The design of my website is based off of the website of the firm that my alumni interview connection works at. My goal after graduation is to succeed at law school and be hired as an attorney, so I thought, why not make it easier for them? My website is plain but still colorful and relatively interesting – it puts the focus on the pictures the most.
My artifacts were mainly picked for two things: to show that I can write extensively about any topic, and to show my identities as a Southern Jew. These are two tenets that are central to my law experience: I want to work in a path that may take me to a big firm where I have to work horrible hours, but I am not willing to sacrifice observing the Shabbat commandments, so that is clear through my poetry collection. In terms of the essays, I really just wanted to show my attention to detail and my ability to cite and build an argument.
My two additional pages focus on my editing experience, which again, shows attention to detail but also team leadership and effective communication, and on my bioethics story and research, which explains why I want to go into the specific field of law I’m planning to pursue.
If I had more time to improve, I probably would have wanted to add more of my editing experience. I will soon have articles that show editing directly in the medical field published, and I will also have the fourth issue of YNST coming out, so there will be a lot more comments.
Throughout this semester, I’ve been balancing the CofC English Capstone curriculum with my personal plans. I’m set to go to law school, but there is still much to learn from our class. In “What Color is Your Parachute?” by Richard Bolles, there is an activity called the Flower Exercise, which is a seven piece self-inventory meant to help individuals figure out what they are looking for in work. The Flower Exercise has helped me narrow down my plan and especially has helped me decide where I will go to law school.
There are seven overall petals, ranging from smaller questions such as “who do you want to work with?” to larger questions like “what is your life’s purpose?” For me, I felt as though I already knew the petals about my skills and working conditions, but two petals that taught me a lot were petal 6, “Places,” and petal 7, “Purpose.”
One of the biggest struggles for me right now is picking where I want to go to law school. I have consistently heard that where you go to law school is generally the state in which you will practice, and my interview with Morgan Insley, filed under the Alumni Profile section, confirmed this belief.
I knew that I wanted to practice in the Southeast, but that’s about all I knew. Undertaking petal 6, “Places,” I had to really focus – where have I lived, what did I like/dislike, what do I need vs. could live without – and that was something I’ve never thought about. I always thought I’d just stay in Richmond, my home town. That’s not off the table, but this exercise made me realize I might want to go further South. After careful consideration, I ranked certain things higher than I thought I would have – for example, nature. I put nature as the fourth most important thing. I have taken trips to visit my friends in New York and I literally had headaches every time and just couldn’t deal with the city. This petal exercise made me cut out those dreams that really just make no sense.
And yet, Atlanta still made it onto my list of top places to live. There are other factors that are even more important to me – a Jewish community is up at number two. I was raised essentially secular but have been moving towards Modern Orthodox practice for the past two years. I wake up every morning and attend shacharit services, among many other practices, and it has really changed my life. I realize now that going somewhere extremely rural or that simply does not have a Jewish community is out of the picture for me. It would make me unhappy in everything I do, and somewhere like Atlanta has a strong community.
teaching my summer campers how to put on Tefillin, a morning prayer tool. Masks b/c 2021
Then there’s petal 7, “Purpose.” This was the petal that took me the most time, because I had to push out the corporate talk that I’ve used for so many professional applications. Yes, the goals are important there, but there is more to my purpose than work. After careful consideration, I wrote out the main important things for me: a faith and community driven lifestyle, respect in both life and death, with physical and mental flexibility.
Yes, that’s relatively abstract, but those are the pieces that matter to me. It means that I want to be a daily congregant at a synagogue, where I can learn and connect with friends with a similar background. It means that I want to do good things for the people around me, being able to host or provide for others. It means that I want to treat people better than I do and feel good about how I act to people, whether they know it or not (if you’re dead, you’re probably not caring how I treat you…) And finally, it means that I have the physical condition to do what comes to me: whether I want to lay on the couch all day or play basketball (my favorite sport) with my grandchildren. It means that I can continue to push myself through lifelong learning, just like my grandparents – I never want to stop.
I am so glad for this exercise and will continue to revisit it as my plans change.
A closer look at Tefillin — this is one of the most important grounding practices for me, and we put these on every day as part of prayer. Let me know if I can explain this more!
“Keep trying to find what you love to do… If you don’t know what that is, it’s okay, just keep trying different things and you will find it.”
