Letting Go - The Fine Art of Just Enough
A blog post by Sarah Perez about a recent Forrester report on Baby
Boomersreminded me that only about 21% of the population are Creators - people who create content on the web like blogs, videos, podcasts, etc. While Boomers are clearly improving in their use of Social Media, only 15-16% of them are creating content.
How to Reach/Attract Your People
By the way, if you haven't figured out how to reach "your people" with Social Media yet you need to play with the Technographics Profile Toolon Groundswell's site. This will allow you to choose from several demographic elements (age, country, gender) so you can see how your people like to be connected with (and how you can attract them).
Adults & Letting Go
Clearly Adults need some help with creating content. One major factor which might be holding adults back from pouring their individual wisdom, insights, etc. into the public domain (or the hyper-accelerated version of it, the Web) for all to see might be an unwillingess to Let Go.
Lessons from the Past
My Grandfather wrote a draft of a book on speed reading but never published it. My Mother felt like she had "The Great American Novel" in her, but never wrote it (unless you collectively count the wonderful letters she wrote during her lifetime).
Web Publishing = New Opportunities
Given the newer methods of Publishing on the web, most notably blogs, we can all publish our content in one form or another. Just remember that a number of blog posts can end-up being a real dead-tree book or eBook.
Make It So
So to the end of helping a number of people realize their dreams or potential I'd like to offer you a way to "make it so" (in the immortal words of fictional Star Trek character, Jean-Luc Picard).
First Release Yourself From All Constraints
First, let's start by releasing ourselves from any rules or constraints to worry about. Certainly then any one of us could just let it go and let out the words and ideas which are trapped within us. Writings generated in this way would most likely be incredibly free-form like the thoughts we have all of the time. To put a literary term to it, we'd be writing "stream of consciousness" content.
Stream of Consciousness
Stream of consciousness is great if you're great at it,
like podcasters C.C. Chapman (Managing the Gray) or Mitch Joel (Six Pixels of Separation), but it would probably drive us crazy if it was used excessively for writing blogs or website content. Note that you don't see that many stream of consciousness novels around these days, although there were some isolated great ones, mainly because the authors were great, e.g., James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Some Structure Necessary
That said, some structure is necessary and certainly some grammar and puctuation helps.* But don't obsess about finding the "perfect word", or sentence, or blog post, or content for your website. Just get it down, clean it up some, polish it a bit...and you're done. Now let it go.
* Should that be "help" singular or "helps" plural? - I could spend the time to go look up the rule for agreement, but I won't just to make the point.
Publishing = Opportunities
It's more important to have it up on the web than sitting in your head, on a sheet of paper, or on your screen - unpublished, than out there in public being read, commented on, and indexed by Google and the other search engines.
Value vs. Rubbish & Perfectionists vs. Slackers
That said, I'm not suggesting that you should just write (or say)...worthless rubbish. Have something good, something valuable to say...and say it. So this isn't a call for "Slackers Unite!", but more of: Slackers should take it up a notch and perfectionists should take it down a notch. Ok, for real perfectionists, take it down a half-notch (or you never would, and you know who you are!).
Is it done yet? - The 87-13 Rule
My Wife, Milen, is infinitely practical about things like this. Since I was an information researcher for many years, there's always a point in every project when you have a draw a line in the sand and ask yourself, "Is it done yet?", since research in-and-of-itself could go on forever (especially with the web and new information being produced all the time). Her advice was much like the Pareto principle (the 80-20 rule), only she would ask, "Is the research at least 87% done? And if the answer was, "Yes", then she'd say, "Fine, then your client will probably be fine with the results."
Form Over Substance
The reasoning is that the questions have been answered, but there can always be some additional information which could be obtained, or documented, or the format could be polished, or a chart could be inserted, etc. But these things are more "form over substance" versus the conclusions which were already made (and substantiated).
What's Necessary vs. Gingerbread
And more importantly, these are things which are in your head and weren't
- Gingerbread flourishes on Victorian
necessarily anything the client ever wanted or needed or asked for. Chances are the client will be ecstatic over the results they are provided with...and they'll never know that there might have been more flourishes or "gingerbread" which could have been added, but weren't.
Let Go & Make It So
In any case, I hope this gives you a rationale for Letting Go.
Now "make it so".
Comments?
Have a comment or question? Know a better way to let go so your web publishing can flow? If so, let me know.
Footnotes: I originally heard about the blog post by Sarah Perez about a recent Forrester report on Baby Boomers on the For Immediate Release (FIR) Podcast: The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #425: February 23, 2009. The part of the podcast mentioned above can be heard at EveryZing.
Tell a friend!
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