Month: June 2015

I’m still working on the blog’s vision and goals and it occurred to me why authentic was such a sticky wicket–the meaning has been stretched some. To me, it’s summed up as “what you see is what you get,” and therein lies the problem: I don’t look like much, unless you know where to look, I suppose.

The challenge comes when having had to choose between making an impression or making an impact, I’ve preferred to make an impact. Sometimes, on a good day, the impact is what makes an impression. Oftentimes, however, the impact comes at the cost of making an impression, or at least an immediate impression. Sometimes, to be completely honest, I strike out and make neither (or worse). Those, I chalk up to live and learn, and try not to repeat them.

Back to the blog. If I aspire for the blog to have a positive impact and make an impression, but can I do that and be authentic?  I think so, as long as the impression comes from the impact. In a world that can’t see past the impressions, however, that’s going to come with a cost. But it’s a cost that’s lower, in the long run, than optimizing for impression over impact.

I think I can get past authentic now that I’ve operationalized it more clearly.

With that, I’ve updated my vision document.

In this latest update, I:

• Added a new audience segment: Amateur radio. How could forget that?
• Edited the vision to engage in a conversation, not just contribute (i.e. toss things into) one.
• Added a new principle: to strive for craftsmanship.

The last one is a personal goal as well and speaks back to how I’ve operationalized authentic. I want this work to have a clean and professional sense about it. If it doesn’t now, I want it to work towards that goal as I go along.

Interesting. By clearing up one principle, I was able to reveal another.

Cool.

There’s no time like the present.

In the spirit of my last post, I started the vision document for the blog. This wasn’t as hard as I thought, but it wasn’t easy. I ran out of steam at the Principles section. I don’t think that means I’m without principles, just that I want to give them some thought–I want them to be something I can live with, if not aspire to.

Audience

That was easy. It took a little bit of thought, but only to decide how to articulate them.

Vision

That was pretty straightforward, as well. We’ll see how it holds up as time goes on.

Principles

And this is where it got a little sticky.

• Be honest and accurate
• Be constructive and contribute to improvement
• Be authentic

Be honest and accurate – That was easy to put down on paper (virtual or otherwise). Without that as a starting point, the rest is just more Internet flotsam. But I could feel the pressure starting to build.

Be constructive and contribute to improvement – That’s going to take some growing into (so please have some patience). It’s not that being constructive is something I can’t do. Not at all. What’s going to be a challenge is tempering my critical comments (a.k.a. biting my tongue). It’s still too easy for me to slip into my curmudgeon persona. There’s a time and a place to call him to the front of the line, but, it’s usually better if he just stays at home in the rocker on the porch, sipping lemonade, and petting the dog.

Be authentic – …and that’s as far as I got in this try. I got stuck on operationalizing authentic. That shouldn’t be difficult, but for now, I’ll attribute the difficulty to the fact I did all this on a Friday afternoon.

All in all, not a bad start.

My blog is getting close to celebrating its six month birthday and I’m still finding its voice. Sure, its voice is really my voice, so maybe I’m still finding my voice as well.

From the first post, I started off with some simple, structural rules. Well, rule. Each post should be less than 500 words. That’s about two minutes for the average person to read. It seemed like a good limit to accommodate the reader’s patience and temper the writer’s proclivity to go on and on (and on and on…). Thanks to editor that WordPress provides, I can  tell when I’ve hit my limit and several posts have been trimmed down considerably to meet the limit.

There’s more to writing, however, than word count. After limiting the length, the next challenge is the voice and tone. How do I want the blog to sound. Looking back at the topics, they seem to wander around with no apparent direction. In some sense, that’s the nature of a web log, but I’m not sure that’s where I want it to go. This became a more pressing problem as I recently wrote several posts that I’m not sure will ever see the light of day, at least in their current form. They appear to have been written by someone who is very impatient and somewhat upset with things as they are. (Oh, right, that must’ve been me). Whether or not that’s what I meant to say at the time, I’m not sure that’s what I wanted to say. So, I’ll muffle those for the time being. Because it’s easier to edit than create (usually), maybe I’ll come back to them and tidy the up. Constructively, I think they represent my state of mind (unfocused), and my annoyance with that. Fortunately fate has intervened to help turn that around.

Now that school’s over, I’ve got time to attend some of the social/professional events that are going on around town (Seattle). In one I attended earlier this week, I saw Steve Fisher talk about Content & Design: Conflict is the Key to Great Experiences. Most of the content from his talk is on his website at Responsive content modeling, if you’re interested.

The key takeaways from Steve’s talk were using and working through conflict to arrive at the design’s:

• Audience
• Vision
• Principles
• Goals

Those seem like reasonable elements to identify for my blog to help me find its voice. Now to get to work.