Month: May 2019

I Walk Around Like I Have Something to Prove

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Henry Ford was at one point questioned by lawyers in order to prove that he was intelligent by being asked a series of questions about history and obscure terminology that, at the time, would prove that someone had a university education.

After taking enough questions and seemingly irritated, he exclaimed that he had a series of buttons on his desk where he could call in a person willing to consult with him about any matter that he didn’t know the answer to. Why would he need to know everything when he has access to what he needs to know in order to continue with his process?

That seemed to shut everyone up.

The same thing has been seen over and over from influential people such as physicists, to even more practical businessmen as Bill Gates. They specialized in something and were able to connect knowledge into a plan, even if the plan didn’t exist and they had to make it.

School should be teaching us how to connect things in order to come up with a plan and then execute on it. Slowly, it has turned into a way to prove that you know something, even if you can do absolutely nothing with the information you were taught.

You got an A in math, cool. You scored a B on your last exam, oh no, that’s going to lower your GPA. A low GPA means a crappier job.

The plan is already made for you, all you have to do is follow the road, do as you’re told, and meet expectations. Doesn’t sound like a plan I want to follow.

But then you come around people in organizations such as the current United States administration that puts up a list of expectations. Are you college educated? Do you have a family? Do you follow the law? I’ve come around other countries where they ask similar things in order to award a visa, or even a potential job opportunity. Hey, I get it, there are hundreds of millions of people to sort through, why not put some metrics in place?

Sadly, we’re still in that age where you have to look at a brown man and then down at his resumé in order to come up with an accurate judgement, something that puts the burden of proof on the applicant, that no, he is not and does not support your stereotype of a son of Mexican immigrants.

And then they ask us why we walk around like we have something to prove.

We have something to prove.

We Are Storytellers

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We Are Storytellers

Storytelling is what makes us human. When we ask for help in something personal, or when we’re trying to make the sale, what we’re really doing is telling a story. The better we become at telling a story, the easier it becomes to get what we want.

In today’s age, we have what seems like an unlimited amount of mediums to publish on, and many different ways to tell a story, but it really boils down to three main ways: with visual imagery (photo/video), text (blogs/books), or auditory (radio/podcast).

With all of these channels, we’ve become distracted in chasing different metrics that mean very little to how we satisfy our need to tell story. Looking at the number of Instagram likes or followers tell us nothing about how good we are at telling a story, but rather on how well we appeal to the norm and to what is common within that medium.

There is some great undiscovered content on YouTube that might not even be discovered by the right people before the content creator gives up on his or her craft because there are no views or no likes on their videos. We’re looking at the wrong metrics, because a content creator creates because they like to make things, because their message needs to get across to someone else, but we’ve been fooled to think that we’re wasting our time because someone else has more likes than us.

And we fail to see that even in the greatest search engines and algorithms are very desperately trying to find the best content to show their users, yet we’re trying to meet the algorithms in the middle by lowering our standards and making mediocre work in order to be found by the majority. It may not be a race to the bottom, but if you’re on top, this is definitely a race to a lower version of yourself. Do you really want to join that race?

I would rather make something that I want to make, an opinion that I want to share, and do my best to make it accessible to the people who want to hear/watch/read it. Yes, this may involve some technical things like adding tags, proper captions, SEO, and other things, but it gets built around your content and not the other way.

Let’s make stories for the sake of making them and experiment with making visuals, writing, or speaking. It may require practice to get back on track, but at some point it will be natural once again because we are storytellers.