Welcome to One Thing Better. Each week, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine (that’s me) shares one way to achieve a breakthrough at work — and build a career or company you love.
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Today’s edition is sponsored by Attentive — the AI-powered mobile marketing platform. Details at the end of the newsletter.
Now, on with today’s newsletter…
You’re being misunderstood.
You shared a great idea, or made something wonderful, or told someone something — and they are confused. Unimpressed. Maybe even annoyed.
Now you’re upset. Why don’t they just understand!? But here’s the problem:
You started in the wrong place.
I fall victim to this all the time… including here in this newsletter.
So today, I’ll share some of my own stumbles — and a powerful, two-step exercise that will make your intentions and ideas clearer, so everyone understands you.
First, my own mistakes
A few weeks ago, I got an alarming email from a reader named Pam. She thought my newsletter was written by ChatGPT.
“I was hoping it was written by you,” she wrote me. “I’m out.”
I froze. Why would she think this? Then I realized the answer — and I started to panic.
For more than a year, my newsletter began with an AI-generated image. I wrote “Made with ChatGPT” underneath it. Here’s how that looked:
To me, that was a basic photo caption. But to Pam, the phrase “Made with ChatGPT” was teeing up the entire newsletter — as if I announced, “Everything that follows is made with ChatGPT.” (This newsletter is 100% human, I promise!)
This is why I panicked. I wondered: Do other people think this too?
And then I realized: OMG, I have made a classic mistake.
Why we’re so misunderstood
Everything we do makes sense to us. Our actions are the product of our training, context, experiences, and desires.
But the problem is — we don’t all have the same training, context, experiences, and desires. So we are often blind to what other people don’t know.
Good news, though: We can solve this problem. And even avoid it.
The next time you’re misunderstood, or want to communicate more clearly, ask yourself:
- What experiences or knowledge of mine shaped my actions now?
- Do my actions make sense to someone else, if they don’t know the backstory?
You’ll start to see breakdowns — places where something makes sense to you, but appears weird and arbitrary to others.
Now let’s apply this to my mistake
I wrote “Made with ChatGPT” underneath my images. Pam misunderstood me. Why?
Well, let’s take my first question: What experiences or knowledge of mine shaped my action?
Here’s the answer: Working in magazines, I was trained to write captions and attributions for all images. To me, this is natural and expected.
Now, let’s ask the second question: Does my action make sense to someone else, if they don’t know the backstory?
Answer: Maybe, but not definitely.
Pam is a copywriter, and told me that she opposes AI writing — so she was primed to interpret my caption the way she did. No wonder we miscommunicated.
Now start doing this proactively
Don’t wait for misunderstandings to arise. You can ask my questions all the time — and improve your work as a result.
For example, once I cleared up the confusion with Pam, I started to wonder: Why do I even have an AI image atop of my newsletter?
Again, the answer goes back to my media background. At magazines, words are always accompanied by an image. When I started a newsletter, it seemed improper to hit publish without some visual at the top.
But now I wondered: Do I really need it?
So a few weeks ago, I asked readers: Do you like the illustration? Responses flooded in. Some liked them, but the vast majority did not. One person even said: “When I don’t care for that particular image, I’m prompted to skip your article.”
Ack! I’ve decided to stop running the illustrations altogether.
We operate in a low-context world
Let’s zoom out for a moment, and ask one final question: How much context do we need to understand each other?
In anthropology, this is addressed with a fascinating concept called high- and low-context cultures.
Some cultures, like American and British cultures, are defined as low-context — meaning that we must communicate explicitly with each other. We are understood through the literal definition of our words.
But other cultures, like Japanese and Arabic cultures, are defined as high-context — meaning that a lot of communication is unspoken, and cultural expectations are shared and understood.
Here is my theory: In our day-to-day lives, we operate somewhere between high and low. We want to communicate clearly and explicitly, but we also expect to be understood — and as a result, we have blind spots for when we’re being unclear.
The truth is, we cannot assume a shared understanding. We cannot leave things unsaid. Instead, we must rigorously consider what we know, and what other people don’t know — because when we do that, we will appreciate them more, empathize with their viewpoint more, and most importantly, we will be understood.
That’s how to do one thing better.
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