What do you want to give to society?
What do you want to do? Why do you work? Why do you work so hard? Is it just the check, or are you shooting for a goal? Is there a point and if so where does it all fit in? Me, I fancy myself a picker of horses.
Follow along, I’m going somewhere with this.
I like to consider myself a picker of good horses, except the horses are people, products and ideas. There are a lot of really fantastic ideas in the world but they are buried under the weight of all the bad ones. What we need are filters, people who can eye the right stag and tell you where to place your chips. Somewhere in the race to be everywhere and please everyone we forgot the importance of being selective. I don’t want to cover every startup with a PHP programmer and a dream (though I would like to talk to all of them), I want to cover and promote people with products that are changing the world.
Even if it isn’t the World with a capital W.
I want to find anyone, anywhere tackling a point of pain in society and help them sort through all roadblocks in our Culture that cause us to turn a blind eye because we’re too busy having Grande Mal Seizures over the latest microblogging platform.
I want to hear all of your stories, find out why you do what you do, and give you (in 500 words or less) advice that might help you make your business just a little better than it was a day before.
I want to influence you to build products and services that help society, that use the platforms that we’ve been given to do something bold and new and interesting. I want to give all of you creators out there in TV land that little kick in the pants that you need to take whatever you’re doing, look it straight in the eyes and say you can do it better.
I want to do all this and on top of that, carve out whatever living this interweb thing has to offer to people in the business of building.
That was the point of starting this blog. That is why I am sitting here at 2AM writing this so it can go live tomorrow morning. Over the years it is a point that has, at various times, been lost as I became too “practical” for my own good. Only recently did it dawn on me that you are the people I care about, the ones sitting through this and nodding along as I ramble. Certainly I want there to be more of you, and they will come in time but I wouldn’t give you guys up for the world.
So what is your contribution?
Do you really want to write about gadgets and building another social network or are you doing it because everyone else is? If you do love gadgets, which gadgets and why? What’s your niche? What’s your voice? What story do you want to tell and how are you going to tell it? If you could get unlimited amounts of traffic and money as long as you created something you were passionate about — what would you be doing and how would you present it?
Think about it.
I can tell you now that if you’re really passionate about toe nail clippings, you probably won’t be building a vibrant Internet career around it but it’s still a good exercise. The easiest path to success is recognizing something that someone else isn’t doing and finding a way to do it, the best way to find that “something” is to have a clear picture in your mind of what you really want to do and the best way to be successful at it, since we are all unique snowflakes doncha-know, is to take that thing and do it just a little bit better than your neighbors version of the same.
So as I end this series I leave you with a question. Why are you here on the web and what is it that you want to contribute?
(Images) (Season One)
