We Need to Talk

Two of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of We Need to Talk pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.

1. Sociologist Charles Derber named the everyday habit that kills conversations: **conversational narcissism**. When someone shares, we reflexively offer a **shift-response** ('Oh, that happened to me too, let me tell you...') instead of a **support-response** ('Really? What happened?'), quietly yanking the spotlight back to ourselves.
2. Headlee distills good conversation into **ten rules**, and insists one towers over the rest: **listen**. She leans on a line she attributes to the Dalai Lama, when you talk you only repeat what you already know, but listening is how you learn something new, because most of us listen only to reply, remembering as little as a quarter of what we hear.

The other 5 — and the full 10-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 8 chapters

The whole summary runs about 10 minutes, read or listened to.

1. A Nation That Forgot How to Talk
2. Talking Is Not the Same as Communicating
3. Why We'd Rather Talk About Ourselves
4. Be Present: The Multitasking Lie
5. Be Interested to Be Interesting
6. Empathy, Difference, and the Echo Chamber
7. Talk to Strangers
8. The Ten Rules, and the One That Matters Most