Category: Society

The 7 Cardinal Rules of Life

The 7 Cardinal Rules of Life

Nik

When I was 18, I had no idea who I wanted to be. I was about to leave home and start college, and the only thing I knew was that the future was uncertain.

Before I left, I tried to fight my nervosity in many ways. I read everything I could get my hands on that seemed relevant to my chosen academic field — a mix of business and engineering. I prepared my courses in advance. I sought reassurance from others that I’d chosen a good school and degree.

In the end, what helped me the most was an exercise you could file under “youthful naïvete:” I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down “my 30 guiding principles.” Most of them were simple, like “Let go what must be let go,” “Simplify,” and, “Have no secrets.” I still have the list. It’s on my pinboard. I’m looking at it right now. So why was I naïve to create it?

First of all, I didn’t know that what I’d come up with weren’t actually principles. They were just rules.

The difference between a rule and a principle is that one is merely a guideline that follows from the other. Principles don’t break. They’re universal. Gravity is a principle. Whether it’s you who falls from a skyscraper, your cat, or a 17th century vase, it’s not gonna end well. Gravity makes no exceptions.

In order to deal with principles, we have rules. “Don’t jump off skyscrapers” is a rule and a good one at that. Unlike principles, however, rules break all the time. Often, it’s us doing the breaking — and often prematurely.

Eventually, however, even the best rules expire. It’s part of their design. Once they no longer serve their function, they’re meant to be broken. “Don’t go faster than 30 miles per hour” is a rule. It’s useful on a poorly built road, but once that road becomes a highway, it must be updated.

That’s the second reason my list was premature: In the ten years since I wrote them down, I have broken every single one of my rules. And yet, I’m still glad I wrote that list. You know why? Because the idea that I wanted to live by some rules — despite not knowing which ones or how or why — was enough.

It didn’t matter that the list was arbitrary. What mattered was that it sent me on a path where I would look for rules and principles everywhere, learn to tell the difference, and continue to build my life around them as I went.

Today, what I’m most interested in is neither principles nor rules, but what lives in-between. That’s one of the many lessons I learned along the way: Each rule may have a lifecycle, but that cycle can repeat many times in one life. So if a rule somehow keeps reappearing, keeps proving itself as useful, and continues to hurt if I break it, that rule catches my attention.

Such rules have extended validity and therefore live right between normal guidelines and the base layer of principles. I guess we could call them ‘cardinal rules.’ As you can imagine, they’re hard to come by.

Luckily, I found some.

The 7 Cardinal Rules of Life

In 1995, Studio Ghibli, a Japanese anime company, released a movie called Whisper of the Heart. It’s about two high school students struggling with their artistic callings, their feelings for each other, and coming of age.

About a decade ago, someone extracted seven rules from the film and released them online. The original source remains lost, but they’ve been making the rounds ever since.

Like my own rules, they’re all quite simple, but much closer to timeless principles. So whoever you are, wherever you sit: Thank you.

Thank you for giving us…The 7 Cardinal Rules of Life.

1. Make peace with your past so it won’t mess with your present.

Bill Gates says the worst day in his life was the day his mother died. It’s a simple reminder that we all have regrets.

We all keep past versions of ourselves in a closet somewhere, and every time we open it, we feel pain and suffering. We can’t change the people we once were, but we can make peace with them. Open the closet and let in some light. Reconcile. Otherwise, our past will forever be a drag on our heels.

Life is but a series of fleeting moments, one forever chasing the next. The only place where you can live, act, and make a difference is the present. Today.

2. Time heals everything, so give it time.

Sometimes, you can’t find the power to move on immediately. Sometimes, you really want to kick yourself. That too is part of life. What you can do is allow time to pass.

I know you want to just fix everything and move on, but if you stitch a wound poorly, it’ll get worse down the road. So take time. Take care of yourself. Your health. Your broken heart and broken parts.

Sometimes, even what heals leaves a scar. Those will be with us forever. The least we can do is let them mend properly.

3. What others think of you is none of your business.

Most of our scars come from wounds inflicted by other people. Words can hurt us more than weapons. But it’s not your job to imagine what arrows people might point at you inside their heads. The majority will never fire.

4. Don’t compare your life to others, and don’t judge them.

Instead of taking shots at others, most people decide to draw up — and lose at — another imagined game: Who’s better? It’s a moot question. We have no idea what anyone’s story is like up to the page on which we meet them.

