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"But I am telling you that owl invitation or not, you already have this ability within you. That you have the ability to create magic within yourself. Tha
by brandnewlow 15y ago
"But I am telling you that owl invitation or not, you already have this ability within you. That you have the ability to create magic within yourself. That you just have to imagine — and believe in your imagination so much that iyou work hard enough to make it real."
This is really key. SO many people struggle with this brand of magical thinking, i.e. "There's someone out there who will solve all these problems for me." It took me 27 years to stop doing it myself. I see it with a lot of my friends starting companies and trying to get traction for them. They take every meeting with a VC who "wants to chat," they consider uber sketchy proposals from marketing guys looking to "combine my people skills with your product" etc etc etc. And it leads to death.
I spent a solid year of working on Windy Citizen where my hopes and dreams were all centered around getting one of the big newspapers to write about the site and the community coming together there. It was a huge waste of time and energy that could have been so much better spent actually building the community and making the service better.
This idea that special people do special things is proposterous. Anyone can do something special, you just have to put yourself in a position to accomplish whatever it is. Waiting around for some outside force to change your life it the fast-train to loserville. Glad Jenny shared that message with the kids.
It turns out, if you're intently focused on your own mission, if things start coming together for you, people will go out of their way to make things happen for you.
- jenny8lee 15y agoHi Brad. I'm glad that you found a message in it for you. Makes me think that the message works on kid and adult levels.
- brandnewlow 15y agoAbsolutely. People like to help people a lot more than they like to be asked for help. Think of how many people asked you to write stories about them when you were at the Times, and that little part of you that died inside every time and made you actively NOT want to cover them simply because they asked. Meanwhile, if you heard about someone doing something awesome cough Reddit cough you'd want to go write about what they're up to and spread the word. It's the same for these kids. Waiting around for someone to make their dreams happen for them won't work. They need to go try to be awesome and then people will help them get better.
- wallflower 15y agoSince you live in Chicago, you may be fascinated with this profile of Lois Weisberg. She is single-handedly responsible for helping found many of Chicago's cultural landmarks like Taste of Chicago. http://www.gladwell.com/1999/1999_01_11_a_weisberg.htm http://www.gladwell.com/1999/1999_01_11_a_weisberg.htm