A second set of eyes can be invaluable when we are writing, and it's especially important when it comes to communicating about our business. Getting out of our own heads enough to write clearly about our work is tough! Whether you're making assumptions or just forgetting a word somewhere, it is always—and I do mean always—helpful to have someone else in your corner when you're writing.

Who's ready for a bit of a rant? Well today it's time for one of mine that is old enough to drive. In journalism school I wrote a whole essay on how journalistic objectivity is unattainable, and I stand behind that idea all these years later. (Which, having reviewed a lot of the work from those years in search of that essay, can't be said for many of my youthful stances. So much cringe.)

You can agree with the idea that you need to know your goal and still be bad at figuring out what the goal is for any given piece of communication. I'm sure of this because I see people communicate with each other in absence of a clear goal all the time, in business and in life.

Every time you communicate—big multimedia campaigns to short text messages—you have a goal and the clearer you are about the goal, the easier it becomes to hit the mark. We need to understand why we are communicating and what we are trying to achieve before we decide anything else.

The best work of my career has often involved a whole network of people working together to make things happen.  It's also taught me that all aspects of our life include relationships with other people. When we shift our perspective to one focused on relationship, it shifts the way we communicate and interact with people.

Words have power, and we have a responsibility to wield them carefully. It's been nearly 200 years since Edward Bulwer-Lytton coined the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword," but it remains painfully true. From our most intimate relationships to international diplomacy, our word choices can be the difference between peace and war.

Today's world is full of niche markets, subject matter experts, and nerds that are defined by their slavish devotion to a subject as opposed to the definition that looks for pocket protectors and social awkwardness. But being an expert in one field doesn’t make you a genius in every field. That means it’s time to join forces with complementary nerds.