I am greedy to be understood
I think one of the things that often strikes when I really get to know someone, is that 99% of the time I am significantly more desirous of being understood than they are. For instance, I find people often accept way more coarse grained signals of whether someone understood their point than I do. I know, I sound like a lot of fun to talk to.
In reality, a lot of the time I just try to calibrate how much people understand what Iâm saying from their vague answers and streamlined back channel grunts and âuh-huhsâ, so I can snipe the right level of explanation for the next thing exactly right. This is where a lot of my energy goes and a lot of the time itâs super dumb, because the other person isnât paying enough attention or investing enough emotional energy in the conversation, so that even if I do snipe the right level of abstraction and they do get it, it doesnât lead anywhere or they donât remember later and it was mostly in vain.
But what it does give is practice. And I have practiced and practiced figuring out how to get the abstractions exactly right for people, which mostly involves figuring out how they think about the abstractions presented...which has meant that I end-up with an obsession with figuring out what other people are trying to say when I want to be heard.
And this is actually the fundamental principle behind generalized reading: any accurate reading, leads to different writing, any successful writing, leads to a different kind of reading. They play off of each other, because each is trying to capture whatâs in the other.