Mark Twain said, “Comparison is the death of joy.” Worse, it’s also the birth of misery. The less you compare, the bigger your capacity for empathy. Meet people on their own terms. You won’t doubt yourself as much and be less prone to jealousy, which only leads to fear, anger, hate, and suffering.

5. Stop thinking so much, it’s alright not to know the answers.

If you’re not supposed to think about others, nor what they think, what are you supposed to mull over? What you think of yourself? Actually, it’s fine to not think so much at all. Answers often come to you when you least expect it.

Make your choices. Choose a path. Be determined. Commit. But, once you have, let the chips fall where they may. You’ll know when to take a different fork in the road.

6. No one is in charge of your happiness, except you.

At the end of the day, what you desire most in life only you can give to yourself. You already have everything. Right inside. Feel your heart. Point at your chest. There. That’s where happiness is.

We spend all this time looking for something we can’t see because it’s not there. The outside world is only as good as what you do with everything that happens in it. Are you cultivating your experiences? Cherishing them?

If not, it’s not fuel or oxygen that’s missing. Only you can relight that fire because it rests deep inside. Choose to kindle that flame. Protect it. Hold up its light. And let it shine for everyone to see.

7. Smile, for you don’t own all the problems in the world.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has over 160 million fans. He gets a lot of letters. But none like Haley Harbottle’s.

Haley has Moebius syndrome. She’s 22. She has never smiled in her life. Haley was supposed to have “smile surgery,” but her anaesthetist made a mistake and she almost died. Soon, she’ll try it again, hoping to smile for the first time.

There is someone on this planet literally dying to smile. Yet here we are, you and I, walking around, often choosing not to extend this simple, near-automatic gesture to uplift our fellow human beings.

Whatever problems plague you in your day-to-day life, chances are, they’re not all that important in the grand scheme of things. We each have our own challenges, but as long as you can smile, do it. Who knows who you’ll infect.

The True Purpose of Rules & Principles

Here’s one more thing I’ve learned about rules and principles: Many rules can follow from one principle, but you can never act on principle alone.

“Friendship should be based on loyalty” is a principle you can aspire to live by, but without the rule of “I never abandon my friends at the last minute,” it doesn’t mean anything.

When I was 18, I thought I could rein in the chaos of the world with a few well-chosen guidelines. I was wrong, but I took a step in the right direction: We can never control the world, but in learning to control ourselves, we can get better at dealing with this fact. Structure isn’t something we can project on the outside, but if we cultivate it internally, we’ll be ready to make a change when we need to.

That’s what all this rule-setting and principle-discovering taught me: Learning how to live is an ongoing process. There will always be rules to be updated, principles to be understood better, new ideas to be added to old truths.

We decide who we are in this world not once but with every action we take, every principle we value, and every rule we choose to follow. That is their true purpose: to serve us in our everlasting quest to become.

I don’t know how long the rules from the movie will last for you on this never-ending mission, but, like one of its characters, I’d like to remind you:

“You’re wonderful. There’s no need to rush. Please take your time.”

The 3 Kinds of Overthinking Cover

The 3 Kinds of Overthinking

Nik

Overthinking comes in two flavors: ruminating on the past and worrying about the future. Both offer endless avenues to create a downward spiral of negative thoughts, but, at the end of the day, they resemble two simple fears we all have: a fear of regret and a fear of uncertainty.

Of course, it’s impossible to completely avoid regret and uncertainty in our lives. Therefore, the overthinking outbreaks that result from us being afraid of them are, generally, our most unproductive.

We can’t change what we could have, would have, should have done better, slower, faster, not at all, or not quite the way we did it. We can’t assess the flaws, success, or even likelihood of countless scenarios and eventualities that will never come to pass.

All thoughts in either direction are a waste of mental and physical energy. As soon as reality knocks on our senses or we snap out of our thought bubble and return to it, they go up in flames, having cost us dearly, but gained us little.

There is, however, a third kind of overthinking: Obsessing over solutions to present-day problems.

We source these problems from our recent past or immediate future, then frantically assess options to combat them. If you find yourself musing about 17 different strategies to mellow your explosive temper after lashing out at someone or flicking through book after book to find the best business model for the startup you want to launch, that’s present-day overthinking.

This type of compulsive thinking can often be productive, which is why it’s the hardest to get rid of, to diagnose, and to accept as a problem in the first place.

