Reason and faith find a welcome home when you pursue your life's passion.
I have always known just how much luck is involved in success. Perhaps the path is more straightforward for others, but for me it takes daily work, intense focus and a sometimes lonely leap of faith that my truth is destined to be realized.
The space that I am within, social media, is a vibrant one. It is all about faith. Faith that people systematically connecting with like minds in a rich fashion is a good thing.
Faith that the combination of favorites, related and recommended content will lead to better media and information flows.
Faith that companies, their customers and their constituencies will take the plunge and embrace as strategic the cultivation and capturing of conversations; that they will take whole the development of never-ending narratives with and between their core base.
I really believe in the goodness of all this but new markets don't follow familiar paths. You just can't know what you don't already know. There is no substitute for actually doing.
Here is where pragmatism enters the equation. There is a saying that you can not improve what you don't measure. This is a medium that can be measured on so many levels. Brand awareness. Attention. Well-defined actions. Completion. Signing up for an email list. Requesting info. Buying something. And on it goes.
But the workflow-friendly means to make sense of the data in a meaningful fashion are still pretty young.
And what constitutes the metrics of your success and that of your customers in this medium? It really depends on what your ambition is. How earnestly you approach something that is not yet fully formed. Early adopters gain huge market "land grab" advantages. That said, fast followers are all too often the last man standing.
Ultimately, you've got to pay the bills. In the lexicon of "Built to Last," it is not the reason for being but it is certainly the oxygen.
What got me thinking about this is that I am reading Al Gore's book, "The Assault on Reason" and one of the central tenets of the book is how disconnected our society has gotten from owning our own critical reasoning facilities.
Putting the political and cultural aspects of the book aside, I realized that I do reason very well. It is the oxygen that I breathe naturally. What I do less well is faith. It sounds strange to say that, as I am very spiritual and like I said, I have taken many leaps throughout my life and career to date.
Somewhere along the line, however, I started to carry a dispassionate self. Wanting to believe that there is a light a the end of the tunnel. But too much of a chicken shit to take the emotional plunge and put it all out there. Too much of a chicken and not enough of a pig. No more. I am all in.
The seeds of faith have been re-planted. I must chant it daily. Shouldn't we all own reason and embrace faith (whatever that means for you) and faith-filled pursuits ?
