I graduated from college in 1969. This will blow your mind — it took me from '69 to 1977 to know how to connect. The reason it took me that long was because I had no mentors, I had nobody to teach me. So I had to kind of grope and do trial and error. When I would listen to somebody speak I would ask myself a question. Are they connecting? And if they were connecting with me I would ask myself "why?" What are they doing, what are they saying that connects with me?
I quickly learned how to discern the difference between a person who connects because of a subject and a person who connects because of their ability to communicate. The best way I can explain that is it's not a subject issue — it's the person that is the communicator. So you say give me a subject that I can really communicate to people. My whole thing is: if you're a good communicator just about any subject will do. If you are a bad communicator there is no subject that will help.
Advertisement
So I began to study the communicators, once I understood that the key to communication was connection. Then I began to ask myself the question: "How do people connect?" When I met Charlie, Charlie was a member of my church at Skyline. He does the bulk of my writing now — we form ideas together, we lay it out and then we kind of work together but I mean he is the main "pen man" now for me. But I realized that I had to teach him. If he was going to do research for me, how does he know he has good research? I mean I don't want people bringing me material. Through the computer and internet I mean, you could put stacks on top of the guy. You have to get the right material. I used to have him read quote books and mark what he thought were good quotes. Then I would read the same book and I would mark what I thought were good quotes. And when we started ninety percent of the quotes that Charlie thought were good quotes weren't ones that I'd ever use. Ninety percent — I mean we were ninety percent off! But over time I would explain to him why I would never use that quote, why it would never work for me, why it didn't fit me. Probably after five or six of those exercises with those books he was ninety percent on. Now I could have him go get quotes for me. I don't need quotes — I need good quotes.
When I had sermons every Sunday, I would teach for forty minutes and they would hardly ever look up. So then I said to Charlie, "In that message give me the five best minutes of that." I was teaching him how to read a crowd. "Charlie, what were the five minutes I could have omitted and have gotten nothing but applause from people?" I taught him how to read people. If you can't read a situation you can't read a person.
I am amazed at guys who go up and communicate and nobody's home and they don't have a clue — they walk off just happy as clams and I'm sitting there saying, "Do you know how bad you were? If I were to interrupt you halfway in your message and looked at the people and said, 'Do we want to take a vote?' they would have found a gong and the trap door would have opened and you would be gone. Do you know what I am sayin'?" They don't have a clue.