Last week, I put up a video of Malcolm Gladwell speaking at TED.  Much like his books portray him, he is articulate, funny and engaging.  He can make something as silly as spaghetti sauce, riveting.

Currently, Bill Simmons is touring the country in promotion of his new book “The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy“.  I stumbled across a interview he was doing for ESPN about the book.  Check it out:

Something with it just didn’t seem to work.  I know that the first time I heard his voice, I was stunned by how dissimilar it was to the voice I has assigned him in my head while reading his articles.  I won’t criticize him here, because he is still a superb writer and I appreciate the thought process he goes through when creating his work.  Let’s just say that he helps to prove the idea that good writers are not necessarily good speakers.  It’s interesting food for thought if you are trying to become one, or both.

Gladwell illustrates the lessons from his story about Howard Moskowitz pretty darn well, so I won’t add much.

I too often find myself obsessed with universals and trying to discover the rules that govern the way that all of us behave.  The idea of variability and diversity is very intriguing.  In truth, there may only be a handful of universals amidst a sea of beautiful diversity and variables.  It seems to me that a large proportion of our conflicts and wars are due to leaders mistaking a variable truth for one that is universal, and then attempting to impose it on the masses.

Even attempting to give something as universal as “freedom” to another culture can fail based on the variable understandings and perspectives on freedom.

The older I get, the less “black and white” the world gets.  While I always knew that “There’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s”, I didn’t extrapolate that principle to many other areas of my life.  There always seemed to be a right way to do this, and a wrong way to do that.  The more I understand about my own perception, the less faith I have in my ability to discern things that are ALWAYS right or ALWAYS wrong.

Since taste seems to be obviously chock full of variability, where does that principle end?  What is universal?

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.