Our new marketing director, Robert Brown, brought this to our attention.
from The Friendship Factor by Alan Loy McGinnis:
“Good Listeners Dispense Advice Sparingly
During the darkest hours of the Civil War, Lincoln wrote to an old friend and fellow lawyer, Leonard Swett in Springfield, asking him to come to Washington. Lincoln said he had some problems he wanted to discuss.
Swett hurried to the White House, and Lincoln talked to him for hours about the advisability of issuing a proclamation freeing the slaves. He went over all the arguments for and against such a move and then read letters and newspaper articles, some denouncing him for not freeing the slaves and others denouncing him for fear he was going to do so. After talking far into the evening, Lincoln shook hands with his old neighbor, said goodnight, and sent him back to Illinois without even asking for his opinion. Lincoln had done all the talking himself. That seemed to clarify his mind. “He seemed to feel easier after the talk,” Swett said. Lincoln hadn’t wanted advice. He had merely wanted a friendly, sympathetic listener to whom he could unburden himself.”
McGinnis focuses on Swett’s ability to listen. At OpenBook we’ve learned some of us produce a neurostimulus when we activate the smooth muscles we use to produce speech. This neurostimulus allows us to think more clearly, store in memory more durably, and retrieve more reliably than when we’re not exercising those muscles. While we admire Swett’s ability to listen, we admire Lincoln’s awareness of his need to talk in order to think clearly about this decision.