In fact, as a society, we often celebrate people for performing mental ultra-marathons. We call them successful entrepreneurs. We shower them with money and status and tell them to never stop.

Ask the world’s richest man what his worst fear is, and he’ll say he doesn’t want his brain to stop working. That’s how embedded overthinking is in our culture. But it’s still overthinking, still eating away at our peace of mind and happiness.

To some extent, our problem-solving nature is just that — nature. Our brains are wired for survival and, for the better part of 200,000 years, surviving meant being creative.

Not just in the literal sense of procreating and producing food and shelter from our surroundings, but also in being crafty in planning our next move. How can we cross this field without being exposed? What’s the best way to avoid being seen by the tiger? Those are creative problems. They require immediate thought, strategy selection, and subsequent action.

For better or for worse, however, the world no longer presents us with a single, constant survival problem, framed in a great variety of differing challenges. For the most part, we’ve got that covered.

Instead, we’re now tasked with moderating an entity that’s much harder to maintain than the human body and that we know next to nothing about despite decades of research: the human mind.

Rather than run down the simple 3-item checklist of “food, sleep, exercise,” we now face vast, open-ended questions, like “How do I find meaning?”, “What makes me happy?”, and “How can I best manage my emotions and attention?”

These aren’t simple problems. There are no clear-cut answers. They’re lifetime projects, and we slowly craft their outcomes through the habits and behaviors we choose every day. That’s the thing. We choose. We get to. There’s no pressure to think-pick-act. Only freedom in near-limitless quantities.

As a result, our problem-seeking, survivalistic simulation machine turns on itself. In lack of real, pressing issues to tackle, it finds some where none exist or crafts one from its own imagination. That’s overthinking type I and II. The dwelling on regrets and anxiety about the future.

Or — and this is the brain’s ultimate self-deception — it latches on to a tangible, relatable, available challenge and goes into brainstorm overdrive.

How can I go from zero running experience to completing a marathon in nine months? What podcast are people dying to listen to that doesn’t exist? Is there a way to improve or replace the umbrella? Questions like these make our synapses light up, but whether they find graspable answers or not, it’s easy for them to become self-perpetuating.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting meaningful work and finding happiness through self-improvement, but when these endeavors and the productive thoughts that go into them become ends instead of tools, we quickly drift into self-loathing and misery. So how can we stop at the right moment?

There is no shortage of tactics from science to help us address our past- and future-oriented overclocking. Most of them involve replacing the negative thought with a more positive one, for example by looking at different angles of a situation to make the bad scenario less believable or reframing problems as challenges.

Instead of blaming your soggy shoes on bad luck, you could look to the rainy weather or inattentive driver who splashed you as he went by. Similarly, you could focus on wanting to feel fitter rather than lamenting that you’re out of shape.

There’s also the idea of simply writing down your thoughts for a sense of relief, distracting yourself, and learning to stay present so you can focus on whatever’s right in front of you.

From personal experience, I can say that last one is particularly powerful. Meditation helps me stay aware throughout my day, not just of the negative consequences of overthinking, but of individual thoughts themselves and whether I want to further pursue them or not.

None of us can turn off our inner monologue for extended periods of time. It runs right through each of the 16 or so hours we’re awake each day. But we can decide which thoughts deserve to be chased and which ones don’t. We can learn to let go and return to whatever we we’re doing.

But what do we do when our positive and well-intended thoughts spiral? How do we deal with our entrepreneurial, creative energy when it runs wild?

That, I think, requires one more step: Knowing you are valuable even when you don’t do anything. When I meditate, I constantly remind myself that, “I don’t have to think about this right now.” Lately, I even tell myself: “You don’t have to think at all.”

For me, this realization gets to the heart of the problem: Even when you don’t think, you’re still a valuable, lovable human being.

In a world that guarantees the survival of many but provides existential guidance to none, doing, thinking, solving problems, it all matters little in comparison to us being here in the first place. Right here, right now. It’s a wonderful, rare thing to have been born and be alive today. Enough to be grateful and more than that to be enough.

Type III overthinkers define themselves by how much they think. How many problems they solve, how useful and busy they are, and how many of their own faults they can erase. But even when you don’t think — can’t think, as nature sometimes reminds all of us — you’re still a valuable person.

