Words are a type of action, and I guess apologising and then immediately moving on to defending yourself is not the sort of action which signals sincerity.
Well technically since it does take energy and time to move the vocal chords, mouth, tongue, etc..., but it’s such a low cost action that even doing something as simple as treating someone to lunch will outweigh it by a hundred fold.
I think what I was thinking of is that words can have arbitrary consequences and be arbitrarily high cost.
In the apologising case, making the right social API call might be an action of genuine significance. E.g. it might mean taking the hit on lowering onlookers’ opinion of my judgement, where if I’d argued instead that the person I wronged was talking nonsense I might have got away with preserving it.
John’s post is about how you can gain respect for apologising, but it does have often have costs too, and I think the respect is partly for being willing to pay them.
Words are a type of action, and I guess apologising and then immediately moving on to defending yourself is not the sort of action which signals sincerity.
Well technically since it does take energy and time to move the vocal chords, mouth, tongue, etc..., but it’s such a low cost action that even doing something as simple as treating someone to lunch will outweigh it by a hundred fold.
I think what I was thinking of is that words can have arbitrary consequences and be arbitrarily high cost.
In the apologising case, making the right social API call might be an action of genuine significance. E.g. it might mean taking the hit on lowering onlookers’ opinion of my judgement, where if I’d argued instead that the person I wronged was talking nonsense I might have got away with preserving it.
John’s post is about how you can gain respect for apologising, but it does have often have costs too, and I think the respect is partly for being willing to pay them.