Covering your ears

A man wanted to steal a bell. It was heavy, so he decided to break it up and carry it off in pieces.

He hit it with a mallet. The bell rang out, and he was terrified someone would hear.

So he plugged his own ears, and the ringing seemed to vanish, and he thought: excellent, now nobody can hear it.

The usual telling has him being an idiot. But watch the internal logic. The bell was huge and the sound was enormous, so it must be the ears. From the inside, the theory is completely consistent. He solved the problem he could observe and left untouched the problem he could not.

Everyone knows this story. Very few people can find their own hands.

The company whose numbers are bad and whose meetings are full of adjectives. The relationship where a subject has been off the table for two years and both people have become extremely polite. The person who has been "about to change" for six years, and whose friends have stopped mentioning it.

Whatever the equivalent of the bell is, notice that the volume hasn't changed. What changed is that the people nearby stopped bringing it up.

MOJOWAY is a conversation where nobody has agreed to be polite. One honest hour a week is worth more than six months of a room that has gone quiet.