You might be afraid that people will laugh at you, isolate you, throw you out into the cold. That won’t happen and it’s something you should take comfort in again and again.

Mindfulness is an excellent tool to combat all kinds of overthinking. What allows you to exercise it in the first place, however, is remembering we’ll still love you, even if your mind doesn’t always run like a perfect, well-oiled machine.

How to Get Rich the Humble Way Cover

How to Get Rich the Humble Way

Nik

One in 185 people is a millionaire. Credit Suisse counted 42.2 million of them in the 2018 Global Wealth Report. Divide that by the 7.7 billion people currently inhabiting this planet, and you get to that number — about 0.5%.

And just like you “get” to that number, we think “getting rich” is an activity. That it’s about movement, action, struggle. It’s implied. Think about how we use the word “get.” We get coffee. A job. To the top of a mountain.

It’s true, of course, that getting rich requires years of hard work. You’ll have to learn a lot, build skills, make the right decisions at the right time, and have a whole bunch of luck in the process. But if that’s all we focus on, we miss the most important aspect of how wealth is built: through compound growth.

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How You See Yourself Will Determine How the World Sees You Cover

How You See Yourself Will Determine How the World Sees You

Nik

I have been following Casey Neistat for almost ten years. He’s one of my favorite humans.

What few people know is that even before he started on Youtube, he was already a successful filmmaker. He and his brother sold a show to HBO for $2 million the year he opened his channel. He’d been nominated for a Daytime Emmy and had received lots of praise for his short films — films like iPod’s Dirty Secret, which pushed Apple, yes, Apple, into offering a battery replacement program and extended warranties for iPod’s that showed poor battery life.

If you’ve been following him long enough, none of this will come as a surprise. Because if one thing becomes evident from observing Casey, it’s that he’s a hustler. Always has been, always will be. He sets goals, works hard, achieves them, and then sets bigger goals. That’s who he is. He talks about it often.

Given his hardcore work ethic, soon, some of his first Youtube videos went viral. There was his analysis of Chatroulette, the one about $2 bills, and, of course, Make It Count for Nike, which reached three million views in its first week alone — in 2012.

Until 2015, Casey continued making hits like these on the regular. However, after five years and about 100 such videos, Casey had “just” 500,000 subscribers. That’s a lot, but considering how much Youtube itself grew in that time, Casey’s one hundred million views, and that even his Twitter following was half as large, that’s not what you’d expect.

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What Is the Purpose of Art? Cover

What’s the Point of Art?

Nik

In 2001, contemporary artist Damien Hirst went to the opening of his new exhibition in London. Standing in the rubble of the afterparty, he felt inspired — and turned it into an impromptu art installation.

The next morning, the janitor was the first person in the building. Sadly, he didn’t share Hirst’s sense of imagination — and chucked his assortment of ashtrays, coffee cups, and beer bottles right into the trash. Oops.

Hirst thought it was hilarious. The gallery owner probably didn’t. On the surface, this is just an ironic, funny incident. But if we analyze it, it reveals something much deeper: Damien Hirst truly understands art.

In Germany, we have a saying. We use it when someone’s clinging to an item out of nostalgia, mostly in a good-spirited, but also a slightly mocking way:

“Is this art or can this go?”

It’s a joke, but it’s also meant to help you move on. Not from the nostalgia or the good memories, but from the item. It’s your art exhibition, but we’re the janitor. And we’re here to clean up the building.

I don’t “get” Damien Hirst. I don’t get the animals or the dots or the skulls. And I definitely don’t get the sculptures of giant uteruses. But then again, to this day, I struggle with most contemporary art.

I keep catching myself, asking: What’s the point? And I think that’s the exact right question to ask. But because I keep looking for subjective signs of effort and quality, I’m missing it. Have missed it.

Because now, it’s starting to dawn on me that, maybe, art is not about what you can spot. What you can directly see. Maybe, it’s about what you can feel.

And there’s no rulebook for who feels what with which kind of art.

On April 20, 2018, we lost famous DJ Avicii. Exactly one year later, two cellists released a video. They played his biggest hit to 50,000 people. When I watch that video, I can feel it. And I can see all the people in it feeling it too.

But when you watch it, you may not. That’s fine. In fact, that’s the point.

We all have different feelings at different times. But we feel in different ways too. And that’s why we need different art. Why we need a whole lot of it. Because as different as we are, we all want to feel something.

