Company Blog

The Experiment

by Adam Zack — March 13, 2019

I maintain that “I know!”

Apparently last week’s blog got a little too descriptive. And I didn’t think there was such a thing! Lesson learned: When it comes to farts, bodily functions and pimples, detailed descriptions are not needed. Everyone just knows what you’re talking about with a few brief descriptors.

So, I think one of the underappreciated things in business, and in life, is experimentation. It’s not the safe route, and the outcome is the opposite of certainty. If there’s something you want to change, experimentation with different options can usually lead to ways to make that change you need. Or it just may be a change you want, but don’t necessarily need. Now I’m not talking mad scientist kind of experimentation like Dr. Brown in Back to the Future, or the “Hey, let’s see what happens when we take mushrooms and drink a bottle of Jack Daniels” experimentation. I’m talking more practical experimentation like if we make the ad signs a different color what does it do to sales? Or if we tweak our ad pricing strategy, what are the possible results. Or if we don’t respond when someone makes a statement, does the conversation turn uncomfortable? I maintain that “I know!” and “Yeah, I know” are a couple of the most overused conversational responses today. I blathered on about it before: Why even converse when the other person already seems to know everything? So, I conducted an experiment the other day and counted how many times in conversation that someone said, “I know!” to me, I said it, or I heard someone else saying it. In one day, it was 76 times. I didn’t count “I know, right?” because that’s more of an agreeable statement.

So besides just keeping count of a pet peeve of mine from my grammatical high horse, what’s the point? There really isn’t one. Conversational habits are very hard to change. I do think, though, that the choice to be a better listener is prolific and difficult, and it has to start somewhere, and why not begin by listening to your responses in conversation. I know, right?