When Intellects Collide.....

WHO says intellectual discourse is damn boring?  I beg to disagree, so I'm sharing this Quora.com post by Alessandro:  American physicist Robert Williams Wood was on trial for 'beating the RED light'.  And he defended himself by claiming that the RED  traffic light appeared GREEN to him because of the relativistic "DOPPLER EFFECT".  Struck by the physicist's scientific explanation, the judge was about to acquit him when, suddenly, a young man intervened. With the intent of demolishing the physicist's statement, the young man offered to calculate the speed at which a driver would have to travel for a red light to appear green to him.  The judge accepted the young man's proposal and after the latter had finished his calculation, carried out with cold calm, changed the penalty for violation of the traffic code from 'for having gone through a RED light for having exceeded the maximum speed limit instead📗📙📘

The young man smiled ironically in the direction of Wood who, a few days earlier, in his capacity as a professor, had failed him in the physics exam.  This reminds me of that age-old cliche:  TIT for TAT.  Stone me and i'll stone you.  BUT WHAT I heard many times is that silence can be that deafening.  THAT is, if you are more quiet, the better control you have in life💚💛💜

Corollary to this, I often heard this one-liner as well:  LISTEN MORE, SPEAK LESS.  In the most practical terms, the less we speak, very obviously the lesser are the chances of us ending up uttering something 'stupid' OR just off-track.  Moreover, like it OR not, you may come out OR stand up as someone WHO is intellectually upright.  Net result, there is that high likelihood of people eager to hear WHAT you want to say.  WHAT an irony, right???

If there's one gaping hole most educational and academic systems share in common, most of their curricula are focused on the subjects and technical aspects BUT HOW often do we hear subjects that are focused on PEOPLE SKILLS, on SOFT SKILLS?  The irony here is that 90% of the time, we will be dealing with people and even getting into loggerheads with some of them is sometimes inevitable and this is WHERE our conflict resolution skills get into the picture.  BUT there's even a preemptive way and countermeasure to 'nip in the bud' potentially brewing conflicts😡😡😡

Our takeaway:  One lesson that gets refrained over and over again is DON'T BURN BRIDGES but WHAT gets missed here is the need to value every contact we make in life.  Even as we speak now, everytime I call the hotline, regardless IF it's my banker OR my favorite pizza delivery, first things first, I would inquire on the name at the other end of the line.  Regardless of intellect, WHAT we need to harness and enhance is our relationship-building and sustaining the gains.  We DON'T want to wait WHEN INTELLECTS COLLIDE, right dude???