That something is connectedness. And that’s what art can give us.

Art can take on infinite forms. It could be a nod in the street, a silent wave to the stranger at the bar. Maybe, it’s an email to stressed parents or a coding tutorial on a napkin. And yes, sometimes it’s oil on canvas or a symphony.

But as soon as it connects two people, if for the briefest of moments, it works.

Once it’s done that, it can go. Even if it’s “art.” Because we’ll remember the connection. We can summon it with our senses. As long as we do that, we’re never truly alone. We might be lonely or misunderstood or lack intimacy, but we’ll always be human. Still one of many who are one.

Art is just the reminder. That’s what Damien Hirst knows. And that’s why the janitor can throw away his art.

Sometimes, we can find this reminder in a tribute. Sometimes, we can find it in the trash. But we can always find it in a memory.

The composition may long be swept away, but the connection forever stays. It was never about the installation. It was about us.

And that’s the point of art.

Why Rest Is Essential To High Performance Cover

Why Rest Is Essential To High Performance

Nik

On The Tim Ferriss Show, LeBron James said he sleeps eight or nine hours each night. Sometimes ten. And if he can’t get those, he’ll catch up with a two-hour nap. James is a prominent fan of quality shut-eye, but not the only one.

According to ESPN, sprinter Usain Bolt and tennis stars Venus Williams and Maria Sharapova also shoot for an average sleeping time close to the double-digits. Point guard legend Steve Nash told The New York Times that naps on game day are a common occurrence among NBA players — and they help.

The message is that sleep isn’t just beneficial, but essential to top performance.

This is easy enough to understand for physically demanding activities, like sports, but when it comes to knowledge work and creative professions, we have a much harder time accepting the importance of sleep.

And yet, all of us know how tough it can be to host a long meeting or how hungry we are after hours of creativity. So what’s going on here?

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Everything We Do Is Not For Today Cover

Everything We Do Is Not For Today

Nik

When the town’s crime boss wants a precious piece of land, he sends some of his goons to terrorize the school that’s built on it. First, they threaten the principal, then they torch a classroom.

Luckily, the local Kung Fu master saves the day. When he tries to acquire more help in form of the police, however, the chief says his hands are tied. His boss took the case. Corruption. After listening patiently, the master starts talking:

“The world’s not fair. But moral standards should apply to all. Those who rule aren’t superior and those who are ruled aren’t inferior. This world doesn’t belong to the rich. Or even the powerful. It belongs to those with pure hearts.

Have you thought about the children? Everything we do, they’re watching. And everything we don’t do. We need to be good role models.”

And then, master Ip Man says something important. Something we forget. Something that, little by little, seems to fade from the human story:

“Everything we do is not for today — but for tomorrow.”

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Happiness Is Loving the Boring Days Cover

Happiness Is Loving the Boring Days

Nik

Out of all the great TED talks that exist, Barry Schwartz’s is easily the best. He talks about what he calls The Paradox of Choice. I’ve gone back to it countless times for countless reasons, but my favorite part is when he shows this comic:

David Sipress, The New Yorker, Nov 24, 2003

Ask anyone how they feel about their life from ten years ago, and they’ll likely tell you that “those were simpler times.” Less to worry about, more to enjoy. Somehow, everything was easier. Today, it’s all complicated. Always.

“Everything was better back when everything was worse.”

It’s more than a good chuckle. So simple, yet so instinctively true. But why does our gut want to agree so badly when we hear this? Barry explains:

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Stop Optimizing Dumb Shit Cover

Stop Optimizing Dumb Shit

Nik

I have a friend. She’s brilliant at arts and crafts. Every time I enter her place, she’s tinkering. Decorating. Customizing a birthday gift. Preparing a surprise package. And it all looks amazing. Bar none.

But when she tells me the story of how her current project came together, I always die a little bit inside.

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How to Communicate Better Cover

How To Communicate Better: 7 Simple Lines to Express Your True Thoughts, Beliefs & Feelings

Nik

Good communication is always simple.

What’s hard is having the courage to let it be. To say “I don’t love you,” rather than concoct some elaborate web of intricate, lesser truths — or even outright lies — hoping the other will stumble into it, trip, and fall over all on their own.

In the movie Hitch, titular character and communication expert Alex says:

“60% of all human communication is nonverbal; body language. 30% is your tone. So that means 90% of what you’re saying ain’t coming out of your mouth.”