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“Oh, so you want to be a teacher?”
If you’ve ever talked to a college student, you can bet that they’ve been asked that at least ten times. In 2024, students and parents alike are increasingly worried about the viability of an English degree in the workforce. After the 2008 recession, STEM fantasies filled the heads of Americans, and images of Starbucks baristas took over what it meant to be a Humanities student. George Anders, Senior Linkedin Editor and author of “You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Education,” tells numerous stories of students itching to learn about the classics telling their professors that their “parents wouldn’t let [them]” study the humanities – “[t]hey have become understandably fixated on starting salaries and the supposedly safe majors that will make college pay off.”
Long gone were the ivory tower ideals of academia, the values of a well-rounded education destroyed.
All that mattered in this market were job skills. Professional school. Morgan Insley, a student at the College of Charleston from 2009 to 2013, saw this dilemma. She majored in English, studying a wide variety of literature and media, from classic British literature to contemporary Jane Austen mediums. Even though these aren’t necessarily classes that seem valuable to a career-driven market, Insley knew her plan: go to law school and become a practicing attorney.
Morgan’s headshot for Blanco Tackabery
Insley finished up her senior year and headed straight to the Charlotte School of Law, graduating in 2016. What she quickly found was that the classes most people would have thought were ridiculous were actually what helped her graduate fourth in her class, summa cum laude. Further, she was able to intern for Justice Paul Newby of the North Carolina Supreme Court and was on Law Review, one of the most prestigious extracurriculars in law school.
While her classmates were struggling to adapt to the complex and often counterintuitive new writing styles, Morgan was quickly finding her stride, “and would not have succeeded without [her] English background.”
But Morgan’s writing skills weren’t the only thing she learned from being an English major at the College. She felt that the major opened up her eyes to social issues around the world – especially through Dr. Simon Lewis’s African Women Writers class. As a senior, Morgan chose to write a bachelor’s essay on madness in Black female literature. The ideas that she was exposed to through the English major inspired change in how she saw the world – and not in a corny way, in a real and honest way that pushed her to explore many passions.
In his book, “You Can Do Anything,” George Anders calls these skills the “rapport sector” – the ability to explore all options, and to make “wise decisions amid the ambiguity and murky information that machines can’t stand.” These are the X Factor skills that set English majors apart; the “pioneering spirit” that fits so well into the American Dream.
Because CofC’s English major is so fluid, Morgan felt that “you’re not pigeon-holed into one particular career path or a few – there are so many possibilities.” Morgan has tons of hobbies: painting, reading fantasy literature, and most importantly, keeping a work life balance.
As an attorney, certain jobs and firms expect that you devote your life to the work. Especially in certain corporate or “big law” positions, it’s out of the question to have a life of your own. Morgan says that keeping a work life balance is her “#1 priority” in the job search, and that after taking on a few jobs where it was impossible to keep the balance, she has “gone out and found positions” that have the right understanding.
But it didn’t all work out easily. Morgan had to work extremely hard in law school to get her place as fourth in her class. Then, her law school dissolved – meaning that her foundation, connections, alumni web, and more – was effectively gone. She still has a network of classmates, peers, and business partners, but it has made things harder, especially when some people have never heard of her school. Further, she wishes that she had pursued a tax LLM, which is a master of laws that specializes in a certain niche.
Things have worked out well, though. Today, Morgan works for Blanco Tackabery in the Trust and Estates practice group, living in Mt. Pleasant. She is also well versed in real estate, corporate counseling, and business formation. Her work deals with clients going through intense situations, often coping with grief in their own ways.
Morgan wanted to give a piece of advice to current English students: focus on finding fulfillment in your professional life, because it will bleed over to your personal life.
“Do you want some of this pie?” – a question that I would normally say yes to every chance I get. This time, though, I was asked by the brother of a dying patient who was denying that this was the end, who was offering to give me the same key lime pie he was going to smash onto his brother’s face. I was interning at the Medical University of South Carolina, and this was only minutes into my shift. But what does working in a hospital have to do with my academic story?
I was stuck in this situation – as a Palliative Care volunteer, I have to realize my place. I blur the line between friend and physician, but I have to try to keep my decisions closer to that of a legal advisor. Being offered a slice of pie was more than just a slice of pie: it was shattering the picture that the brother had. But it’s not my job to destroy any hope that he had. My job is to explain the reality of the situation and to help offer ways to create a healthy and meaningful exit.
