42… Do you still need more explanation?

42 is the Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything (Google confirms this). According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a hyper-intelligent race constructed the second greatest computer in all of time and space, Deep Thought, to calculate the Ultimate Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. After seven and a half million years, Deep Thought answered: “forty-two.” The computer rejected complains:
“I checked it very thoroughly, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”
This is probably the largest known communication failure in the Galaxy. What about you? Do you know how to communicate effectively, avoid communication failures and still get things done?

Communicating with humans

We know that effective communication with humans requires skills, experience and effort. It is not easy and straightforward. Professor Albert Mehrabian explains that in communication

• Only 7% of meaning is in the words that are spoken.
• 38% of meaning is in tone of voice.
• 55% of meaning is in facial expression and body language.

It is not overstatement. Our unconscious parallel processing in the brains is much more powerful than controlled sequential thinking. It is matter of our survival to use “gut feeling”, all senses and analyze many clues – much more than we can do with the limited conscious mind. In addition, we cannot trust words, we often use them for convincing explanations without really knowing how we came up with them.
Therefore, person-to-person, face-to-face communication is the most effective. But excessive communication could be a big waste of time and prevent us from accomplishing other things. To survive in the modern communication flood we should learn how to communicate effectively.

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