Surrounded by Idiots

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The person who never returns your emails, the one who talks for twenty minutes without landing a point, the colleague who needs three days to make a decision you’d make in three seconds — Thomas Erikson’s argument is that none of them are idiots. They’re just wired differently than you are. And here’s the uncomfortable part: to them, you’re the difficult one. Communication, Erikson insists, happens on the listener’s terms. Everything you say gets filtered through the other person’s biases and frames of reference, and what survives that filter is the only message that actually lands. You can’t change how someone receives you. You can only change how you send.

Thomas Erikson on SummaryShelf

Surrounded by Idiots