I have reviewed more than 200 books on social media. Most reviews have passed without incident. Then one didn’t. The review was largely positive. I had recommended the book to my followers. But I’d mentioned something specific that hadn’t worked for me as a reader. What followed was a long message from the author: honest criticism, if it must exist at all, belongs in private, not on a public platform. I took the review down and sat with the strange, deflating feeling of having offered something generous, only to have it handed back to me as an injury.
Later that day, I went for a run. I’ve been training in Zone 2 lately. For the uninitiated, Zone 2 is a specific cardiovascular state, a pace that feels frustratingly slow. You know you can run faster. The ego insists on it. But the purpose of Zone 2 is adaptation, not performance. This is where the aerobic engine is quietly built. If you push harder, you move into Zone 3. You are still working, sweating, even feeling productive. But runners have a term for this kind of effort: junk miles. Expenditure without return. Somewhere during that run, it occurred to me that most of our difficult conversations are Zone 3. We are fully present, emotionally engaged, even convinced we are communicating, but without the slower, deliberate groundwork, very little actually gets through.
The mistake I made with that review is the one we all make, repeatedly, with the best intentions. We assume that what feels respectful to us will feel respectful to others. It feels like empathy. It is, more accurately, projection.
No book is without its imperfections. That is not a failure of the writer. It is the nature of the form. Once a book leaves its author’s hands, it no longer belongs to them. It belongs to every reader who opens it, each bringing an entirely different interpretation to the encounter. A review is simply a record of the meeting between a book and a reader. Every such meeting will be different.
Not everyone sees it this way. And that, I realised, is the problem. The disagreement was not about a review. It was about two people operating from entirely different assumptions. To me, a review meant an honest public response. To the author, it meant something different. Neither of us stated our expectations. We discovered them only later.
The older I get, the more I notice how much goes wrong in the space between what we assume and what we actually say. We think words such as support, loyalty, feedback, friendship, and honesty carry universal meanings. They do not. Every person arrives carrying a slightly different dictionary. Most of the time those differences remain invisible until something goes wrong. Thirty seconds of plain speech about what we meant by the word ‘review’ would have spared us both.
This is what Zone 2 thinking looks like applied to communication: slowing down enough to clarify expectations before the effort begins, even when it feels unnecessary or awkward. Most of us do the opposite. We rush ahead assuming that shared words mean shared meanings. We expend enormous emotional energy managing misunderstandings that could have been prevented by a brief conversation at the start.
Honesty is not the problem. Unexamined expectation is.