So what did I do? I took that slice of key lime pie, said thank you, and told him not to give it to his brother. I explained that he was in a comatose state, and that he was very close to death. I gave the brother a moment to think, feeling the dry pie as I swallowed. While he was trying to come to terms with everything, I offered some words: it is thought that many comatose patients can still hear what is going on around them, even if they can’t respond. I spent the next hour talking with the patient’s brother about some of their best memories and praying with him.
Tools we give to grieving families
This is one of the most important experiences I have had as a volunteer, College of Charleston student, and person. The only reason I feel that I succeeded in that situation is because of my time as an interdisciplinary English major. Some degrees focus entirely on getting a job and nothing else, but English prepares us for life. As Richard Bolles states in his job-hunt book, “What Color Is Your Parachute?”, the job search is “no longer an optional exercise. It is a survival skill” – which, yes, is a bit ironic compared to this literal life-and-death situation I am writing about, but he’s right. We are prepared for survival — as the market changes, as technology takes over, and as we grow as individuals with different interests and desires.
Studying English has taught me three core values: anti-apathy, focus, and the power of words. I have learned these each day studying, but there are three main projects in which I learned the skills necessary to succeed in the end-of-life work field, and to succeed as a person – my papers for Third-World Literature and African Women Writers, my interview with David Popowski, and my internship with the Office of the Attorney General for Virginia.
Anti-apathy is the first skill that was vital to this situation. In today’s world, we are inundated with information. From the moment we wake up to the moment our head hits the pillow, our phones and computers flood us with happenings, and more often than not, they’re pretty bad. From school shootings to bombings in Gaza, the horrible actions have become tiresome to us. We grow accustomed to seeing these atrocities and our levels of caring plummet. We cannot care for a thousand causes at once, and it is even harder to care for something that does not directly affect us. That might sound horrible, but it’s the truth. There is simply too much to always pay attention to – but studying English has helped me to avoid this failure. Writing papers in Third-World Literature and in African Women Writers has allowed me to deeply study something far away that shouldn’t matter to me. As a white Jewish male from the South, why should I care about sexual violence in Jamaica or self-immolation in Zimbabwe? What link do I have to these problems? Does knowing about them affect my daily life? What I’ve learned is that it is one of our great gifts to care about others, and studying these topics allowed me to walk into that hospital room and care for the patient and his brother. After the patient passed, I have not seen or heard from the brother or the family. I do not plan to. It is simply that I was allowed to care, even if just for a small amount of time. The patient and his brother will always be important to me, but it does not affect my daily life – and that’s the point. It doesn’t have to.
The next important skill was focus. Let’s be honest – how many of us can really focus on something anymore? You’ve probably checked your phone at least once while reading this. And that’s okay! We live in an attention economy, and everyone and everything is fighting for yours. As part of an Oral Histories of the Holocaust course, I was able to interview David Popowski, a descendant of Holocaust survivors in Charleston, and was able to contribute to the Shoah foundation housed at the University of Southern California. I believe that everyone spends half their lives planning what they’re going to say next, rather than listening. During this class, I practiced for months how I was going to guide the interview and how I would respond to each and every type of answer. I quickly learned that was not realistic. As soon as the interview began, David took over. The thirty minute interview quickly became two hours, and I learned how to let go and to simply focus on each and every word. Instead of thinking about my own goals, I struggled to let my ego sit back and relax. I always want to get ahead, to say something smart, to be seen as important and successful. But I was simply the recorder of someone else here – and it taught me how to work with the patient’s brother. I am simply an anonymous helper, someone to offer a moment of respite for someone dealing with death. It is not my place to input my own beliefs or thoughts – in fact, I never put forth my Jewish beliefs unless the patient is Jewish. I often find myself saying Hail Mary’s or praying in Christ’s name. Without this class and this interview, I would have forced myself into the conversation, making the situation harder for the patient’s brother.
And lastly, the power of words. This is important not only to this specific situation at the hospital, but for life. As an intern with the Attorney General, I worked with victims of violent crime. I was the one stepstone between them and an unhelpful and often confusing government – yes, a kid with no real legal experience. What I often ended up being was simply a voice with words of comfort and resources. And that’s often what people need – not someone to walk them through the intricacies of a legal decision, but someone who would make them feel okay. And that’s what I did with the patient’s brother at MUSC – I didn’t give him false hope, but offered words that might be a shining light at the end of a tunnel.
