Day 78 | The 7-40 Challenge
I was listening to Todd Henry’s Die Empty this week, and he referred to communication as a soft skill. I had to stop the book and take a voice note so I wouldn’t forget how frustrated I was.
Communication is not a soft skill. It never was. Calling it one gave people permission to not take it seriously for decades — as if the ability to clearly articulate what you want, what you need, and what you’re willing to give for it is somehow optional. Secondary. A nice-to-have you pick up along the way while you’re learning the “real” skills.
That was already wrong. Now, with AI in everyone’s hands, it’s catastrophically wrong.
Here’s what I mean.
Every bad AI prompt is a communication failure. Every bad email is a communication failure. Every meeting that should have been a five-minute message is a communication failure. Every project that runs over budget, over schedule, and under-delivers — trace it back far enough and you’ll find a communication failure at the root. Someone didn’t say what they meant. Someone else didn’t ask for clarity. And everyone moved forward on assumptions that weren’t shared.
I’ve spent eighteen years in data management watching this happen. I’ve sat in meetings that cost five thousand dollars an hour in personnel — and we had that same meeting three or four times before we reached a resolution that could have been handled in one email if someone had just said the thing clearly the first time. That’s not a soft-skill problem. That’s a twenty-thousand-dollar problem.
Take something as simple as a marriage. She says “let’s spend time together” because she wants quality time — just being with him. He hears “let’s spend time together” and thinks it’s time to tackle projects. Same words. Two completely different outcomes. Multiply that across every interaction in a workday, a business, a family, a community — and you start to see that communication isn’t the seasoning. It’s the main course.
I was my own first convert on this. Early in my career, my manager introduced new data entry standards. I thought they were stupid. I was doing data entry. I didn’t understand why I needed to add extra fields, follow specific formats, and standardize things that seemed fine the way they were. It felt like bureaucracy forced on me from above.
It took time — more than I’d like to admit — before I realized what those standards enabled. With clean, standardized data, I could actually connect records across sources. I could research with confidence instead of guessing. I could build a full picture instead of stitching fragments together and hoping the correlations were real. The standards weren’t slowing me down. They were giving me a language that worked.
Communication standards work the same way. When you define your terms, clarify your intent, and say what you actually mean — not what sounds close enough — everything downstream gets better. The research gets better. The decisions get better. The relationships get better.
And now we have AI.
If you put ambiguity into an AI prompt, you get ambiguity back. If you give it incomplete reasoning, it fills the gaps with confident-sounding noise. If you don’t tell it what you actually want — specific, clear, no room for guessing — it will fabricate something that sounds right but isn’t. The tool doesn’t fix bad communication. It amplifies it. Polished garbage is still garbage.
But here’s the flip side. Working with AI three to four hours a day has actually made me a better communicator with humans. Not because I treat people like machines — that would cheapen every interaction. But because the discipline of being clear with AI transfers. I write better emails. I ask sharper questions. I define problems before I try to solve them. The muscle you build prompting well is the same muscle you use communicating well. Clarity is clarity, whether the listener is a person or a processor.
Know your message. Know your audience. Keep it simple. Deliver it well.
That’s not a soft skill. That’s a discipline.
The era of winging it is over. Clarity wins.
Day 78 of 280. Two days left in Round 2.
David Willis 