the hurricane inside my brain

photo: jessicafm on Flickr

When cars were first invented, they didn’t have blinkers. It was only after the fact that people studying the effect that cars had on society said “hey, it looks like people keep crashing every time the person in front of them turns. Too bad we can’t figure out a way for the cars to signal their intention before they turn so that people can stop in time.”
And then they solved the problem.

What they didn’t say was: “what idiot invented the car and didn’t realize you’d crash every time you got out there and made a turn” or “the general public is too stupid to drive cars, they are never going to work” or “cars don’t work, it’s fine when there’s only a few people on the road but they are just not scalable.”

Yet that’s what I see people do when it comes to technology, or social media, or networking platforms. They blame the creators or they blame the people using them or they figure stuff will never be scalable.

Until someone else comes along and solves the problem.

Which just got me thinking that some day I would like to be the type of person that invents the blinker.

photo: eleanorhartwick

We are defined by what we share.

There’s a lot of talk these days about people being “curators”. Brand curators, journalistic curators, and, as I like to say, curators of the world.  We come across all this stuff in our day-to-day life, stuff we find helpful or interesting or entertaining and we share it with our friends. When I tell people who don’t know about Social Media that Social Media has changed my life they look at me like I’m a little insane (which is ok, ‘cuz that’s part of my brand.)  But the reason it’s changed my life so much is because I have learned to share. I give away everything I can – every idea, every bit of business advice, everything I learn, everything I find interesting. I’ve come to find that it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I just didn’t know how.

Here I share with you Damien Basile’s Tumbler Account, which he shares with the world.

photo: wetwebwork

I used to think that the word “value” was the most overused, least meaningful word in the English language. People kept telling me: “In social media, you need give people something of value.” But what was that? Information? News? A how-to guide? Entertainment? Just something random and bizarrely interesting? A beautiful sentence? Surely there could be value in ANY of those things.

But then I discovered a meaning that makes sense to me.

And in the end, it seemed so obvious, that I felt a little stupid for not getting it before. So with that said, I will share it with you. : )

People come together in a community because they share common values. It may be common interests (knitting, photography, golf). It may be shared ideas, such a political views or religion. It could be  excitement around a product, or even a shared sense of humor. But whatever it is – people come together because they realize they only have a limited amount of time in this world and they want to spend their time doing the things they think are most important. And it’s nice to have others who share those values – people who think the same things are interesting or equally important.

So when I think about what to give a group of people that *has* value, I think about what values they share that brought them together in the first place.

This leads me down the following paths when creating things of value:

> Advice, information, how-tos that help the group as a whole will have value.

> An idea that is relevant to your group but gets them to see things in a new light will have value.

> Things that are funny because only people who are in that group really understand what you’re saying will have value.

> Something random and bizarrely interesting will have value only to those people in your group who happen to find that particular thing also interesting. Another way to look at this is that if your group is large enough, everything will have value to *someone* in it.

> News about what’s going on out there in the world has value when either: a) it relates back to the group or b) you are one of the first to pass it on. (it’s truly NEW, and thus the newness itself connects people).

> Sometimes advertisers try to connect their product to a group of people by associating it with what’s happening in the world. They try to jump on trends as a way of connecting people to their product. It works when there truly is a connection between the product and the trend. It rings false when there isn’t.

> If something has value to my group, I have a public conversation about it. If something has value only to an individual, I have a private conversation.

> If you have created a community, or group, or following or whatever that was created randomly, haphazardly and does not share certain values, it will be *extremely* difficult to figure out what is valuable to them.

There are those of us (and some days, I admit to being one of them) who want to find the one thing that *everyone in the world* will find interesting. And there are some things that are universally appeally: stories of men landing on the moon, or a pilot landing a plane on the Hudson.

But it’s really really hard to send a man to the moon or land a plane on the Hudson river every day.

And if you want to get out there and talk to a group of people every day, in a way that has value to them, I’d try this: first, think about what their shared values are.

Photo credit: wjklos

I heard a story about Christopher Columbus when I was about 6 years old. It had nothing to do with crossing the ocean, or the Nina, Pinta, or Santa Maria, or with the world being flat. I do have some vague jumbled memories of all those things, but this is the story that has stuck with me for 40-odd years

Columbus is at a dinner party when he holds up a raw egg. “Can any one of you guests,” he says, “make this egg stand on end using nothing more than your wits and what’s on this table?” The guests puzzle over it, try it and fail. After they give up, Columbus pours a pile of salt on the table, and stands the egg up in the pile. When he blows away the salt, the egg remains standing. “But that’s easy!” protests one of the guests, indignant. “Of course it’s easy,” states Columbus mildly. “Once shown how.”

I use this story in my own life two different ways. Often, there are times I don’t know how to do something. Once someone shows me how, it’s easy. Getting over my fear of looking stupid before asking is often the hardest part of the process. But the other way I use the story is for those times when there is no known solution. What to do? Forge a path, figure it out, come up with a solution that has beauty and elegance and looks like it was the easiest thing in the world. Then blow away the salt, and watch what happens.

When my son was about six years old and learning to read, we were huddled in bed, looking at a book. He pointed to a picture of a boat. “What’s that?” he said. “That’s a boat, Johnny.” “No, it’s not Mommy.” I squinted, looked again. Was I wrong? It looked like boat to me. “I can’t sit in that boat, mom.” He grabbed the book from my hands and tried to sit on it. “Will it float? Can I take it to the bathroom and put it in the tub? It’s not really a boat, is it mom?”

For years after that happened, I told people that my insight from this story was that boys were more literal than girls. Which could be true, but perhaps misses the point. I think a better insight might be this: Sometimes people just need to have one more piece of information than you are willing to give them.

After all, Johnny just wanted me to tell him it was a “picture of a boat.”