After watching her TED talk ”If I had a daughter …” yesterday, I have never wanted to become like someone else, as much as I wanted to become like, Sarah Kay. To taste her freedom to speak on stage as a weaver of words, a magician of language; she graced the TED stage as if she were on fire. A friendly fire, filled with bliss, inspiration, courage, awe and glory. The audience stood and clapped for her twice for god’s sake because, damn she’s good.
An Aside: I dream of writing, of speaking, of being in this world with the same integrity and rawness that exudes from people like Sarah or from who I imagine her to be. Hmmm, that’s interesting, I’ve created her into a certain type of person based on her stage presence. When, in actuality, I have no idea who she is or what she’s like aside from watching her for close to 19 minutes. I wonder how many other times I’m creating fictitious people out of a single event. That’s one for the pause bucket.
The fingers of Sarah’s talk reached out through my computer screen and grabbed my heart because her passion is real, tangible and similar to my goals with Side Of The Road Sessions. She uses spoken word to tell her stories, to brainstorm her thoughts, to uncover her points. I use the written word to tell stories, to think through challenging conundrums and to discover the clarity in order to make my points – to simply be in this world. Both spoken and written words are valuable and both seem to be falling apart in our world of social media, through our love affairs with tech gadgets and due to the fact that composing a solid sentence, takes time.
So as a marketer, who spends much of her days on the computer and with social media, can I overcome the global temptation to shorten my words and clutter my life and other’s with abbreviations in order to tell my story in 140 characters? Can I maintain the ADD mentalities beyond the 5 minutes that statistics say we currently possess, to tell my stories and the stories of my clients?! I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell striving to reach this goal. I don’t want to be Sarah Kay, but I sure admire her gumption and much like Sarah, I too will keep putting pen to paper and watch what happens.
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