Why Is Everything Either Awesome or Amazing?

We are very, grateful.

So, before we start, a big thank you to all.

And today, in a half lighthearted, half dead serious way, we ask a very interesting but hefty question.

Let me introduce it by saying this.

A thousand years from now, historians, cultural anthropologists, and linguists will look back on the beginning of this millennium and wonder about a curiously strange phenomenon.

What, they will ask, happened to adjectives? Well, at least what happened to all but two adjectives?

It appears that with a large portion of the American English speakers and English speakers as well.

Everything, every person, every place, every food, every experience, and every thought came to be described with one of two adjectives.

No kidding.

English, with all its words, synonyms, variations, and exceptions, with its porousness that absorbs interesting components and is the official second language in 56 countries.

English, the global language of business and science. English with more ways to say any one thing than in any other language. English is being reduced to a language of two adjectives.

Amazing.

Awesome.

Or is it?

Forget my sarcasm, but making my living with words, I am not thrilled with what I'm seeing. Not as a career coach, a job from which I retired a little less than a year ago. Not as a public speaker. Not as a professor of two graduate courses in executive communication, which I did for 15 years. Or as a journalist. I can give you chapter and verse, long diatribes, and more reasons than you can count why this is so deflating.

But I'll stick to the career aspects for now.

The ability to communicate effectively is, always was, and always will be the most important skill set that we can develop, both in the workplace and out of it, and is, according to all surveys of executives over the past 50 years that I've been aware of, the most critical and sought-after skill set of all. Communication is the most critical and sought-after skill set of all.

It's the king of soft skills, and by far and away, more valuable than any hard skills, with no exceptions.

For 15 years, I taught two graduate leadership courses at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Northern New Jersey.

Based on this one premise, the prime importance of high-level communication skills is unsurpassed.

But calling everything in the world amazing or awesome is not living up to the potential of such a rich and creative language, and it is also denying the legacy of that language. It just doesn't cut it, frankly, yet that's where we're heading.

It's being lazy inexact, inappropriate, hyperbolic and after not too long, boring if you can't express yourself better than that you're going to run up against a brick wall sometime in your career if you haven't already, usually before you realize that you just did people who make such distinctions about hiring you, promoting you, or referring you, put more emphasis on your communication skill set than on anything else. They know it. You should.

In other words, they're saying executives, recruiters, managers, they're saying they can get all the accountants and chemists and software engineers and sales analysts and anyone else with hard skills they want. But what keeps them up at night is a giant deficiency, the inability to find people who know how to talk to each other, to co-workers, to vendors, to customers, and so on.

I've been observing and writing on this issue for years.

So why again? Why does this come up again? Because the problem is not self-correcting. it's worsening and I came across a pathetic example recently which for me reopened the wound I'd like to relate it to you one of my career coaching clients I don't do career coaching anymore but I did for 30 years one of my clients who was in the middle of a job search forwarded to me an email she got from a staffing agency's recruiter who wanted to present her to her to her client.

Here's what the staffers said about the company to my client.

They're an amazing company and they have an awesome office.

You're waiting for more? That was it.

Nothing remotely resembled a specific reason to consider the company, but they were amazing and their workplace is awesome.

Well that didn't have the desired effect on my client because well what did it say what did that say nothing that's what it said but happily she realized it not to mention the futility of dealing with someone whose communication skills are so limited clearly less than awesome and amazing so what actually is awesome or amazing If that's not, what is?

What really deserves those distinctions?

Awesome?

Niagara Falls.

The tides in the Bay of Fundy or Mont Saint-Michel.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. An eight-hour concert by the Grateful Dead at the old Fillmore East back in the 1960s and 70s. those are definitely awesome a pizza even the best it's good not awesome it's just a pizza but how many people have a pizza and declare it awesome amazing katie ledecky in the swimming pool of the olympics is amazing and so is e equals mc squared disneyland and those nine-year-old and 11-year-old kids who wouldn't a spelling bee every year on words you've never heard of ever, let alone can spell.

That's amazing.

Pay close attention to the communication that's going on around you and tell me if I'm wrong.

No, don't bother telling me I'm wrong. On this, I'm not wrong.

I'm not wrong about the bigger issue either. The one single thing that will separate those of us who move forward in the 21st century from those of us who don't, is a great communication skill set.

And double that when you throw AI into the mix.

Not to mention imbibing in the joy of English.

Now that is amazing and awesome.

While you're chewing that up a little bit, I'm going to take a break. I'll be back in about 30 seconds. In the meantime, a message from our sponsors.

Before we go any further, I want to thank our sponsors.

Thank you to SingleTask.

Thank you to Kardam Consulting. Thank you to Bergen Volunteers. Thank you as well to Stephen Bozer. We are grateful to every one of them.

I'm back with a with a great thought or a great confluence of thoughts I'm recording this on October 11th which is the anniversary of the birth of one of the great human beings who have shaped all our lives Eleanor Roosevelt so in the great minds and big hearts section here let's talk about her just for a little bit Eleanor said if life were predictable, it would cease to be life, which is why she was not only ready for anything, she succeeded at everything she did.

But when I think about her and think about areas in American culture that I would like to see her being more prominently displayed in terms of modern terminology.

Where should her NIL be? The name, image, and likeness. The kind of enormous money being paid to high school and college basketball players, football players, et cetera. NIL.

Eleanor's not on the stamp. She was. She should be again. Eleanor is not on a bill in the U.S. currency.

I think she belongs on the $20 bill.

We could see more bridges and roadways and airports named after Eleanor because she was not only a great mind, she had a great heart too. So happy birthday, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many more in our hearts and in our history books.

For the wrap-up section of this episode, and I want to start with two aphorisms. The first one, the way I've lived my life, problems are really opportunities poorly dressed.

You figure out what to do with that. I don't have to tell you. And the second aphorism should actually tickle your funny bone for your amazing adjective that we used.

The first person to live to 150 has already been born.

So don't make decisions lightly. You'll live with them for a very long time.

And the section that I usually call what if, I'm calling Mind Stretcher, related.

None less than Galileo Galilei said this, I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended for us to forego their use.

You can look at that statement many ways. You can look at it optimistically, pessimistically, skeptically, humorously, and empathetically. But one way or another, Galileo was right, I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who's endowed us with a sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

And that, in part, is why this podcast exists.

Thanks for listening once again. Thanks for joining us and spending time with us. Thanks for being part of a growing minion of critical thinkers.

Thanks for being a part of the movement to revive critical thinking.

We've got some great sections coming up.

Next week or next session we're going to talk about a standard in communication that has been shattered i suppose all for the better catch you next time i'm Eli Amdur see you next time until then keep questioning keep learning and keep thinking critically