THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY

When I was a kid I used to listen to my Grandfather “Papa” tell me “Peter Cottontail” stories. Now I’m not sure if my Grandfather ever read a Peter Rabbit story or not, but you couldn’t tell by the way he would tell the stories. They would go on and on and keep me in rapt attention until he would get bored and kill off poor Peter. I didn’t care that his stories were a poorly veiled attempt to teach me life lessons about obedience, gluttony, greed and avoiding loops of rope lying on the ground. The power was in the story itself. The stakes, the villain, the many lives of this crazy rabbit and most of all the journey I would go on inside my own imagination. Now as an adult my Papa thinks it’s weird when I show up on his bedroom floor in my jim-jams and ask him for “more stories please” in my best Oliver Twist accent.

Good stories take us someplace in our mind and ultimately leave us in a place when we can’t help but want “more stories please”.

As a reforming marketer my inclination is to tell you “why me” and “why now”. I am so sick of that part of myself that I performed an ill-fated DIY frontal lobotomy which didn’t remove the marketing jargon from my head but serve to remove my facial recognition of once beloved cartoon characters. It is super embarrassing to accidentally ask Space Ghost how business has been at the KrustyKrab. All I know is that I want to connect with other humans on the basis of something that is more meaningful than a tip, tactic
or transaction. All of the major progress in my life has been because of other people who were generous enough to either share their stories, or actively participate in mine.