the whole company.

Investigating whether a problem exists in a certain area or team

Asking for help if one does not know how to solve a problem

Talking to the person directly with whom you may have a problme in order to resolve it

A really easy test to check if you’re venting is: have you done anything on your own to solve this problem? If not, you’re probably venting. (Vendor sucks? Have you tried filing a support ticket? Have you tried even liking a github issue where someone else complained? Have you even brainstormed of potential actions you could take? As we’ll talk about later, even the simple act of brainstorming solutions will take you out of a venting space and into a productive one.)

You may be surprised, as I was, to discover quite a consensus around venting being bad for not only the company but also for you! This is surprising because conventional wisdom dictates that it’s good to get those feelings out by talking to people. This may be in the context of therapy or just venting to coworkers, but there are literally hundreds of articles on the internet still espousing outdated Freudian catharsis theories about suppression.

Supposedly, if you have bad feelings and ignore them, they will fester and grow and ultimately poison you from within. These bad feelings are in fact so powerful, the only way you could possibly deal with them is by talking to another human (preferrably a licensed therapist, of course). How convenient. In other words, your feelings are in control of you and not the other way around. Of course, none of this is true. Read any biography and it’s quite clear that resilient people can in fact compartmentalize quite well, and over time, ignoring certain thoughts and feelings actually decreases their impact.

Psychology has moved on since the 1900s and most nearly all the evidence today actually suggests that venting is quite bad. Why is that?

When we vent, we are re-living the emotions we originally felt. In doing so, we strengthen those neural pathways . Essentially, you are practicing getting angry at the types of situations that you’re re-living. And practice makes perfect — over time, people who vent a lot become more miserable and more angry. This even expands to those who are listening to others who vent. So not only are you making yourself an angry person, your poison is spreading to others.

Venting is fundamentally a fight or flight response. When you’re venting, you’re not being logical because you literally cannot be. Your fight or flight response comes from the amygdala, and when that part of the brain is active it actively suppresses the frontal lobe, which is responsible for your logic and reasoning ab