Communication and how to use it to create opportunity in your career (Day 5) | Open to Work

**Helen** (0:00)
Aneesh, we're on day five of our series of Open to Work. So, I think I should recap what we've covered.

**Aneesh Rahman** (0:05)
Yes.

**Helen** (0:06)
So, we've done day one, curiosity, then we talked about courage, we've done creativity, we've done compassion, and our fifth and final skill that we're going to talk about today is communication. I wonder whether people who are listening or watching, they might think, oh, I know about communication. I communicate every day. What do I need to do differently? Why is it more important now?
Let's dive into this and give people meaningful, useful stuff that they can do, because this is all about the human skills that help us to stay relevant and succeed in the age of AI. So let's tackle communication. Why did it make the five? Why wasn't it just a foundation for everything?

**Aneesh Rahman** (0:46)
This one is the most personal for me of the five, because my whole career at some level has been built around communication. And I have honestly struggled with that term. There were periods in my career where I ran away from anything that had communications in it because I wanted to be more than and I didn't want to be limited by.
In the job I'm in now, I remember my co-author Ryan early at LinkedIn said, you're a great storyteller. And I reacted negatively to that because I felt storytelling was around a campfire or with children's books. It didn't feel real, mature, business relevant.
And I have over the course of writing this book, but also just coming to terms with my strengths and really what makes me amazing, so embraced communication now as so core to who we are at our best as humans. And I think some of the idea of communication and why is it a 5C, it's already been out there. There's also this sense that AI can make communication possible for everyone. Why do I have to do anything if I can just ask it to write the thing I have to write or write the talking points I need to use. And so this is another one like creativity where AI will make the generic universally available. So that means all of us can be better communicators because communication and storytelling is often again been seen as a talent that some people have, some people don't. We all can now get better at it with this tool. But the moments of great communication as we talk about in the book, Martin Luther King saying, I have a dream and that mobilizing a movement. The Beatles saying, all we need is love and that mobilizing a culture. I mean, the power of words spoken well in moments that are waiting for those words to be articulated is sort of indescribable in terms of its impact on individuals, on cultures. So part of the story of self that I've been building around communication and storytelling made me a student of storytelling. So I learned about Pixar. We talked about Pixar in the creativity episode. How did they bring a science to storytelling? But also just the importance of storytelling. So in Sapiens, which is another great book, people should read A Brief History of Humankind.

**Helen** (2:51)
Not brief.

**Aneesh Rahman** (2:52)
It's not brief. I know now having written a book, I'm like, oh my gosh, she really went at it. But it is not brief.
But he talks about storytelling is equivalent to tool building as what makes us the apex species. It's not that we go from fire to wheel to AI. It's that we tell stories to create inner subjectivity around this imagination and this made up thing that becomes real, like the nation state, like the monetary order. Without storytelling, we don't get situated in the world.
And then I think often about Joan Diddy and the great American writer, and she has this line, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And we just talked about it at the end of the Compassion episode, but story of self is the most important story that any of us will ever tell. And most of us don't understand that that's a story. We think self is some locked identity based on the nature, nurture, intersection, often around 10 years old, that makes us in an unchangeable way. We either are always restless or not, or we are creative or not, or we are someone that people get, or we are someone that people don't. All of that is a story. We're all those things. We're both of those things. We're neither of those things. And so the work of storytelling and communication, again, like the end of compassion really starts with self. And that's why I'm excited about this as a C, because I think it will change lives if people can grab hold of this skill.