long pauses can be rhetorically powerful. i think showing people you’re thinking-and telling them—is also great. you can always say “i need time to process what you said” and write it down
Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
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Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#92I just fundamentally believe that most human traits aren't good or bad, they're situationally appropriate. Healthy integration of your traits means recognizing when your traits are appropriate and putting yourself into those situations, and recognizing when your traits are not appropriate, and leaning on the people in your life who have the traits that are appropriate for that situation.
In your case, if you're a slow, methodical thinker, you need to have a few people at hand who are quick thinkers and can make snap decisions and assessments when it's appropriate to do so.
I'm a quick, intuitive thinker, and I need people in my life who can slow me down and think through how my intuitions might be wrong.
Neither of these is better than the other. Both are needed. Love yourself. :)
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#93I'm a slow thinker who's quick witted. Odd question bud.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#94Sometimes what people think is quickness is actually extensive prep. I had a 30 minute meeting the other day to ask a team to do something I didn’t think they would want to do. It ended up going really smoothly and they just took my word for it, but had they not, I spend several hours preparing for that meeting, gathering data, preparing charts to illustrate the data, thinking of the possible objections and responses…
100%. Preparation is key. I never walk into a situation that matters without going over a ton of different paths the conversation could go. Even if the conversation goes down a path I didn't prepare for, the preparation was still helpful. Preparation looks like quick thinking, but it's not. It also very valuable at keeping your emotions in check, avoiding one of the common reasons conversations go off the rails.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the only insight IQ scores can give you. But each IQ test tests for something , and IQ being a bunk concept doesn't invalidate that. Reading comprehension tests test end-to-end ability to process that test and those questions in this circumstance. What comes next? tests test your ability to understand and solve a particular set of puzzles: they're a decent proxy for pattern-recognition skills if you share cult…
> IQ being a bunk concept It's not.
If IQ was a bunk concept then the US military could save tens of billions of dollars a year by admitting people who don't meet the current threshold. Imagine the promotion you'd get for saving tens of billions a year, every year, in perpetuity.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#96I ask a lot of questions and make the other people talk while I figure out what I am saying. This has the additional benefit of giving me more input. I simply refuse to participate in rapid back and forth. (In my dreams! But it does work sometimes.)
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#97Don't speak. People fill voids and awkward situations by saying stuff, even if that stuff is wrong. It's OK to be quiet. It's also OK to say 'Let me think about that'. Lose some arguments. And unless the situation you are in that requires a quick decision is life or death, it probably doesn't need one.
> Don't speak.
Great advice. Nothing shows confidence more than asking a question and then waiting for answer. Let the awkward silence sit.
And when you do speak, keep answers short and to the point. It also conveys confidence.
Anytime I see/hear someone rambling in email/on meeting, I know they are not confident in what they are saying.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#98So called slow-thinking may not be an all around trait, but rather specific mode in some contexts.
Do you generally experience slow physiological and neural reactions? In other words is it a 'hardware' limitation?
My guess, in your case it may be more about specific contexts. Some topics/domains may not be your forte, so to speak, yet you could be familiar with them enough to get engaged.
So a reasonable choice could be not to engage into debates, instead take a role of a talk show host which encourages guests to talk and tell. It's a win-win case, the other side shines, you learn about the person and the topic.
Eventually you'd know which topics are "yours". It's not possible to know everything, yet it's very much possible to listen to anything (unless it's a preschooler asking for ice-cream non-stop).
Also, exercising your memory may be of great help in life in general. Fast recall saves you more time for processing the information.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#99> Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
1) It may be that you aren't a slow thinker but a bad translator.
2) I prepare 70% of a conversation in my head (I may never use it).
3) My first drafts are awful. Second and third can be worse. The 30% is the bit I'm less likely to ruin on delivery.
4) I used early social media to learn to trim multiple paragraphs down to sentence. I'm still learning it.
5) I'm a slow learn. This took years.
Re: Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?
#100Avoiding situations in which I need to think on the fly. If I'm playing a game, I play a turn based game, not a real time game. Why do what you're bad at and will never be great at? Sadly one of the places where quick wittedness is most essential is face to face social interaction so at some point you just have to bite the bullet and do things you're worse at than others.
> Why do what you're bad at and will never be great at?
Because being good at things is not the be-all and end-all.