Nice while it lasted

As I was getting into bed the other night, a phrase popped into my head. I turned the light back on and wrote it on my whiteboard. Today I decided to google it and see if someone had already said it. No matches. I'm going to write it for you now, so when someone searches for it in some distant age, they will find that it first appeared at 17 Word Street in the second decade of the third millennium.

Literacy -- just another flash in the pan

Words as vectors

For the past 12 months, I've been working with my partners Chris Hart and Todd Israelite to launch a new venture by the name of sr4. Recently, Chris has been giving a presentation that he calls The Path to Sustainable Change. Chris has also been leading our effort to replace our provisional website with a much better one, and as I looked at the design for the new landing page, I saw that The Path to Sustainable Change is now right up there next to our logo -- like a tagline!

I thought I should start taking that phrase seriously. So, when I had the opportunity to name four buckets on the landing page, I chose to use the word "path" in each heading. One day, while Todd and I were discussing the right designation for the entrance to our blog, he blurted out, "Live, from the Path." I wrote it down and sent it to the website designer.

So now let me talk about the vector-significance of two word choices: "path" and "live" (vector: a quantity with both magnitude and direction).

That word "path" suggests a way forward, worn by feet, discovered by trial and error, which can broaden out and narrow back down according to circumstances, and which remains a path only as long as it works -- to get people from where they are to where they want to be. With that as a picture in your mind, you know you will now write about your work in a certain way--in the style of an experienced guide on a path not at all well-known by many who would like to get to where it leads.

And when you think of filing dispatches "live," from the path, you know you're no longer waiting for some brilliant insight before you sit down to write. You're not painting on a large canvas; you're just taking a snapshot of where you are right now, right here, on this little bend in the path.

The choices of two little words -- made pretty much on the fly -- carry the magnitude and the direction to change how you talk about what you do, and how you talk about what you do begins to shape the scaffolding of your brand.

The lightbulb came on for me on March 13. I posted on the sr4 blog that day, and then for five of the next six days. I used to wonder if I had something worth posting about, and usually I didn't. Now I just wake up in the morning and ask myself, Where am I on the path? That, I know. And I don't mind writing about it. Check it out and you will see: it really is live, from the path.

To own a word

In the month of February I heard two different people, each speaking to a diverse audience, mention the word "practice" -- and both times they could not stop themselves from invoking the name, Allen Iverson. How long ago was it that Mr. Iverson said what he said about "practice?" Seems like only yesterday. But it was almost nine years ago, May 8, 2002. And 20 years from now, those who inextricably link Allen Iverson with the word "practice" will still be doing it. We can't help it. The rest of you will just have to tolerate us.

Through and through

The medical director of the trauma and critical care unit looked into the cameras and said, "She was shot one time in the head, through and through." After all the education, all the Latin words learned for things anatomical, when the chips were down, those were the words he chose: "shot...one time in the head...through and through." And we got it.