Sometimes You Need to Just Shut Up & Listen

'When Lee Iacocca worked for Robert McNamara at Ford Motor Co. in the 1950s, he tried imitating his mentor's style of summarizing--numbering his points to make an argument sound more emphatic. According to Iacocca, 'McNamara would say, I'm going to give you five good reasons why you don't know what in the hell you're talking about. then he'd tick them off.' This can backfire. 'When I tried that,' Iacocca recalled, 'I couldn't remember what the hell my fourth point was.' Sometimes the only way to learn from a master, says University of Michigan psychologist Chris Peterson, is to just 'shut up and listen.'
--From an article on how people react to being around brilliant people, from the April issue of Psychology Today