You can’t outrun change when it’s you evolving
Posted by Michael Walsh (Check me out!) on September 24th, 2007
Tagged as: Asides
In this life of volatile emotions, when something breaks it’s usually because something else is trying to get out.
The agents of change are powerful motivators as we are all fine-tuned into seeking out the next big thing. Yet despite being as big and as cumbersome as a
When one of these bright red agents comes down our street we see it a mile off, let it drive past, quickly read the destination and if we decide it’s going in the general direction we’re interested in, we hop on.
Once aboard, we pay the modest fare (money, toil, late nights, some other personal sacrifice) and only get off when we see another, bigger, brighter agent heading to the next Promised Land.
This is all very well, but whatever change made us jump on in the first place was outside of us (it was on the bus), not inside.
Every now and again life catapults you headfirst into the path of one of these agents and the blow leaves a mark a mile wide on your soul, and changes you forever.
As so it is with this copywriter.
The last time I looked at how this blog started, I didn’t recognize myself. Nothing deliberate but back then I was so busy trying to see whose paths my thoughts and experiences would cross that I didn’t notice the profound shifts taking place closer to home.
I have never been an academic. It’s one of my personal skeletons I defend by saying that for me structured academic intelligence simply gets in the way of my own understanding of a subject, slowing down my responsiveness and interrupting any emotional enjoyment I’m expecting to feel.
Take music for example. I couldn’t tell you the difference between Mozart and Mahler, or name more than a few of the myriad of music styles that have emerged since their time, but I have an innate sense of rhythm that is almost physical. I can actually “see†the most complicated percussion breaks and follow complex, computer-programmed drum sequences like they were softly flowing trickles of water. It just clicks.
These past months have stunned me into the silence you can see between this and my last post. Something new and unexpected just clicked, bringing a new order to my world that conflicts so much with so many of the things I have done to date that I am radically re-ordering my priorities.
In two short months I have read: The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Dip, The Tipping Point, Blink, The Assault on Reason, The Wisdom of Crowds and Out of Our Minds by the brilliant Ken Robinson. Then I wrote the corporate brochure of my biggest client (you try believing what you’re writing after a preparation of this calibre…
If that wasn’t hard enough I then sought comfort in trying to take the corporate voice of this same client outside the accepted boundaries of damage limitation and it came straight back at me. Not from outside, but from within.
And then something broke…
These discoveries refuse to be categorized as mere acquired knowledge that makes me function better as a copywriter, rather as agents of change that have brought an innate knowledge to the surface that makes me function better as a human being.
After years of perfecting my art, I now see the value (and lack of it) in many of the things I do and there’s the rub. How do you reconcile your personal thoughts and professional actions when they are in blatant disaccord?
On paper the answer’s easy, yet I’m willing to bet that no-one reading this is foolish enough to believe that anything truly worthwhile ever is.
I have a plan, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it.
-
Loading ... - Print this
RichardatDELL wrote:
It doesn’t sound like I need to re-post afterall (reference is to a previous comment). That Cluetrain manifesto page must have come down the track like like a high speed train versus an old style locomotive…and there is light at the end of the tunnel. A Big bright sun light