How’s this for an interesting conjunction of events: in the same week, my A Deadly Misunderstanding coauthor Mark Siljander appeared on the world’s largest Muslim/Arab television network and on the world’s largest Christian television network.

That’s right: Mark appeared on the Al Jazeera! show Min Washington yesterday and the day before, Sept 23 and 22 (check the book’s site for news and links to video clips of this broadcast)—and on Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN)’s Behind the Scenes on the very next day, Sept 24—i.e., today (for archived footage click here).

Dang—now that is coverage.

Who is that guy’s PR director?!

In this fascinating interview I had recently with Secret Language of Money coauthor David Krueger [note: name and email login required], Dave said this wonderful thing that I had to stop and think about:

I believe the most basic motivation we have as human beings is to be effective, to be a cause.

This hit me like a thunderbolt. And it got me thinking …

Why do people say they want to become “rich and famous”?

Rich, I understand: the desire to be free of limitations, to be able to do whatever one wants, to have whatever comforts and pleasures one desires, to be free of lack and struggle.

But famous? Why would that be such a common desire?

Is it the desire for recognition? Perhaps. But I suspect that what lurks under the idea of “famous” is the more primal idea, important.

That is, that we want to feel our lives genuinely matter.

Another strong review of A Deadly Misunderstanding, this one part of a collection of reviews entitled “Peace in the Middle East: Will It Ever Be Achieved?” in Spectrum magazine, a Seventh-Day Adventist journal founded to serve the goal of looking “without prejudice at all sides of a subject, to evaluate the merits of diverse views, and to foster intellectual and cultural growth.”

You know, I think people are starting to read this book.

Chelle O’Connell, a friend and Go-Giver reader, wrote to us over at the Go-Giver blog with this observation:

“After 25 years of marriage, I realized that there is more than one meaning for the word listen.

“My ex-husband frequently said, ‘You aren’t listening to me.’ I would ask for his advice or input, and if I didn’t do as he recommended, he would say I hadn’t listened. What he really meant was that I hadn’t obeyed him.

“In your book [she’s talking about Chapter 9 of The Go-Giver], Susan was using the word listen in its true sense.”

Beautiful insight — and it’s quite true: people often have very different interpretations of what “listen” means, just as they often give very different meanings to the words “agree,” “disagree,” “talk,” “respect,” and many others.

In fact, listening may be one of the most underdeveloped muscles in modern culture.

Yesterday I interviewed Duane Elgin, author of The Living Universe and Voluntary Simplicity, and in the course of our talk Duane cited a source (I cannot remember the source, though it’s in my notes somewhere; if you want to know it, feel free to email me, and once I dig it up I’ll send it to you) who said that awareness and love were two words for the same thing.

If that’s so, then listening must be the beginning of loving.

What a great way to approach the world — and how sad not to.

It’s September first — which means I’ve got a new editorial up at Networking Times.

This one is called, “Life Is Like a Box of Tofu.” Here’s how it starts:

“While at a party during the 1920s, the young F. Scott Fitzgerald observed a man named Leonard Zelig who had an uncanny ability to take on the demeanor and even physical appearance of those around him. Over the following two decades the chameleonesque man showed up again and again, fitting seamlessly into dozens of different social circles, from Nazi Germany to the White House, always blending in perfectly. Amazing …

“Except that none of it ever happened. The real Fitzgerald never saw or even heard of Leonard Zelig. Because like his heir apparent Forrest Gump, Zelig was a complete fiction.

“Zelig—Fitzgerald party, White House appearance and all—was invented by Woody Allen for his 1983 film of the same name. Gump, the creation of novelist/satirist Winston Groom, was brought to life on film in 1994 by Robert Zemeckis. And like the brilliantly clueless Chance the Gardener, created by novelist Jerzy Kosinksi, filmmaker Hal Ashby and actor Peter Sellers in Being There (1979), they are fascinating characters precisely because they are not really characters at all but take on whatever character others see in them.

“Something like money…”

You can read the whole piece here (no cost, but registration is required).

The bottom line of it is this:

Money, or the lack of it, does not decide who you are. You decide what money is. Life, as it turns out, is not a box of chocolates: you not only know whatcha gonna git, you determine it.