Knowing your coworkers, your boss, your friends requires a seldom used hidden skill: conversation.

Conversations are much more complex than most of us realize. It's a skill you'll use to understand what other's want and need, and to start making more well-informed decisions.

Photo by Mitch on Unsplash.

We learn to talk by age 2 or 3, but when do we learn to communicate? For my part, I learned pretty late in life.

I had no siblings and grew up in a remote spot on the Berkshire mountains. I spent a lot of my time exploring the world solo — sometimes romping off into the forest, sometimes tearing apart an old television to see how it worked. (I learned, years later, that those old style cathode ray tubes store energy potential like a capacitor — I was lucky I didn’t electrocute myself).

In many ways it was a life full of adventure, very Tom Sawyer in it’s own right. That time exploring the world would deeply influence my fascination with technology later in life, when I found even more to explore. The early 80’s and 90’s was an exciting time in technology, and one that few chose to penetrate.

That relative scarcity of fellow tech explorers surely delayed my own realization that being good at conversation is a valuable skill. Well beyond my college years, I still…