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Charles Duhigg thought he was an excellent communicator.

He was a journalist.

He had a Pulitzer Prize.

His literal job was to communicate.

And then they made me a manager at the New York Times,

where I was working at the time,

and I discovered I had no idea what I was doing. And I actually was okay at like the logistics part of it,

but of course the logistics part is not the hard part of management. It was the management part

that I was terrible at. And it was all because I would do a bad job communicating.

Like, I would fail to hear what people were really trying to tell me.

I couldn't get across, you know, what was important to me.

Was that something you were internally starting to realize,

or were people telling you you were a bad communicator?

Like, how did that realization kind of evolve?

Yeah, no, my colleagues did not hide it from me that I wasn't granted the job.

Oh, no.

Charles was confused, but he was also curious.

I really wanted to connect with these people, and I wanted us to work together as a team,

and I couldn't figure out what was going wrong.

So being a writer, naturally, he decided to investigate communication more deeply and write about it.

He wanted to know what people who are incredibly effective at communicating do, that the rest of us don't.

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