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The difference between saying something and thinking it

Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on May 29th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides, Social Media

I made an important discovery yesterday. One of those blinding flashes that sneak up on you when you least expect them, yet are so bright they burn colourful imprints onto your retina so that you can still see them even if you close your eyes.

It seems I have more in common with Hugh McLeod than I imagined.

Many years ago I dropped out of university before I even had the chance to start. I went to a very good private school in England and was all set to follow the crib-to-grave groove and enter the medical profession.

Until I went to hospital.

The school organized a works-experience week and I and two others (who made it to the other side) were shuffled into an operating theatre to see what surgeons do first hand. It also gave me the opportunity to see who the surgeons were.

That day I learnt the most important lesson of my life. Who you are and what you do aren’t necessarily the same thing.

The English education system makes it almost impossible to back out of your chosen career path at the last minute which is why at the tender age of 19, I found myself on a plane heading to Italy, where I’ve lived ever since.

That day returned to me recently during one of those “what am I doing with my life??” moments when I was blinded by that flash I mentioned earlier.

It seems that the cutting edge of the blogosphere is social networking. It’s like a massive, uncontrollable Hollywood-style scandal rag reporting round the clock on who’s sleeping where, who said what and how my judgment is invariably wiser than yours.

Getting on this train is easy: Read, write and link. Read, write and link. Hugh calls it “people talking” and people talk perpetually.

Like mainstream chat show ghosts, the stars of the blogosphere are beyond reproach. They’re sneezers, opinion makers, forces to be reckoned with. The rest of us drop like flies.

There is a holier-than-thow element to this. Apparently, to be successful, you’ve got to have your ear (aggregator) to the ground, know the movers and shakers and hang out at the right blog expos. Even better, vlog about them. Corporations in particular can’t miss a beat.

Now I’m the first to admit that, expos aside, I do this myself, I’m doing it on this blog and in this post. It’s also how I met my friend, colleague and rival Richard and it’s how I plan on meeting many others in future.

That’s what I do. But is it who I am?

Didn’t blogging start out as a “web log”? A diary of me, my thoughts and a way of sharing my chunk of life?

I guess at some point some big-boy bloggers’ personal conversations dried up and they sought out other conversations, building traffic for no other reason than because they channelled their thoughts into the comments of others (link love), fueling a never-ending conversation that systematically leads them towards a conversational anti-climax they knew was coming anyway.

Boy does this system get you noticed (and ranked).

But what exactly is the point?

In my book, the only things that ignite and build genuine interest either have a start and a finish or, at the very least, a sense of purpose. Anything else is just a scratched record, with clicks replaced by links that, sooner or later, take you back to where you started.

For my job, the Edelman/Vista fiasco had a start and a finish and it was an amazing experience to be in the middle. Following and countering the adverse PR for my client was an education in syndication management. The bickering about who got the damned Ferrari notebooks and who didn’t frankly didn’t light my pipe at all.

So where’s the link with Hugh? Hugh writes passionately about purpose in the epic “How to be Creative” article.

“One evening, after one false start too many, I just gave up. Sitting at a bar, feeling a bit burned out by work and life in general, I just started drawing on the back of business cards for no reason. I didn’t really need a reason. I just did it because it was there, because it amused me in a kind of random, arbitrary way.

Of course it was stupid. Of course it was uncommercial. Of course it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete and utter waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge. Because it was the exact opposite of all the “Big Plans” my peers and I were used to making.

It was so liberating not to have to be thinking about all that, for a change.

It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to impress anybody, for a change.

It was so liberating to have something that belonged just to me and no one else, for a change.

It was so liberating to feel complete sovereignty, for a change. To feel complete freedom, for a change.

And of course, it was then, and only then, that the outside world started paying attention.”

I just walked that same path with my wife and our Runaway Parents and Genitori in Fuga projects. The fact is, it’s got nothing at all to do with what we do, but everything about who we really are.

There’s a different flavour to projects you have, to use Hugh’s words, “complete sovereignty over”.

“The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. How your own sovereignty inspires other people to find their own sovereignty, their own sense of freedom and possibility, will change the world far more than the work’s objective merits ever will.

Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing.”

Writing about who you are also puts what you do into perspective, draining some of its ultimate value perhaps, but forcing you to put your long-term strategy into perspective.

Even if you still can’t resist that one last link to someone further up the tree who absolutely, without question has something interesting to say about the state of the union.

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