Is it catching❓Or is it just plain old serendipity❓

It was January 1st when I had the idea for the 366 series. It wasn’t fully formed, but I had to start. And, as the posts started to happen over the next few days, there were different ideas and formats running around in my head and being tried out. With the layouts, every time I locked down on a new one - I went back to the older 366 posts and adjusted. (Not the post itself - the layout.) I have never been diagnosed with OCD, but I have my suspicions.

It has now all settled down, a flow has been building, so much so that I have topics in my head that are maybe a week out.

The trouble is that some of the topics are big, and I know I don’t have time on that day and some get really big so have to flag with 🚧 - my signal that I will be coming back.

🖇️ Like this one for example, which I flagged with the emoji - but I know there is so much more to say that I even added words for more context.

Let Me Explain

I happen to share 366 posts into specific, yet different communities to solicit feedback. 🖇️ This one for example, has spawned comments applying the thinking to a game, which then moved on to applying that game to corporate workshops. Which is just brilliant really. No idea if any of that will take off - we will have to see .. I just like the idea that

• a post on LinkedIN by someone I do not know resulted in
• a comment from someone I do know that caused me to
• write a post about how that triggered a connection to something that I bang on and on about which meant I had to
• find that original post so I could share that, so it made sense
• which then made the 2nd person in the chain seek to clarify the idea I was spouting
• which I confirmed that it was indeed
• so he then took that and suggested that a game could be developed around the process, to which I said
• or maybe turn it into a framework for Corporate Workshops and ….

… and that’s where we have got to so far. In amongst all of that I have some actions I need to do to close some loops - but it’s all because of the serendipity of the different people coming together in this chain of thinking. #Awesome

But - and here’s the weird part … this wasn’t the serendipitous event that I was referencing when I first ideated the theme of this post. Not at all.

The thread started as a simple idea that as I came up with this project - so too did Om, who I follow and read anyway - but within his ‘river’, he has a sub-theme called 🔗 Project 36

I don’t really follow his photos (though they are really rather good), and I became aware of it because of 🔗this post on his blog, which ends with these words …

They really resonated with me. ()Om often does) and on the 3rd🖇️ January I linked to his New Years message because those words there in my mind right at that point because just three days in I was already feeling the enormity of what I had challenged myself to deliver, daily.

I also have a couple of posts in the 366 series that are very short - to maintain the flow - but they don’t take much time. Like🖇️ this one from the 28th January - it’s a quick photo!

But there’s more. fellow MicroBlogger 🔗 TeeJay seems to have also latched on to the one a day post. In his case - every single day he is putting a lovely image that he takes on that day.

Turns out - for him it is not a new idea. 🔗As his new year post points out. and now his daily photo comes into my RSS feed each and every day - reminding me to stay the course.

And to tie it all back. This whole post was one of those quick throwaways. I had the idea for a ‘serendipity’ post when I had seen Om and Teejay - it was up my sleeve to write it when I was short of time. Like today.

Short of time? What the hell happened?

The observant amongst you will have spotted that an ‘eye candy’ image accompanies every post. In this case, I wrote my two lines and hopped over to Leonardo to generate my image.

This was the first image to come out …

Seriously? Cubes? After just writing a a long post that featured a cube. Is Leonardo watching me? Of course I had to connect those dots and unpack that serendipity.

And with that … done. Time to post. A quick check reveals the word count to be roughly 100 times my original target. I know I am hitting the send button with the post not fully proofed, which is why 🚧 is at the top.

I will come back later to make whatever inevitable fixes I will need to do. For now though … I feel I have rambled to the end of this garden path and I can sense it has come around full circle back to where it all started.

If you are still with me. Thankyou for seeing it through.

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Out in the wild - and really - these days what else would you call ‘LinkedIN’, I 🔗 read a post by 🔗 Tim Parsons that had garnered a few comments. It was touching on a pet peeve of mine, despite TL;DR being a technique I use from time to time.

This was the essence;

Sometimes it just can’t be any shorter and still be useful. Some lynchpin bit of data or context would have to be sacrificed, a risk go unnamed, a requirement remain unidentified.
Sometimes information exchange has to include all the information AND the meta data it needs to build a bridge from you to me.
Sometimes “Too Long; Didn’t Read” is a terrible risk/reward proposition, and you have to go all the way to “Very Long; Must Read.”
When everything extra has been distilled out, but there’s still a lot there, that’s a sign of something complex enough to be fascinating, or at least full of critical, decision-influencing intel.

He ended his post with a reference back to the source.

I remember 🔗 Marjorie Anderson activating that thought in my head weeks ago, and now it won’t leave.

This resonated ….

Sometimes TL;DR simply must yield to VL;MR

Which got me to thinking.

You know how I am with that word … ‘content’.

To remind from one of many posts on the topic - just on this blog ….

As long as ‘we the creators’ keep using low cost, homogenous, non-descript words like ‘content’ to describe our work, our soul, our passion, our beliefs then our work will continue to be viewed as ‘free - to - cheap - to - low - cost’, ‘homogenized, non differentiated, interchangeable fodder’ (which coincidentally is what silos have always been used for), then, we only have ourselves to blame as the resultant payment for our art, our thinking and our ideas, will continue to race to the bottom.

And whilst on the topic of silos ….

You should never … ever … trust a Silo. It’s theirs. The stuff you put there is theirs. Even our' handle is actually ‘theirs’.

All this and more can be found in an earlier post here : 🖇️ Friends Don’t Let Friends Write Content

And it is not just me …

Just today

and last year .. Dana Carvey and Will Arnett brought it up (listen it’s a one minute snipped) on the Smartless podcast.

Anyway, with that all said … ‘set up’ done … ✅

So What?

It struck me that ‘TL;DR | VL;MR’ is the second axis I have been looking for in my one man war on ‘content’. So I drew the picture.

‘content | material ' on the x axis and ‘TL;DR | VL;MR’ on the y axis - and I was left with ‘Yeah .. so what?

The ‘so what’ was because I realized that it was missing the third axis …‘Entertainment | Understanding’

The fact is that so much that is running around the ‘interwebs’ is ‘Entertainment’. Nothing wrong with that, but VL;MR is really about Understanding.

Moreover, the front facing 4 quadrants are all about ‘Entertainment | Understanding’ and TL;DR | VL;MR - not ‘Content | Material’

So I drew it again.

The coloration isn’t quite right for all occasions, but in this particular context

1. on the entertainment side - it doesn’t really matter which end of the TL;DR | VL;MR spectrum you are - a 240 character tweet can be as entertaining as a 3 hour movie or a 1,000 page book, BUT on the understanding side .. sure sometimes a pithy one liner can shed light on an issue that a three volume encyclopedia will never do. It’s also true that a very short mathematical equation is very powerful when it comes to ‘explaining’ - IF you understand the language of math(s) (I like to accommodate both sides of the Atlantic if I can), which most people do not.

But generally that is not the case, because what triggered me is that context and history and space and time and .. is needed to really bottom out ‘Understanding’

So far so good?

I added the third dimension.

And we are there … nearly.

The dimensions are right - but the colors remain at odds with my thinking. I have the image in my head plus the colors need to be fading from one color to the next - depending on the context. I am not a graphic artist … and I could draw what I am thinking … eventually … and maybe I will return to complete / correct this.

But before I do that. Make sense? See where I am coming from?

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