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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 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 great at 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.

He spoke to CIA recruiters, NASA psychologists, researchers, and more. And he calls

these people and his book, Super Communicators. And what's really interesting is it's not because

they were born as great communicators. They're not charismatic. They're not necessarily

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