When I was 20, I moved to Africa to work at a nonprofit.
I was young, excited, and if I'm being honest, a little too confident in how I thought I understood people. I believed if I was clear, direct, and honest, that was basically what good communication was.
Then I ended up living in tight quarters with a guy from Ghana, a guy from Brazil, a guy from Mozambique, and four guys from South Africa. Different countries, different cultures, different upbringings. English wasn't everyone's first language, and even when we were all speaking it, we weren't always meaning the same thing.
It didn't take long for that to show.
Put a bunch of 18 to 20-year-olds in a small space with different norms and you're going to get tension. We did.
I remember one disagreement getting heated. In the middle of it, I pointed at one of the guys while making my point. To me, that meant emphasis. It meant I cared. It meant I was trying to be clear.
To him, it was disrespect.
And he was right.
I didn't know enough at the time to understand that something as small as a gesture could carry that much weight depending on where someone comes from. I thought the issue was what we were arguing about. I thought if I just explained myself better, it would resolve.
But it wasn't really about the argument.
It was about everything underneath it.
Posture. Tone. Body language. Pride. Culture. Assumptions.
All the things I wasn't paying attention to.
That season gave me a pretty honest look at how limited I was as a communicator once words weren't enough.
And words had always been enough for me, or at least I thought they were. I leaned on them. If I could explain myself, persuade, talk it through, I assumed I was doing a good job communicating.
What I hadn't learned yet was that communication isn't just what you say. It's how you carry it.
Over time, living together forced all of us to adjust.
You start to read each other better. You learn what lands wrong. You learn what's normal for you isn't normal for someone else. You learn that not every sharp moment is about bad intent. Sometimes it's just a gap. Sometimes it's ignorance. Sometimes it's ego.
Usually it's a mix.
And slowly, things change.
That same group of guys I was bumping into every day became some of the people I experienced life with in a way I hadn't before.
We traveled together. Egypt. Kenya. South Africa. We sailed on the Nile. Ate fresh mangoes off trees in Kenya. Stayed in a children's home in the Shimba Hills outside Mombasa. Shared meals. Shared stories. Eventually met each other's families.
And the guy I got into that heated disagreement with…
He became one of my closest friends from that season.
We've spent countless hours on the phone over the years talking about business, life, leadership. I've watched him grow into an operator and builder in South Africa. We've stayed connected in a real way.
He was at my wedding.
I think about that sometimes.
Because that moment, the one where I pointed at him and didn't even realize what I was doing, could have gone a very different direction. Instead, it became one of the early moments that forced me to grow up a bit.
That's really what that season did for me.
I went there thinking communication was mostly about saying the right thing.
I left realizing it's a lot more about how you show up while you're saying it.
It's posture.
It's tone.
It's whether you're actually listening or just waiting to respond.
It's whether the other person feels respected before you even get to your point.
It's understanding that people receive you through their own background, not yours.
That last one matters more than I realized at the time.
In the U.S., we tend to flatten communication into words. Be clear. Be direct. Say what you mean.
There's value in that.
But it's incomplete.
Because you can say the right thing and still lose the room.
You can be technically correct and still be relationally off.
You can make a strong point and still fail to communicate.
I've seen that play out in business over and over.
Leaders thinking they're bringing clarity when they're actually creating tension.
Operators thinking they're being decisive when the team experiences them as dismissive.
Teams stuck on what they think is a strategy issue, when underneath it's a trust issue or a communication gap.
I've done all of that myself.
That's probably why this memory stuck.
It wasn't just cultural. It was personal.
It exposed that I relied too much on words and not enough on awareness.
Even now, I can still default there.
If I were to put a simple frame around what I learned, it would be this:
Most communication is happening on four levels at once.
What you say. How you say it. What the other person brings into the moment. And the relationship between you.
Most of us spend almost all of our time on the first one.
But the older I get, the more I think the other three are usually doing most of the work.
That lesson started in a cramped house with a bunch of guys from different parts of the world, trying to figure each other out.
And it stayed with me because of what came after.
Not just the tension, but the friendship.
Not just the misunderstanding, but the time it took to understand each other.
Not just the mistake, but the relationship that outlasted it.
I'm thankful for that.
Thankful I got it wrong early.
Thankful it didn't cost me the relationship.
Thankful that one of the guys I had no idea how to communicate with at 20 is someone I still respect and care about today.
Some relationships start easy.
Others are built through friction.
This one had both.
And it changed how I think about communication.
Less about making my point.
More about making sure it can actually be received.
That's harder.
But it's the work.