Anytime I eat key lime pie, I will be reminded of this experience. What I’ve learned is that being an English major has taught me skills that are helpful not only in the academic world, but in the professional world and the plain life world. As a major faced with constant insults, it is important for me to “take an inventory” that will give me “something solid to stand on.” Further, the second chapter of “What Color Is Your Parachute?” is largely focused on self-care – as the characteristic bumper sticker the author quotes says, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think.” Not only do the insults get to me, but the innate depth and stress that comes with working with people at the end of their lives gets to me as well. I have learned through lots of experience that there are ways I need to treat myself in academia, at work, and in life. These skills will help me be a better lawyer, social provider, and most importantly, a better person.
English has been valuable to me personally in terms of individual development and creative development, but it has been extremely viable for me professionally, considering that I am planning to work in a career that is extremely focused on constant reading, drafting, and analysis, down to the most minute word.
As a lawyer, I will need many of the skills depicted by the texts we’ve read (Anders’ “You Can Do Anything” and Madsbjerg’s “Sense-Making”), but the two most important for me will be Anders’ ideas of the “Rapport Sector,” and “Reading the Room.” As a lawyer, I plan to work in end-of-life law. This means that at the most basic level I will be working with people who are planning for death, people concerned with their legacy and their past. This means that I’ve got to be able to work with all types of people and I need to listen to them to discover exactly what they want. I need to be able to develop a rapport with my clients so that they will be open and honest (especially because the issues are typically sensitive, revolving around family issues or regrets). I also need to be able to read the room – I will be dealing with family members and other influencers, as well as other attorneys. I will need to be able to take all of these influencing factors into consideration while also remaining impartial.
I have learned many of these skills from being an English major undergrad, but there are three projects I’ve produced that showcase these skills:
I enrolled in a small Jewish Studies class where each person was matched with a Holocaust survivor or descendant of a survivor, and we were set to interview them to learn about their personal story of survival, their experiences in immigrating, and their time as a South Carolinian. Although I knew a lot about Holocaust history, something new that I learned was how to listen without a script – especially with an interviewee with a voice as powerful as David Popowski. What I mean by this is that I learned how to listen fully without anticipating what was coming next and without focusing on what I was going to say next. I had been learning this skill for a while, but it culminated during our interview. It wasn’t necessarily new knowledge about the world, as I’d heard people talk about this forever, but it was new to me in the sense that it had been hiding in plain sight, covered by my ego. I had created a four page document with tons of questions and pathways to take, but after we got together, he threw everything off the rails. I didn’t even really get back to “leading” the interview until halfway through, but it was absolutely worth it.
This practice shaped my own disposition and translated to my career path invaluably. As someone working with end-of-life patients, most of them realize that there is no fix. Most people then want a presence to be there for them and to listen. I don’t have it perfect, though. My ego still gets in the way at times, and sometimes I am simply too nervous about being perfect that it backfires. But this skill will work not only for end-of-life care, but any other career path I go into. It is always a good skill to be able to make people feel seen and heard.
2: My internship with the Virginia Attorney General
For summer 2023, I interned with the Virginia Attorney General, working with victims of violent crime. This wasn’t really something that I wanted to do (why didn’t they put me in the health law sector?), but it ended up being incredibly valuable for my career path. My job was to comfort victims and explain the appeals process to them. I was generally their one link between the person who changed their lives in a horrible way, and to justice. That sounds pretty lofty, but it really was often the case. Most of the people I worked with had zero experience with the legal system. Further, many of the clients were of different ethnicity, faith, and culture than me – which is exactly what Madsbjerg talks about with their idea of “Culture – Not Individuals”. We have to look to bridge the gap between peoples and see why people act the way they do.
3: My bachelor’s essay: “Jewish Views on End-of-Life Care”
My senior year bachelor’s essay is a literature review, survey, and interview collection that I have been working on for the past year and a half. This work is listed under sociology – it’s not a typical bachelor’s essay for an English major. It has been a ton of work, but what I’ve learned is that my skills from English are vitally transferable to other fields such as sociology and data analysis. Further, this project embodies Madsbjerg’s idea of “Thick Data – Not Just Thin Data” – I’m working beyond the statistics, gaining a holistic understanding of Jewish people’s views on end-of-life care engaging a more human experience, rather than an answer to my question on a scale of one to five.
