Monday, January 3, 2011

Objective Communication for Sale

Update: Someone bought this course long ago. Feel free to check out the quote that I shared from it, however, and then (if you're wondering about his latest book) read 6 Quotes From (and Some Thoughts on) Leonard Peikoff's DIM hypothesis.

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A year ago, I bought a lecture course called "Objective Communication" by Leonard Peikoff. Since then, I have listened to the course twice. It has proven extremely valuable, helped me to get published numerous times, and I treasure it.

However, my wife also gave me something valuable last year--a baby boy. And I treasure him too. So in order to help buy him all the Montessori toys that a parent can buy, I'm selling the course that I originally bought for $280 for $150 plus shipping.

You can learn more about the course--usually sold for $350--here. Below is an excerpt from the first lecture, where Peikoff establishes why the subject matters:
We are none of us, very few of us, taught to think or communicate. We didn’t learn the skills [or] techniques involved. And yet these techniques, both with regard to thought and communication, are not innate, they’re not automatic. It’s a difficult, complex ability to present complex ideas, to deal with them, to make them clear. It’s an ability which rests on principles that have to be defined, applied, practiced. It’s an art that has to be learned. And it can be—and I mean here both thought and communication. 
Now in the ancient world this art was essentially taught, they called it rhetoric. It was the art of how to present ideas persuasively to others and the major philosophers all had a definite theory on that. (Aristotle wrote a whole treatise on it.) Today, it is not effectively taught. 
The future of the world depends on the spread of the right ideas. And that requires that the advocates of those ideas understand them clearly in their own mind and then can communicate them effectively in whatever form is appropriate—whether in a drawing-room discussion where it’s appropriate or to your child if he asks you whether there’s a god, or to his teacher if he celebrates UN Day in grade 3, or on a paper if you’re a student in school, or to your lady’s club when it meets, or in a letter to your editor, or to Congress, or whatever. 
All of these are the practical daily means by which the world is changed, and saved—saved if what you present is correct. But all of this requires inner clarity on the part of the people with the right ideas and the ability to communicate them effectively.
Anybody interested in the course is free to contact me on Facebook, Twitter, or by email. For an extra $25, I'd also throw in an absolutely delightful course called "Gems of Drama" by Lisa VanDamme.