My X/Twitter feed pretty much consists of sports, politics, psychology, management, philosophy, and some personalities or bands. As such, I often get pics like the one below meant to provide some sort of advice or observation. Occasionally, they will catch my attention and I’ll reflect on it a bit. Obviously, some will contain a solid or descent point, while others not so much.
This particular one caught my attention as, upon first glance, it seems like solid enough advice, but as I thought more about it, I thought it would be more appropriate to say “Be smart. No one cares about your efforts, only THEIR results”. I recently wrote an article about egocentric or monocentric liberty and the concept still applies with this quote. One often thinks about their own efforts and the results they think should be important. However, we often fail to consider the view of our targeted audience.
When giving a lecture or with marketing, the first principle is to know your audience. What is their motivation? What result do they want to see? Do they only care about wins and losses or that you tried your best? Do they care that you made progress on an issue or are they an “all or none” mentality?
If you are doing something for yourself and your audience is you, then you can define your end goal. If, however, the audience is someone or some group such as your boss, sports fans, voters, a patient, customers, etc, then they define the results that matter to them. Their desired results may not match what you believe the results should be and your visible efforts may be factored into their desired result.
Being an anesthesiologist and dealing with operations daily, a surgeon may take heroic measures to save a patient. We could see him or her sweating over the patient and calling out orders left and right during a ruptured bowel or trauma case and ultimately the patient may die. In the operating room, we saw the effort. But the patient’s family may only know that the end result was the death of their loved one.
As an elected official, I see other elected officials that are essentially political grifters. Those officials or political figures focus on tweeting, stirring up false narratives or misinformation on the internet, or otherwise spend their time focusing their efforts on complaining as opposed to actually getting results for their constituents. On the flip side, there are elected officials who quietly go about taking solid votes and drafting public policy that makes a difference in the lives of their constituents. In both circumstances, their constituency will determine what results matter to them by confirming or rejecting the official in the next election.
Being someone who is inherently introverted and as one who values efficiency and actual results, it is often counterintuitive and disturbing for me to realize that the desired result from an audience is the production or the show as opposed to the end result. There is a term called “absence blindness” in which the audience may be blind to your effectiveness if they do not see or notice the show or the production. Thus, they see you as being absent even though you are efficient and producing desired outcomes. Thus, in order to avoid “absence blindness”, a politician may promote a “bridge to nowhere” in which there is physical proof that they provided something for their community.
An example in medicine that comes to mind revolves around the Dunning-Kruger effect in which those with less experience tend to overestimate their ability. We sometimes see experienced physicians who know how to prevent putting their patients or their team in harm's way on the front end. Less experienced physicians will end up doing an ill advised surgical case and wind up having to take heroic measures. Administrators or nursing staff may be blind to the wise ways of the experienced physician while praising or financially rewarding the physician who displayed the overconfidence of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” and likely contributed to the emergent situation in the first place.
The bottom line and take home message that we should glean from the meme is that being smart really means to have situational awareness and understand that your audience is who determines whether your efforts factor into the desired results. At that point, you can be smart and act accordingly.
Terry’s Take is a personal and professional opinion publication from Bryan Terry, MD and paid for by Bryan Terry for State Representative, Cheryl Terry Treasurer. Hope you enjoy the content.