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Writing Blogs and Writing Hymns
widget | 04 July, 2010 15:58
Thomas Power from Ecademy waves to the crowd
I am still ruminating on Thomas Power's Ecademy course on social media. The key recommendation I took away fromit was that a blog must have a personal rather than a corporate identity, because no-one trusts corporate blogs, and they are generally pretty boring anyway.
So what were people to write? Write what defines you, said Thomas Power, adding that people who could not find what defined them in the online world were usually confused about what defined them in the normal world. At times this dialogue reminded me of the scene in ‘Life of Brian’ where Brian tells the crowd that they are all individuals and that they had to think for themselves. “Yes,” replies the crowd in unison. “We are all individuals.”
As an exercise to help us define ourselves, we had to do one of those toe-curlingly awful exercises which tend to come up at courses like this - write down the best and worst moments in our lives.
So what were people to write? Write what defines you, said Thomas Power, adding that people who could not find what defined them in the online world were usually confused about what defined them in the normal world. At times this dialogue reminded me of the scene in ‘Life of Brian’ where Brian tells the crowd that they are all individuals and that they had to think for themselves. “Yes,” replies the crowd in unison. “We are all individuals.”
As an exercise to help us define ourselves, we had to do one of those toe-curlingly awful exercises which tend to come up at courses like this - write down the best and worst moments in our lives.
The best and the worst
The first to share his moments with the group got off lightly. His worst moment was when his house was burgled, which, while distressing, either meant that he was not giving us the real worst, or that he must have missed the more extreme things which can happen in life.
As we went round the room, the moments grew more sombre. Births, deaths and marriages appeared, including the suicide of a best friend at school.
At last, one man said that he saw a distinction between best and worst moments in business and life was made, and he proposed to give us both.
The worst moment in his personal life was telling his two young sons that he was leaving their mother, and walking away without being able to comfort them. The best moment was reuniting those sons with his new second family. The best moment in his business life was selling his business for £6 million. The worst moment was finding out, a few months later, that the acquirer did not have the cash to pay him for this purchase, and was in fact going bust itself, taking his business with it. And the very worst thing, he said, was that that night he went home and cried, which he had not done over leaving his first wife and family.
The worst moment in his personal life was telling his two young sons that he was leaving their mother, and walking away without being able to comfort them. The best moment was reuniting those sons with his new second family. The best moment in his business life was selling his business for £6 million. The worst moment was finding out, a few months later, that the acquirer did not have the cash to pay him for this purchase, and was in fact going bust itself, taking his business with it. And the very worst thing, he said, was that that night he went home and cried, which he had not done over leaving his first wife and family.
Across the years, the words of my English teacher came back to me. The hymns of the 19th and early 20th century are a vastly underrated social record, he told us. So many times, he said, they express things which we have forgotten and I can think of no better words to sympathise with this man's experience than those of the great hymn “Lord of the years" which talks of “spirits oppressed by pleasure, wealth and care.”
Nobody wanted to follow the honesty of the last participants and we went back to struggle over our blogs. Perhaps, like a hymn, or a Johnny Cash Country and Western song, a good blog is a story around a theme, taking up some small incident which illustrates a larger point. At least, that is how I shall try to use this blog - stories which illustrate issues relevant to consumer electronics distribution.
Mark Needham, July 2010
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