Preaching To The Choir – Timely Insights on the Net

Reflections on the #Trust30 “Ralph Waldo Emerson” effort of The Domino Project

I’ve recently finished an effort that was borne out of The Domino Project, Seth Godin’s new(ish) publishing venture. They realized that it was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birthday (well, not really his birthday because he’s long dead, but an anniversary of the day he was born even though he’s not around to enjoy it). They decided to republish one of his works (possibly because it had no copyright and they didn’t have to worry about that aspect of it, but it’s a good thing anyway) and get others to follow along and hold to Emerson’s motto of “Trust thyself”.

They created a site to promote the activity and asked fans to sign a pledge and work along for 30 days on a writing project.

I pledged, worked along, and enjoyed the growth I felt from the project. And it seems like a summary might be nice to wrap things up.

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The pledge

You can still find the pledge over on http://ralphwaldoemerson.me/ and it reads in part –

I commit to reflecting on each daily prompt, crafting a response, and tweeting it out with the #trust30 hash tag when it feels right.

The daily prompts would be sent out by “an original thinker and doer”, and would relate to an Emerson quote.

My internalization of the pledge

I can’t say that Emerson came to mind very often before this effort, but after reading a bit and getting my arms around this, I thought it would make a nice 30 day journey.

And while I didn’t think I could create a whole new blog post each day, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could relate one of my existing blog posts to each daily prompt;-)

Things started well

Just as it started, I was inspired to finish work on a concept that had been bubbling around – answering the question of what is the most important word? Two words? Three…

The prompts found me looking through my archives – often with a keyword based search – and coming back to a number of my favorite posts.

It helped me create a “Best of Timely Insights”.

And after six years, I see that I’ve got a good number of articles out there that really resonate with me.

Until the repetition

The first day’s prompt was a classic: “Quick, you’ve got 15 minutes to live. What do you have to write? Do it!”

And that was a fun exercise – mostly because I had just written that post “Love More”, and that’s the answer…

But then on the sixth day, the prompt was based on “you have a week left to live”. Now please forgive me, but if I’ve already answered the question about what I have to do with my life if it only has 15 minutes left, what am I going to do with this?

I grumbled, added a comment about it to my tweet, and kept on.

But alas, the repetition got worse. Over the course of the thirty day event, a third of the prompts repeated a previous prompt in whole or in part. And three of the Emerson quotes repeated earlier quotes.

So here’s an effort that wants to build people up to be original thinkers, and all the creators had to do was come up with 30 different quotes and prompts – and they couldn’t do it. It was as if they simply said to 30 different people “come up with some bit for this 30 day effort”, and simply glued them together – presto – an instant 30 day thing.

(except of course that without any actual editing, it looks unedited)

A writing challenge

This is perhaps a different poke at the effort.

I signed up because I thought I could use the time, energy, and effort to think about writing, to examine my own writing, and perhaps to get some guidance.

Again – the first few prompts caused me to look at my writing in different contexts.

My distress became visible on the seventh day when I commented: “Why don’t I feel like I’m part of a _writing_ Challenge?” You see, the prompt for that day asked me to “explore something you’ve always wanted to do, list obstacles to that, and create a plan to overcome those obstacles”.

I’m already one of those people that regularly do things that are outside my comfort zone, live what I love, and take my own path. I didn’t want help in planning, I wanted to work on writing!

Worse still

At least one of the later prompts didn’t actually have anything for me to do, it was more of a “position” prompt that ended without a task. It’s ok though – by then I had decided that I was going to do my own interpretation about what the effort should be and very loosely base it on the material given…

Any day that was a clear repeat or failure to stay within the realm of reason was a day I could explore my own archive for an interesting article that allowed me to comment. It gave me tweets like:

Unwilling to settle for average (or ordinary) http://bit.ly/ioL6qN #trust30 2011-06-24

When the prompt wanted us to find our “ordinary” selves.

No winding down

And yes, it seemed par for the course when a 31st and 32nd prompt came out without any hint of what was going on. It’s very reasonable to believe they lost count or just didn’t plan to end them – they’ve now said that the prompts will continue indefinitely.

(But I’m not watching any longer)

The choir

And this is my realization today in reflecting on the entire effort.

If I wanted to convert people to become more self reliant – per Emerson – I might introduce them to Emerson’s writings and attempt to give them a bit of “self-help”.

But – if I already had a following of people who were self-reliant, and wanted them to become more strongly so, giving them that same “self-help” would be odd. And that’s the thing that I think happened here. Somewhere along the line, the concept for a writing challenge became a self-help effort, but the message didn’t get unified. Getting me interested and then offering the program that they did was – well – it was like preaching to the choir…

Taking what I can from it

Least you think this evaluation is some sort of complaint – I’m not meaning it as one. It’s an assessment of the past month with an eye to how it happened, what went well, and what didn’t go so well.

I am better for having participated, and I’ll see about using the material in another way.

The good thing about preaching to the choir? Sure, they’ll say “amen” to everything (because they already know it), and they’ll gripe at the repetition (because they see it), but at the end of the day, they’ll still love you (because they already get it).