The First Quality Of A Communicator Is Anything But Natural

I read a quote the other day that says it all about the difficulty of communicating.

We owe this brilliant remark to David Foster Wallace, a very talented American writer who committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. Besides his novels, Foster Wallace was also interested in the news for his journalistic work.

David Foster Wallace – (CC) Steve Rhodes (#tigerbeat on Twitter)

Foster Wallace made the following comment: “There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor.”

As I have explained several times on Superception, empathy is one of the key qualities of communicators: They must know their audience in order to communicate properly and and be able to experience their feelings in order to communicate remarkably. However, all our lives, we are the center of our own world.

For homo sapiens, “hell is other people.” For homo communicatus, others must be considered paradise.