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Listen More Than You Speak
How to communicate effectively so you don’t get lost in translation
“If you understood everything I say, you’d be me.”
— Miles Davis
Disclaimer: The words that follow are solely the opinion of the author and are inevitably wrong. The best stuff is in the hyperlinks. Please enjoy.
Sometime back in 2015 or 2016, my mom had told me about a phone app that allowed you to listen to audiobooks for free through the library. I had downloaded it and then never used it. Whoops.
It was now 2018, and I was having a tough time in my work life. I felt at odds with the labor I was performing and much of the dogma of my profession. I was looking for inspiration as to what in the heck I should do with my life.
I had always been a voracious reader as a child. I used to inhale fiction. Reading was an escape into worlds unknown.
In college, I obsessed over reading Newsweek magazine and other similar publications in addition to my coursework as part of the Philosophy, Politics, and the Public program at Xavier University. I was fascinated by learning about other cultures, other ways of life. I liked trying to relate what I was studying in history to current events and trends.
I had stopped reading for years though. I think on some level, I believed there wasn’t much more for me to learn. You can of course always add new facts to your store of knowledge, but I had a sense that I didn’t have anything left to modify in my core life philosophy.
I understood how most things worked and why. Everything I read felt like a reiteration of what I already knew. There was nothing new under the sun, and I was intellectually bored and stagnant. Hindsight’s always 20/20 — such arrogance.
So when it felt like life was finally slapping me in the face in a novel way I didn’t quite know how to manage, I humbly returned to reading. I found Medium and started gobbling it up in the same way I had Newsweek.
I replaced political pieces with self-help articles and how-to’s for building websites, blogs, and vlogs. I finally took my mom’s advice and started listening to audiobooks on those…
