What’s the difference between a writer and a communicator?

I know a lot of writers. Not all of them are communicators.

A communicator is the young boy who my dad saw from his hotel balcony one morning, on vacation in Florida.

The boy was walking down the beach, alone.

Below my dad on another balcony, another unseen boy called out to the boy on the beach.

"Jake!"

The boy on the beach looked over briefly, but kept walking.

"Jake!" the boy below repeated.

But the boy kept walking.

"Jake! Jake! Jake!" the boy below cried.

Finally the boy on the beach stopped, turned squarely toward the hotel, reared back and yelled, "Can't you see, I'm some other kid?!"

Now, this was the funniest thing my dad had ever seen in his whole life, and this normally reserved man he could not tell it without gasping and wiping tears from his eyes.

That's because my dad was a communicator, an advertising creative director who had trained himself to look at the world not from his own viewpoint, but from that of his audience. The world is not about your product, he told his clients. The world is about people.

Even in his annoyance, the boy on the beach saw that, to the boy down below, he was not actually himself. Rather, he was "some other kid."

That's what we all are. We are all just "some other kid." And if we write everything on that basis, we'll write better stuff, we'll sell more stuff, we'll get our ideas across and we'll make more friends.