4 Blog Posts about
Communication
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  • Have seen this pop up several times now - but this is the best overview.
  • Disagree with the closing line: "Paraphrasing is like magic pixie dust you can sprinkle onto any conversation to make it more positive and productive." My experience is when you start doing this, even with the right tone, it seems disingenuous. But this can be overcome by being up front.
  • "If your roommate says, “I feel like I’ve been doing all the chores lately,” you might object internally with, “That’s not true! I did the dishes this morning!”
  • "These reactions happen imperceptibly, and we move towards feeling uncomfortable or defensive without knowing how we got there."
  • Benefit of parahrasing: allows for full understanding on both sides & helps speaker feel understood.
  • On the need to be understood: "The unconscious fear is that if we aren’t understood it will be as if we never existed."
  • "Time required to reach conflict resolution is cut in half when each negotiator agrees to accurately repeat what the previous speaker had said"
  • When to paraphrase: After receiving a request, After receiving feedback, When the speaker is sharing something vulnerable, If you’re unsure of what the speaker meant.
  • Avoid declarative tone.
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  • "By sitting down to make sense of their existing ideas instead of trying to invent new ones, writers at their computer mold the wet clay of experience into shape."
  • "The punch that defines good communication, and by extension, good art"
  • "To ship something excellent, you have to be willing to cut what may have taken weeks or months to produce."
  • "The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience - Einstein"
  • "The process of gathering ideas and distilling them into a smaller, more compressed form is the essence of creative excellence. "
  • "People move towards compression progress not by following their rational mind, but by following their intuition for what’s interesting."
  • You can't skip steps. Compression requires going through each step to get to the final output, otherwise the final output won't be accurate.
  • "Compression can conjure the essence of an experience, but never the real thing."
    • "Whenever I’m nostalgic for that live show and long for something comforting, I’ll open my phone and re-watch the highlights. But no matter how many times I pray for a different outcome, that intense feeling is forever gone"
  • "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness"
  • Good examples of compression:
    • Just do it - Nike
    • Antifragile - Taleb
    • E = mc²
  • Disortion can be useful. E.g NY subway map. (Felt this was off-them and a weak ending)
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