Latin: viva vox

What is preferable to writing a learned piece, is not an oral story passed down from person to person or the written documentation of secondhand experiences but the living voice of someone who has first hand knowledge of the story being told.

Better to be an eyewitness by the side of the master himself and not to be like those who navigate out of books. – Galen

You will gain more from the living voice and sharing someone’s daily life than from any treatise.” – Seneca

This spurs me to seek out the voice behind the text, to better understand the perspective of the writing. Maybe that is why leadership books are just so hard to digest… As they are firsthand accounts of how a person became a better leader, but in transcription from experience to paper, many times the story is lost and all that is left is “four principles” or “twelve questions” rather than the true life changing narrative of how a great leader shaped those around him. Without ‘viva vox‘ the story loses it’s fertility.