Introduction to Understanding On Purpose
“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” - Isaac Asimov
This is my first post of parts of my book about Understanding On Purpose.
Introduction
I found myself in a rather persistent, nagging malaise.
Like walking around with dog pooh on your feet and only sensing it in the periphery; looking around to figure out where it was coming from — and then realizing that people have been treating you differently all day.
Uncomfortable — like wearing a scratchy woolen sweater on a warm summer day. And having a rock in your shoe. And a hangover.
I know I’m not the only one. It’s all the “rage” these days, and that’s saying quite a bit.
Political divides. Cultural divides. Polarization. Social media fatigue. 24-hour sound bytes that we still call “news.” Left, right. Offense, defense. Denial, deflection, rebuttal. Fabrications and falsehoods and lies — oh, my!
Sometimes, it seems the truth and fiction, right and wrong, functional and non-functional — have all become old concepts that simply don’t have any real meaning anymore.
I had grown desperately tired and bitter as, with every new turn of events crossing my “feeds” (a lovely word, no?), I would experience the cognitive equivalent of eating potato chips after burning the roof of my mouth on hot pizza.
“Shut up! SHUT UP! “ I would shout that them in my car, or in my head.
“Did you not even LISTEN to what she said?”
All our conversations seem to be the same. They are rife with the same frustrations.
“I just don’t understand him!”
“How could he think that?”
“What was he thinking?”
“Talking to them is a waste of time.”
“Do you even understand what you’re saying?”
“I can’t even talk to him anymore — it’s just too upsetting.”
“She’s got her mind made up — nothing I can say will change that.”
“That’s not what I said!”
“These people are stupid.”
“These people are so misinformed.”
“These people are dangerous.”
“These people are evil.”
“Why can these people not just look at the facts?!”
“Are we even talking about the same thing?”
Now would be a good time to interject a “problem statement.” I ask myself: “Isn’t it obvious?!” Alas, apparently not.
The problem is not those “other” people.
The problem is that we no longer have useful conversations with them.
This book is for anyone who has ever spoken, thought, or written any of the frustrated statements above or been on the receiving end of any of them.
It’s for anyone who is tired of so-called “arguments” that go nowhere.
It’s for anyone who simply wants to learn.
It’s for anyone who fears for our democracy and our world because opposing sides can’t talk to one another about the things that really matter.
It’s for anyone in any relationship of any kind.
It’s for anyone with a sincere desire to understand why other people might think things that we disagree with.
If I were a cognitive scientist or a trained philosopher, I would come to you with formal credentials in psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, neuroscience, or anthropology. I am not, and I do not.
I am, instead, by profession, an engineer. As such, my tools have always been information, logic, and communication.
For the second half of my career, my resume has also included the often misunderstood and much-maligned title of Project Manager. In this role, I add to my bag of tricks all of those skills commonly referred to as “soft” that are all about people: how we think, how we behave, and how we interact, including all of our human weaknesses and strengths, agendas, personalities, and quirks. The past two decades of my professional life have been about helping other people think their way through problems and come to solutions that work.
On a bad day at work, I herd cats and push ropes. On a really bad day, I just listen to the cats scream at each other and want to hang myself with the rope.
This book is about living more of the good days, when I bring people together and make things happen.[1]
By way of personal background, I would offer that am a father of two, husband, brother, and first-generation German-American. I have a Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering. I played soccer throughout high school and college. Today, I spend as much time hiking in the Appalachian Mountains around my home in Roanoke, VA as possible. I am a martial artist, having started in Taekwon Do, dabbled in Judo, and trained in Aikido for almost three decades. I am a musician; a singer and writer of songs, and a picker of guitar strings.
All of these parts of me inform where I come from. Many parts of me have worked their way into my writing, whether they are called out specifically or not.
What’s Coming
In the following 10-12 weeks, I will present my book about understanding. It’s a short book. There are three parts.
Part One, I will present, for your consideration, what I see as some fundamental truths about the nature of human thought itself.
I will then lay out, in Part Two, four basic and cumulative principles about the nature of how humans understand each other and themselves — and, of course, how they don’t.
Finally, I will offer a set of simple principles, habits, and skills in a section called “For the Sake of Argument” that I believe can be at the root of helping human beings understand each other better.
It is my hope to help people make sense of the maddening modern cacophony in the news and in social media, full of chattering, blathering, ranting, trolling, flaming, ghosting, shouting, ‘splaining, name-calling, gas-lighting, fabricating, misconstruing, and just plain lying. There is good stuff out there, but, as a teacher of mine once said, “It can be like groping for a pearl in a cesspool.”
My hope is to help a few souls follow their sincere longing for truth over their instinct for righteousness. Perhaps I will connect with a few brave individualists willing and longing to listen for what few others can hear, and help them echo it back. With luck and persistence, I believe that we can improve the conversations we’re in and eventually steer the larger discourse in a more positive direction than we are headed toward today.
Ultimately, I hope to nudge the world toward humans being better humans, individually and collectively.
I cannot promise that what I write will bring you any sort of peace. For me, I must say that this work has largely done the opposite.
It did, however, bring me purpose. To understand — on purpose.
A brief personal note about politics
I do not write specifically about politics, but I acknowledge that our political conversations over the past three or four presidential administrations have motivated my thinking. It seems almost any discussion quickly becomes about politics, so politics is unavoidable.
I actively avoid choosing sides in our ongoing and ever-more polarized political discourse. At least not until the very last possible minute, when we all have to make choices. After all, life is full of essay questions, but the test is usually multiple-choice.
While I personally have my own political leanings like everyone else, I try very hard not to let those be part of what I write about understanding. In fact, to the extent that you can sniff out who I might have voted for throughout my life, I have probably failed. Forgive me in advance — I’m human.
My mission is how we communicate with each other — not necessarily what we talk about.

[1] Taken from the tag line on my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelmfranke/