I’m moving on from writing on Drop of Change for a variety of reasons but perhaps mostly because of this advice from Andi over at Instigationology, “take a month and just do what you enjoy doing.” Spoken in the context of my disinterest in writing for Drop of Change I took the time to figure out what I did when I didn’t feel obligated to write for Drop of Change.

What that was was to use a simpler medium for my words, my Tumblr, A Study In Movement. It has been innocuously linked with a small RSS feed at the bottom for a long time. I end up sharing links, articles, quotes and videos far more than I ended up writing and I engaged more deeply with the concept of short bits here and there from Tumblr as a stream with the occasional written piece thrown in for good measure.

So, I’m calling an end to Drop of Change, it will eventually be phased out but for now I’m leaving it up with a landing page and gracefully retire it to oblivion.

In the meantime, visit A Study In Movement, you can see the posts I will be writing there with this category while the rest are merely a mixture of all the things that stumble through my life and I find worth sharing.

Dreams by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

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A sort of inner curiosity and creativity because you don’t have other kids to play with, and even when your one friend (your best friend) is around, you imagine whole worlds that don’t exist, can’t exist when you’re sitting in front of a computer or game console.

Computers, games, media, are other peoples worlds and you project yourself into them. They’re good to draw ideas from, but the world as a child playing in the woods is akin to a lucid dream (cue Inception) where you get to shape the reality and rules on your own.

I sometimes forget how I see the world and start seeing it as I assume it should be viewed. Flat, limited, bound. Instead when I let my vision (and I’m not just talking about my eyes) guide how I see the world it comes alive in a whole new way.

I see in movement, paths, and challenges, in shapes, objects and space, in lines and curves and concepts. The physical world is a series of puzzles to be put together in various ways, it’s like a giant creative problem solving exercise (that of navigating the world in your own way).

This kind of thinking encourages me to invest in myself so that I can work on moving through the world as I imagine it. Through methodologies like parkour, dance, gymnastics; they encourage me to embrace the world as I see it rather than let it stay untraversed.

It encourages me to see the world as a flow of designs and shapes that interact, counteract and from that comes an emergence greater than the whole.  From the disparate pieces arises a world greater than it’s parts.

How do you see the world?

Do you spend time traveling the world in the ways you see it or do you let your vision of the world remain untraversed?

Perhaps that’s a metaphor for living a good life. If you actually took a moment to reflect, pause and care about what you were doing or even just be aware of it, you could do more good things instead of doing great things (to understand that distinction check out this article by Umair Haque).

Most of the time we’re not faced with the deep moral quandaries that perplex philosophers (e.g. having to choose between our child and our village; go watch the last episode of M.A.S.H.) but we still manage to mire ourselves in short term thinking couched in the language of reason or rationality (which are better described as excuses and rationalization).

It’s easy to tell yourself you’re doing the best you can, making things work with what you have, but are you actually doing the good thing? The action or course of actions that leads to a better world for iteratively more and more people?

But perhaps that’s the problem, that we don’t value a world that it is more vibrant and robust than when we started, or where more people are included in the dialogue to live in that vibrant and robust world.

The Hobbesian notion that we are first and foremost individuals whose lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” in need of social contracts to police our brutish tendencies has pervaded social, political and economic theory for a couple centures now. Yet contemporary research into neuroscience and psychology emphasizes that at our heart we are not brutish and individualistic. Instead we are social and communal creatures driven by a need to connect and empathize with others.

Empathy, not rationality, is our greatest strength.

Why is it then that we still glorify rationality and individualism (particularly in the U.S.)?

I don’t get it. We are not distinct agents disconnected from others and powered by our rationality to succeed or not by our own hand. There is no blank slate, no reset button.

This kind of thinking has done considerably more harm than good to the world on all levels, yet it gets perpetuated over and over again because it achieves great things. Things that are perhaps wondrous and effective yet to what end?

If you’re not doing the good thing, who cares if you’re doing great at it.

Creating a clear and powerful explanation that moves people to engage with you and your content is an entirely different beast that can only be unleashed by talking to people. Your first words about your services or products are a first draft and like any good performer, your content needs to perform in front of people to get real feedback.

Start explaining what you do to anyone who asks.

In launching Pardon My Content, I’ve been pushing myself to explain what the hell content strategy is and more generally what the hell am I doing these days to make the bills go away (other than ignoring phone calls). As I discuss with friends, associates and potential business partners/clients my language is streamlining. I’m discovering the turn key words that make the metaphorical lightbulb click on.

Having a business and selling your services is not about what you do, but about what problems you solve.

To reach potential clients that may need your services but don’t know it, your pitch has to hook them on the problem they have. Mainline content should be solutions and problem solving oriented, not tactics and methodology oriented.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the geektastic jargon, tools and tactics that you and your colleagues enjoy, but your clients want to hear how you can help them, not how you can spend eight hours on taxonomy or curation methods.

Take time to explain your work and services to people who have no idea what you do; it’s the notion that developers are the worst people to test for User Experience, they’re too ingrained in the domain to know how to use it like a normal person.

Business should be about service, good fucking service that solves problems and takes care of people.