Defending Myself Against No One in Particular
October 22, 2013
When listening to the latest episode of Back to Work, Merlin said something that struck me. He talked about how it seems fans in tech culture spend so much time defending their choices that they refuse to admit when something isn’t great. I quickly realized that I do this exact same thing. If there is an opportunity to say something great about an Apple product, I jump at it. Even worse, I think I jump even faster to bash anything that isn’t Apple.
An example of that is a good friend talking about how he is switching away from an iPhone to an Android device. Instead of really understanding the decision why, I instead trolled him in his Facebook post about it. And don’t worry, that troll gained more likes than the original post or other comments on the thread, seemingly reinforcing my decision to do so.
The thing is, many people I respect in the tech industry don’t hesitate to point out the flaws in the products they like. While John Siracusa and Marco Arment are fans of Apple’s work, they are also some of the first to talk about where Apple needs to improve as well on ATP. Both of them respect the work that Apple does, but also understand that no one, or no company is perfect.
I am not saying that I am going to hyper analyze every decision I make, just spend less time telling everyone how great a decision it was. There are lots of smart people I interact with making decisions that are right for them. I am going to stop trying to tell them why they should switch to whatever I am using and instead try to listen about why they made the decision they did.