Dan Lyons on “The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut”

We live in a culture with unprecedented communication options … and an unprecedented number of people embarrassing themselves professionally.

That’s why Dan Lyons, a writer and producer on HBO’s Silicon Valley — whose “Fake Steve Jobs” blog went viral in the ‘00s — is encouraging all of us to shut up. A self-described talkaholic, Lyons was pushed out of Hubspot (which inspired his bestseller Disrupted) and found his marriage on the rocks. To put it bluntly, Lyons’ life “kind of sucked,” he told b., until he realized that he just needed to learn to pipe down.

In STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, Lyons explores why we have such a hard time lately being quiet. While overtalking can sometimes be a result of unmanaged ADHD and hypomania symptoms — for the book, Lyons interviewed researchers who’ve found a link to prenatal biology — it’s often driven by our collective need to flex in the attention economy.

“We have this idea in our culture that success is measured by your ability to attract attention,” Lyons says. “Everyone wants to have a podcast and give a TED Talk and be an influencer. It’s just noise.”

However, when Lyons studied objectively successful people like Apple CEO Tim Cook (who is harshly critical of social media) and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, he realized that many of them were quiet by nature. “Nobody ever knew what [Wintour] was thinking, which gave her an advantage,” Lyons says, adding that most people are so uncomfortable with silence that they “will start to tell you all sorts of things they didn’t want to tell you.” (Talking less is not just a way to keep your foot out of your mouth; it’s a power move.)

Lyons found that meditation apps like Calm helped in his self-shushing journey. Now he tries to wait until the end of business meetings to talk, chiming in only if necessary. Not only will you save your breath, Lyons says, but your energy as well: “The real flex is not having to work so hard.”

This article first appeared in the b. Newsletter. Subscribe now!