The Easiest Thing To Say…

The easiest thing to say is…’I don’t know’…

I decided that, of all the useless things I can write about in a single day, I would like to say a bit about the sentence ‘I don’t know’. I hear it pretty often from persons with whom I try to engage in a simple conversation, usually by starting a question.

When a person says ‘I don’t know’, he or she may be implying one or more of the following:

1. He/She really doesn’t know the answer to a question that you are asking.
2. He/She is too lazy to think of the answer or think of a less curt reply.
3. He/She is trying to say, “I’m don’t know how to answer your question, so just shut up because I’m not interested to talk to you now…”

 

In Aubrey C. Daniels’ book, ‘Bringing Out the Best in People’, he mentioned of something called ‘extinction burst’.

I won’t go much deeper into explaining the technicalities, but I could give you a simple example of what ‘extinction burst’ is.

Example:

1. You press a button in the elevator and it doesn’t work.
2. Because you notice that it doesn’t work, you decide to press the button a little harder.
3. It still doesn’t work, so you start hammering away at the button, pressing it many times, repeatedly, but to no avail.
4. You lose your temper and kick the elevator door, then you give up.

It’s the simple case with people giving you that curt reply, “I don’t know”.

After a while, you tend to ‘give up’ engaging with such persons. Have you been saying “I don’t know” too many times before? Have people stopped talking to you as a result? Go figure.

==End==