pigletpaper.com

Read an interesting article today one of my sis-friends sent to me. The article is called The Captioning of America and is about the editorial trend toward less content and more captions and sound bites. Being a fellow “wordsmither” myself, I found the distinction they draw between captions and sound bites to be rather interesting.

…captions aim to reveal, while slogans and sound bites tend to conceal.

Apparently, we are all getting to busy to read anything of length so the media’s response to this is less and less content. Which is all fine and well when we are talking about captions- that funny commentary accompanying a picture of a cat in sunglasses. But when we talk about sound bites, that’s sort of scary. Are we not demanding the media get to the point and thereby effectively giving them permission to tell us what they want us to hear?

To the average American, content itself is becoming obsolete. The world is increasingly just an index of what’s in it, conversation a distant derivative of things someone heard that someone read that someone said.

I mean really, how many times do we see people create controversy in response to a slogan or sound bite that is so brief it is out of context? All because we demand brevity. And how many times, have we done that? I am certainly guilty as charged, feeling like I get bombarded with so much information on a daily basis that it is a survival mechanism just to be able to filter thru it. When I get an email, for example, if it is very long, it automatically gets filed in the “Read Later” box, which most of the time doesn’t ever get read until my attention is called to it. Sometimes, I feel like I could spend my whole day just checking email. Unfortunately, that doesn’t pay very well.

So herein lies a problem. Where is the balance point between getting information in context and being able to digest it? Has the media not crossed an invisible line? And have we not crossed an invisible line on the other side of the spectrum? Do we not have somewhat of a “chicken and the egg” scenario here? Is this a classic case of the media’s response to our demands-demands that only when they are met we realize that is not really what we meant? Or is out-of context brevity the media’s extortion of our demands? Perhaps this is just merely the media’s attempt to compete for our attention in an over-cluttered, over-stimulated world?

I don’t really know, but perhaps the problem is even more fundamental than that. With all of the brilliant minds in this world, we might have quite simply just over-flooded the minds of consumers with too many choices. But whose responsibility does it become to adjust to this reality? Should we get better at filtering or should the media get better at filtering for us?

I don’t know. Perhaps a mind more brilliant than mine can put this all in context for me. But, I just can’t bring my commentary to a close without sharing the best part of the article with you.

A proposed replacement for the SAT, a test that assesses broader creative skills allegedly more predictive of college success, includes a section on caption writing. Brilliant idea. Writing funny captions for cartoons or photos calls on a wide variety of skills, among them the ability to read facial expressions, infer a situation’s emotional content, and express it in plausible, colloquial language that makes folks laugh out loud. These are far more useful life skills than correctly answering questions about a short essay on papaya production.

Maybe, just maybe, the problem is we are educating our nation on theories with not enough balance spent in practicum experiencing the application of those theories in the real world?

Maybe the problem is more complex than just one issue?

Your thoughts?

There are many schools of feeling on this, but it is my contention that our feelings are not always reality. More specifically, our feelings about a situation do not always accurately align with the reality of the situation. And in my own personal experience, I have found that sometimes they are exactly opposite. Of course, that only becomes apparent in hindsight, never in the moment when it would be really useful.

So as the story goes, I got laid off in July 2001. Actually, I specifically remember it was Friday the 13^th. Go figure! There had been two rounds of lay-off’s already and as a result we were down to a skeleton crew, which meant I was working some crazily long hours. Even before the lay-offs started, I had been pulling all-nighters, so the lay-offs just made things worse.

I guess back then I thought I was doing the right thing and being loyal, not to mention banking brownie points. Today I know, that going to that length was a symptom of a sickness I call work-a-holism, for which the only known cure is to stop working so much. But this is a hard pill for a work-a-holic to swallow! Do you see the trap? All a work-a-holic knows how to do is work. And so you tell a work-a-holic to stop doing the only thing they know how to do well?!?!? Oops, that doesn’t make sense!

Well, sometimes circumstances happen such that they do for me what I cannot do for myself. For example, this work-a-holic didn’t know how to do other “normal-people” stuff like have a relationship with someone that I didn’t work with or to go on vacation and not take business calls. I believed I had a duty. Today it is amazing to me, after having been an Entrepreneur, that I could have deluded myself into giving up so much of my life for someone else. But, of course, my feelings told me that work WAS my life. Perfect case in point how my feelings about a situation were polar opposite the reality of the situation.