Many of these English values are the same as what I discussed in my first blog post – the value of an interdisciplinary degree and the value of an empathetic degree that allows one to work with people from many different worlds. What’s so interesting is that these values are distinctly human – the value of connection, of listening, of noticing, of being. That means that values and viability are often quite closely connected, which is something important to think about for us humanities students.
In my four years of college, I have eaten a chocolate chip bagel at least five days every week. Most people would be disappointed. I order it plain, untoasted, no shmear or cream cheese or toppings of any sort. Most people might even go so far as to call me a freak. At times, I feel like I’m dishonoring my heritage – no lox, no capers?! (although to be honest, I’m not in New York and I’ll never really understand why someone would want to start their morning with fish breath) – but I’ve come to terms with it.
In fact, it’s more than that. I think this is more important. The ladies who run the Einstein’s ship at the College of Charleston are the glue that holds my world together. At this point, I haven’t had to ask for two years. I walk in, I say good morning, and my bagel is ready. On Valentine’s Day last year, they had a bag of candy with my name on it. I had the biggest smile on my face for the rest of the day.
It’s nice to be a regular, but what’s so special about these ladies is that they’ve seen me through all of my achievements. Checking in after a job interview or a big test, even on Yom Kippur, where I had to fast for 24 hours. They gave me a care package the day before with a dozen bagels to help me get super full before the fast began.
Although the interaction at Einstein’s normally only lasts about thirty seconds, it’s the small act of empathy and memory that is so fantastic.
Part 2:
Footnote to Howl by Allen Ginsberg
My name is Michael Stein, and today I saw a statistic that over 1,000 Palestianians have been killed in the past week. One week since the ICJ’s ruling. And I was confused – what had changed in me? When this all began in October, I was pretty much a full Zionist. I always knew that I believed that Palestinian people had a right to live just like Jewish and Israeli people, but since I was a kid I have been taught over and over that Israel is home. But I haven’t been able to explicitly say that for myself. And then I saw that flyer.
[music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan]
Footnote to Howl:
I first read this poem after the entirety of Howl, tired and not understanding anything. But I soon became enamored with Ginsberg – because he was a poet who was Jewish, not a Jewish poet. I had never seen that before.
I tried to understand what was going on. Holy is said 86 times in this poem. I was trying to figure out who was speaking and how and for what – but what I could tell… and more realistically, was hit over the head with, was that everything is holy. Ginsberg is begging the question: if everything is made by G-d, then what’s the difference in ‘holiness-levels’ between a bum and the middle class and even, forgive me, the “cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas”?
So what did this mean to Ginsberg, a noted revolutionary, faced with the issues of his time: Vietnam, Gay Rights, Imperialism. And what does it mean for us today? And what does it mean for American Jews? We can begin to understand by looking at line two; “The tongue and cock and / hand and asshole holy” – it’s a complete rejection of the accepted standard. He starts with the most immediate and at times intimate part of a human: their body. In rejecting the status quo and loving his body, including his genitalia that he writes about having gay sex with, Ginsberg acknowledges that there will be more to come, and that this is just the beginning. This once-revolutionary line has now become part of a self-love agenda that waters down the importance of re-framing the body, which, when it is anything other than white and straight, it is inherently political. In this Israel-Palestine war, we have begun to align Israeli people and Jews with white people – an interesting decision. Normally, Jews are treated as semi-white, but lower class. In this situation, the bodies of Palestinians have been decided by the media as Other.
Ginsberg continues, writing how everyone is equally holy, from the “madman” to the “seraphim,” which, in religious literature, are some of the highest-ranking angels. He aligns writing and poetry with angels, and shouts out how all of his peers and contemporaries are holy as well. And then there’s the fantastic line:
“Holy the fifth / International holy the Angel in Moloch!” – here, he’s referencing the meetings of the Communist, Socialist, and Labor Parties. This battle in Israel-Palestine is one of ideology – with Israel acting as the shining beacon of oil-democracy-capitalism in the middle East, and Palestine as the Other. But that’s not how it works – Palestine and Hamas are different beings. Hamas, the ruling body that reigns over the country, seems to fully be a terrorist group. Invading Israel, torturing and raping civilians, and more. But the Palestinian people are a separate entity – the “Angel in Moloch!”