It sounds intriguing, but I think it grossly underestimates the importance of truth. Even our subjective one. If you’ve ever sheepishly confessed something, shaking like a wet poodle, you know what I mean: A powerful sentence uttered poorly may be weaker than it could be, but it doesn’t turn the truth into a lie. People can tell what we tell. And they’ll react accordingly.

When I fail to communicate clearly, to say what I want to say, it’s almost never because of some complex combination of circumstances. It’s that I’m too afraid to say what I really — like really — think and believe. I have wiggled my way around questions, nodded my head when I should have shaken it, said “yes” when I meant to say “no,” shied away from asking for help, neglected giving compliments, and hated saying “sorry.” All in hopes of the truth magically finding its way to the light, which, of course, it never does.

Because it’s my job to take it there. The job, really. A job for all of us. The only one that matters. I’m not sure how much of what we’re saying comes out of our mouths, but I know that 90% of what does is a weak version of the truth. We may soften it to be polite, censor ourselves to maintain our image, or ask for less than we want because it’s more than we think we deserve, but, at the root of it all, there’ll always be fear.

There’s no way for me to bestow the power to act in spite of this fear upon you or even myself. It’s a war fought in countless battles over one’s lifetime, and you’ll need to summon the courage to be honest time and again. But it helps to keep some truths at hand. A little vial filled with beacons, all but ready to release. You’ll still have to uncork it each time, but at least it’s close by.

I’m only 27, but I’ve had — or would’ve had — to use all of these hundreds of times already. Here’s hoping that, in the future, you and I both will.

1. When you don’t know something, say:

“I don’t know.”

People will respect you for it. It’s a chance for them to say “I don’t know” too. And then you can figure it out together. We think of this line as an admission of defeat, but it’s actually the beginning of taking your power back.

2. When you don’t understand something, say:

“I don’t understand.”

People will explain again. Actually, most of the time, they’ll be happy to. It means they can double-check that they understood what they told you themselves. If you think about how comfortable you are with explaining things multiple times yourself, you’ll see why others will likely be too.

3. When you don’t agree with something, say:

“I don’t agree.”

People will respect your opinion. At least tolerate it. At least most of the time. Don’t launch into an immediate defense. Just plant your flag. Stand your ground. Stay still and watch what happens. Will they stand theirs? Start an attack? Or even join your side? Very few things in life can neatly be separated into right and wrong, which means very few ideas really need justification.

4. When you don’t want to do something, say:

“No, thank you, I don’t want to do this.”

People will find a way without you. They always have in the past and they always will in the future. No one is indispensable forever. Just like time heals all wounds, it makes everyone replaceable eventually. Spouses. Neighbors. Parents. Bosses. Leaders. Friends. You’re never too important to say no.

5. When you have a hard time going it alone, say:

“Excuse me, can you help me with this?”

People will be happy to give you a hand. Like “I don’t know,” asking for help makes people more likely to trust you, not less. After Benjamin Franklin borrowed a book from a rival legislator, they became lifelong friends. In fact, showing vulnerability is probably the only way to truly overthrow animosity.

6. When you like someone, say:

“I like you.”

People will like you back. Maybe not as much. Maybe more. But, when in doubt, most people opt to be friendly. They might not like you enough to kiss you, or to give you a job, or to go on holiday together, but they won’t stand in your way. And even if they thought about it before, now, they won’t cross you.

7. When you know you made a mistake, say:

“I’m sorry. That was my fault.”

People will forgive you. The word ‘default’ is made from ‘de,’ which means ‘out of,’ and ‘fault,’ which means ‘guilt.’ When we ‘default’ to doing something, that’s a safety mechanism meant to cover us in advance. We hate admitting mistakes more than making them and so our default reaction is to shamefully sweep them under the rug. True guilt, however, is too painful to just shake off. So we fess up and fix our mistakes. Therefore, it’s a feeling worth embracing.

In a world full of information, sending signals through the noise is more important than ever. In a world full of devices, it’s enough that the medium twists the message. And in a world where technology dominates everything, communication is a uniquely human differentiator. But only if we keep it real.

May the above sentences help you do just that. Oh, and whenever you find the courage to speak them, leave some room for one more thing: listening.

I don’t think the following communication expert had as much research as Hitch to back up his statistics, but then again, the numbers of nature never lie:

“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” 
— Epictetus