So finally on the morning of Friday, July 13, 2001, someone else did for me what I could not do for myself. I recall walking into my office and not being able to log in. Instinctively, I suppose because of the previous two rounds of lay-offs, I knew what was coming. But yet, still deluded, I marched down to the IT department, found one of the guys I knew and said “Hey, what’s the deal? I can’t log-in. Am I getting the axe?” Without missing a beat, he pulled up my profile on his server, said “Hmmm, I am not sure what happened, but for some reason you have been disabled. It should be working now. Let me know if it gives you any more trouble.” And with one click, I was back in business. Ha!

My relief was short-lived because once I got back to my office, I read the emails from HR that apparently I was not supposed to see. I sat there dumbfounded still reeling at what was about to happen. How could this happen to me?!?!? I remember vacillating between doing nothing and packing up my stuff, because I knew they would be by soon to deliver the news. And in pretty short order, I was right. The CFO appeared in my doorway and I knew it was my turn.

I haven’t been back to Corporate America since and really the rest is history. After exiting the building and getting over the initial shock, I do recall feeling a sense of deep relief that the insanity of was over. I did not have a clue what I was going to do, but for the first time probably in my whole life, I felt, for a brief instant, that feeling of knowing it was going to be OK. I knew then that being laid-off was a gift; it just took my mind a while to catch up.

I think Ronn’s comment to the effect that some people have to be forced to give themselves a gift is right on the money. Looking back at my actions, I really don’t think I thought I was worthy of a gift—of any kind. Today, I know that ALL of our actions are driven by our beliefs—the computer program in our head that is totally void of any emotion and does not know the feeling of insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It just knows to “run the loop”.

So if I am not getting the results I would like, I need to look at my part in them. When I take an honest inventory of my part, I always realize that I was doing the only thing I knew how to do—what my program is telling me to do. If I want different results, I have to have a different program—a new belief. Sometimes, though, I discover that I just have a syntax error. I have a “No” where there should be a “Yes”, or a “black” where there should be a “white”. Those are the easier ones to fix because they just require minor tweaks, not major overhauls.

So if actions are always an indicator of beliefs, looking back my actions tell me that I believed work was the only thing that made me whole. Work was my GOD. I prided my self on what I labeled as good work ethic, never realizing that anything without boundaries is never good. I was guilty of over-indulging in work. And on deeper examination, I realize that much of that supposed “work-ethic” really wasn’t bona-fide work ethic as much as it was a “program-driven” need to meet other people’s expectations in return for accolades. Today I know that was a symptom of a lack of confidence in my own self, cleverly disguised as loyalty.

Today, I am incredibly grateful for that lay-off because it set me on a course that even my wildest imagination could not have conjured up. At the time it made no sense and I just couldn’t see how it would all work out. In hindsight, though, as I reflect on how the threads of my life were woven, I can see that it makes perfect sense.

While there have many rough times since becoming an Entrepreneur, my worst day as an Entrepreneur has always been better than my best day working for someone else. Because deep down I know that I am taking responsibility of my own success.

Quite frankly, I don’t understand why everybody is not an Entrepreneur, but I also recognize that we are always exactly where we are supposed to be. There was a time when I didn’t know what I didn’t know, either. Despite my inner dreams of one day being an Entrepreneur, I know today that “one day” would have never arrived because I was sowing seeds of being someone’s employee, so that is what I would have continued to reap.

For those of you that have that Entrepreneur seed inside of you that you are too scared to water, Willingness is the key. Willingness doesn’t cost you anything, but gains you everything. Don’t let details of the “How” keep you from doing the “Do”. The “How” is what you find in the “Do”.

What personal stories do you have to share?

Are you Willing to do the “Do”?

Write us with your comments, feedback or questions.

For more reading along these same lines, I have found Escape from Cubicle Nation to be a great blog site with a wealth of info.

Also you can click here to download a related article “Happy People Never Retire”. It offers a thought-provoking look at why we are all doing what we are doing.