> A degree of spin and image and projecting confidence is necessary to convince people that someone is worth following.

But people are not worth following. In the context of work, ideas might be good or bad, and the good ones don't need spin unless the environment is already as toxic as Chernobyl.

Everyone has competing ideas. There's no unanimous agreement on what "good" is. We don't all have enough knowledge to judge each idea purely on merit - a lot of the time our only way to judge is to see if the proposer really believes in it. So ideas have to be sold.

I think this is the cause of lots of problems in the world - we cannot all be scientists, laywers, doctors, engineers etc and we have to make judgements about who to put our faith in.

> Who would ever listen to an idea by someone who was too timid to voice it though?

Happens all the time. Just not common in the US. It’s a cultural thing.

I'm not in the US - I notice that quiet people get ignored in every country I've worked in so far.

Yeah this bias is pretty prevalent everywhere sadly - it’s just extreme in the US.

In Northern Europe and Japan(?) if you talk out of your ass overconfidently people will largely ignore you, similar to how you’d ignore someone making a TikTok prank video on the street.

Funecdote: I had a meeting once in Swedish company and the most quiet dude (from the northern part) didn’t say a peep for a good 40 min, and was asked near the end of the meeting “what do you think?”.

He paused for a good 10 seconds and said a few wise words like a goddamn wizard. Unfortunately it was too long ago to remember what we talked about, but I strongly remember everyone took that very seriously - he clearly had distilled his thoughts.

No data point for how many countries you've worked in or what company (e.g. American company in Belgium). More details please.

I admit it cannot be scientific and cultures differ a lot. In the absence of science, all I've got is that I end up getting told a lot of things and complained to a lot but those people totally shut up in meetings and it's left to me sometimes to bring up those ideas if I think they have to be voiced.

When those suggestions don't fit with the group-think I take the dismissive rejections or even mockery and the originators of the idea don't open their mouths. On the incredibly rare occasions that they do get some traction I immediately say - actually that's X's idea.

So IMO it regularly takes confidence to speak out and be heard. I've worked in South Africa (only as a student on some projects but it counts), Zimbabwe, UK, Germany and the US. Companies were everything from Finnish to Japanese to American to British and people were from all over the world - Britain, India, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Zimbabwe and South Africa and the US.

In some places like Zim there's a culture of respect to older people and things are more formal - so you are taking a big risk by disagreeing or expressing an opinion which might turn out not to be popular.

Americans do tend to get heard and listened to because they put themselves forward. IMO you can learn from them or be beaten by them in that respect because they will not learn to be meek.

The problem is that people who have an internal drive to have their statements and suggestions grounded in reality will always lose to bullshitters who don't.