Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell….together!

My two favorite writers happen to be friends.  They became friends after learning that they were both enamored with each other’s writing skills.  I am trying to carve out my own writing style, and I look to them to model parts of my writing after.  I was thrilled to see that they decided to share a back and forth email exchange on ESPN.com this week.  You can read part one of the three part series here.

Malcolm Gladwell

They talk about sports of course, but its how they talk that intrigues me so much.  They illustrate their points so vividly.  They can pull sports and pop culture references up and use them to defend or counter some argument or principle that is being discussed.  I understand that they see life principles at work in all the various aspects of life that they observe, but I’m so impressed by how they put it down in written word.

Bill Simmons

With the technology online growing ever more sophisticated and helpful, Simmons has transitioned some of his writing into audio podcasts.  In fact, the email exchange was originally suggested to be a phone conversation that would be converted into a podcast.  Gladwell thought that it would be more fun to write their thoughts down, rather than discuss them together aloud.  This gives them even more to discuss, as he chides Simmons on responding to his emails so quickly, while Gladwell himself takes several hours to give his written responses.

This has me thinking (which is a good thing).  What is the difference between being a good writer and being a good speaker?  Both are the results of thoughts in our brains.  Some speakers write their speeches down, then memorize them or come close to memorizing them, and soar.  Other people flounder when speaking this way and it is obvious that their oration was written.  Sometimes with writing, I can create something great after tweaking it several times, tinkering with all of the possible ways to communicate something, and finally settling on the best way that I can write it.  Other times, I can just sit down and the words seem to just flow from my hands, in the exact right order that I would have put them in, would I have tweaked them.

I’m still trying to figure all of this out, because communication is paramount in relationships.  Our intentions are not always discerned by the people we have relationships with.  What we mean is not often what is heard.  I’m a lot less arrogant when I consider that what I say is not what was understood by my listener.  Therefore a reaction to something I said is often times just a misunderstanding.  That tends to make two way communication more rich than one way communication.

And I’m sitting here writing a one way communication to you.  Oh well.  It’s all a journey.  I love it.