Moloch is a idol that G-d strictly warns against in Judaism, but Ginsberg, in the full poem Howl, uses Moloch to represent America as villain. I believe that in reading Footnote to Howl today, Moloch can be read as Hamas, and the Angel within is the people.
The poem moves to finish with an overall appeal to good things: “forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith!” and more. This poem, a powerful read and an experience to listen to, is such a reminder to ask ourselves what we know is right and holy, and that sometimes we must step back to re-evaluate our beliefs. I’ve re-centered my own beliefs and will personally make the statement here that I believe Israel is committing genocide, the utmost hypocrisy. There is much more to be said on this issue, but that is for another post.
My parents questioned my major choice. My dad, of course, wanted me to go straight to med school (“I know you’re a senior, but if you want to stay a few more years and take the pre-reqs…”), and my mom – well, she smiled and asked me “are you sure?”
I’ve realized that no matter what discipline I end up in, I’m going to have to learn how to think in an interdisciplinary nature. Each text read in an English class ends up discussing a social/political/economic issue. Further, I’m minoring in Medical Humanities and Jewish Studies. My minors, in combination with my major, have led me to pursue a career in end-of-life healthcare, specifically law concerning bioethics and the elderly. So even if I tried my very hardest to avoid thinking this way, it would be impossible. When it comes down to it, the most personal and private pieces of ourselves seem to find their ways into the wide open at the end of life. I’ve worked as a palliative care volunteer for the past few years, sitting by the bedside when someone is dying alone, or providing respite for a family member who just needs to go eat or shower.
Although I’m some random kid, people decide to tell me everything – from stories of their favorite family meals to trauma and abuse stories. Although this is the career I want to go into, there is no possible way to approach it coldly. Every aspect of the job requires delicacy and empathy, or at least an attempt at empathy. I have found that even though I don’t always find the right words, the attempt is worth it. When I see how the patients are treated, I realize why this matters. It’s not that the doctors or nurses are bad people – in fact, they’re absolutely amazing — but the modern American medical system simply focuses on the maximum number of tests and divisions between parts of the body and their corresponding hospital teams, which results in the patient feeling left behind. So how could I, being one bright-eyed kid, do anything about it? Well, it started with reading about the subject – both fiction and non-fiction.
I took a course called Religion, Healthcare, and Ethics, and we read work from bioethics experts, religious experts, and laypeople. Here’s where it all got started – I learned about topics I had never heard of (namely, palliative care and how it’s different from hospice) and re-evaluated my viewpoints. I found my personal religious views challenged, and I was excited. As Jasmine Guillory acknowledges in her TIME article, “Reading Anti-Racist Nonfiction Is a Start. But Don’t Underestimate the Power of Black Fiction,” “[m]ultiple studies have shown that reading certain types of fiction increases a reader’s empathy for others in the world. Fiction gives you a window into both lives you know and recognize and ones you don’t” (Guillory).
Guillory’s article is specifically about reading Black fiction as an act of anti-racism. She’s 100% right, but her argument expands to helping understand anyone different from you. Whatever your difference, reading about it can give you a better understanding (although not always a correct or close to complete understanding). For me, Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal was a great start. But one could simply respond: well, that’s your career, not mine, and I need something practical.
In his New York Times Op-Ed, “Poetry is Hospitable to Strangeness and Surprise,” author Patrick Rosal asks a simple question:
“For whom?”
Who is poetry for, he asks. He continues on, stating that “you may want something ‘practical’” (Rosal). And haven’t each of us heard that a million times – just like the way my dad said it. But it means something different to me. On my first day as a volunteer with palliative care, I didn’t know what to do. I was so nervous that I was sweating through my shirt, and I actually got lost in the hospital. It was terrifying, and the whole time, I was thinking “what if it doesn’t do anything?” “What if I just can’t find the right words?” I always thought that I needed something practical. I asked the few others on the team if they had some sort of guidebook, and they pretty much just laughed at me.
But what I realized is that the words that we offer are the concrete and practical business. Everyday we interact with people and without proper and effective communication, nothing is going to happen. And further, everyone’s going to feel bad about it. Using the right language is the foundation of a successful process and career.
So maybe I don’t know how to be a surgeon, or how to diagnose an illness, but because of literature, I feel equipped with the everyday decisions as well as the end-of-days decisions.
