Category Archives: People

I stopped following you today.  You probably didn’t notice.

Nothing personal.  It’s just life.

Why?   As I said — life.  An amazing thing happens when you get over-committed as I have in recent months.  You finally make real decisions on priorities.   When you have too much to do, you do what’s most important — what will cause you pain if it’s not done.   The metaphor I use is juggling.  You can juggle one ball, two and even, if you practice – three.  I guess it’s possible that if you really work at it, you could juggle four.   Maybe there is a Zen juggler who could do five things.   But ultimately, it doesn’t matter, each of us has a limit, no matter how much we want to focus, practice or will it to be different.

So if you can juggle four and life gives you five — guess what?  No matter what happens you are going to drop one.  So what do you do?  You pick.   How?  Well, like most people, I presume that you try not to drop the thing that is most likely to break.   You try to make the drop as painless as you can.

We all do this every day.  More and more we are like the juggler trying to take on more things that we can truly juggle.  And what do we do?    We drop something.   What do we drop?  The thing that will hurt us the least.

Unfortunately, that thing was – you.

Continue reading →

Community.    It’s a word that we throw around a lot.  But what does it actually mean?   And why do we care?

Let’s start with the last question.   Why do we care?

In an age obsessed by the idea of community, I’m surprised to see that the idea is so poorly understood.  Yet community is one of the the most important words of our era.

One of our greatest desires is to participate in a community.  We need the interaction with others.  We crave the recognition of our friends, our families, our — communities.  In many traditions, the greatest punishment that can be meted out is banishment, ostricization – forced removal from our community.

Our attachment to community is primordial, a driving force, something we crave in at the most basic levels of our existence.

Some would claim that this craving for community is at the root of the force that we all call “social media”.  I would claim that we don’t really understand this –and if we did, our social media approach and behaviours would be vastly different.

Three events converged this week which pushed me to reexamine the ideas that I had about community and social media.  Continue reading →

There’s a guy who panhandles for change outside the 24 hour drug/convenience store in our neighbourhood.  His name is Al.  Al had been doing this for as long as I could remember – he was a fixture. Day in and day out, he’d stand by the front door holding an old paper coffee cup, bumming for change.  I first talked about Al in a series I did last year.  He appeared in the story entitled “Buddy Can You Spare a Tweet”  As improbable as it seemed, Al had started up a social media consultancy run from his Blackberry.

After that,  I hadn’t seen Al in a while.  Nobody had.  I had asked about him. Weeks went by.  No sign of Al.  Then tonight, I saw him again, in his old familiar spot.  He had his old familiar paper cup which he pushed out as people walked by.  But there was something new.  Now he had a sign.  When I stopped to talk to him I looked at it.  It read…

“Will Read Your Blog for Food” Continue reading →