STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World

by Dan Lyons

Learning to shut the fuck up will change your life. It will make you smarter, more likable, more creative, and more powerful. It might even help you live longer. People who talk less are more likely to get promoted at work and more likely to prevail in negotiations. Speaking with intention—that is, not just blurting things out—improves our relationships, makes us better parents, and can boost our psychological and even physical well-being.

In the entirety of human history there has never been such a noisy age, and it keeps getting noisier. We’re not wired for such constant overstimulation, and it’s hurting our brains—literally causing brain damage

Seek out silence. Noise makes us sick. Literally. Information overload makes us constantly agitated and overstimulated, which leads to health problems and can even shorten our lives. Detach. Unplug. Spend time without your phone. Don’t talk, don’t read, don’t watch, don’t listen.

They described talkaholism as an addiction akin to alcoholism and said that while a talkaholic’s gift with words can help them advance in their careers, their inability to rein in their overtalking often leads to personal and professional setbacks.

“God, help me keep my mouth shut.”

Be disciplined. Be careful. Communicate with intention. Have a plan. Listen more than you speak. Stop talking out of habit, saying things for the sake of saying something.

“You can always say nothing.” When someone hurts your feelings, you don’t have to respond. In fact, you literally never have to open your mouth and speak, in any situation.

“When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.”

Try using the 50 Percent Rule. Write your email, count the words, then write it again using half as many. It takes longer to write a shorter email, but your message will have more impact. The shorter your message is, the more likely it is to be read. And bear this in mind: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contained 272 words. Does your update on the new marketing plan really deserve more than that?

The first is that extra words drain power from a message rather than adding it. The second is that before you speak or write, let your imagination leap to the future and imagine how your words will look then.

If you’re angry, don’t show it. If someone is shouting at you, in person or via email or text, do not shout back. This will infuriate the shouter. “If your enemy is temperamental, seek to irritate him,” Sun Tzu said. Stay calm. Bait your enemy into overtalking. Sit there, blank-faced, like Merkel did to the politician who attacked her in the Bundestag. Be happy! They’re angry; you’re not. You’ve already won.

“Always make those above you feel comfortably superior,”

“Nobody ever learned anything from listening to themselves speak.”

This is one of the big distractions Bodin-Lerner teaches students to look out for, the urge to tell your own story to match one you’ve just heard. Others include the urge to give advice and the urge to prove you’re smart. There’s also the one where, instead of listening, you’re thinking about what you’re going to say next, and the one where you have this great idea, and if you don’t share it right away, you’ll forget it.