#51 - Coterie in a Closet of Mind
Better Than the Mines; ‘Tis a Gift to Be Lego; Corporate Personhood
Hello, my friends,
The term atmospheric river entered my lexicon this week with the sizable rainfall in Los Angeles. In times like these I’m grateful to have a roof over our head so I can stay dry and enjoy the rain from the comfort of home. Speaking of learning, Michael got a book about snakes from his school’s book fair and when we read it two nights ago, we discovered that Arizona Coral Snakes fart to scare away predators. In reality it isn’t exactly farting since snakes don’t have an anus, but a phenomena dubbed “cloacal popping” because the foul smell emits from an entry/exit tract called a cloaca. And that has been your weird fact of the day. As Cliff of the interior design YouTube channel, Dear Modern, says to end his videos, “So, now you know!”
Better Than the Mines
Last week, Michael was watching a cartoon featuring park rangers and when I approached he announced that when he grew up he wanted to be a park ranger. It does seem like a fitting profession for his interests and temperament: He’s active, loves the outdoors, is excited about all sorts of animals (especially dangerous ones), and would be good at teaching others about the natural world. As a parent, my inclination is to show support and excitement, but how much? Should I go out of my way to take him to State or National Parks and introduce him to park rangers? Should I talk to him about what it takes to be a park ranger? How getting a PhD will increase his salary? Should I get him a park ranger hat?
My desire to dive all the way in is tempered by the fact that Michael is four. Realistically, I know that he may change his mind about a future profession a hundred more times in the next few years. Still, is it okay if I vicariously dream about being a park ranger through him while he’s excited by the idea? The answer is, of course, yes! Because it means we’ll keep learning about clo-popping snakes, enjoying hikes, and probably go meet a park ranger or two.
When I was a kid, I recall wanting to be an architect, a barber, a hockey player, and probably a few more. This kind of fantasy life is one of the best things about youth. The tube of potential is completely full! At four, Michael can be whatever he wants to be and we’re nobodies to say otherwise. So park ranger it is!
‘Tis a Gift to Be Lego
I was driving home from an on-site visit at work yesterday and I got to thinking Michael’s birthday, which is coming up in March. Really, though, it reminded me of one of the greatest birthday presents of my youth. A Lego set called “Imperial Trading Post”. Honestly, I didn’t even know the name until I looked it up moments ago and easily located it among the many (really, a huge amount) of Lego fan sites. We’d never had a Lego set that large before so when our parents (I say our, referring to my twin brother and I) agreed to buy it from Toys’R’Us, it was a huge deal. Besides the size of the set, the price was astronomical. I think it was something like $70! As a school-age kid in a lower-middle-class family, this kind of amount was dream money. And the dream was ours!
I still remember how much I loved playing with that set! Sitting at the dining room table, building and rebuilding the pieces in different ways, and imagining stories. How can one put into words how meaningful such a gateway is to a child? The combination of small, colorful blocks, and little men with beards painted on their cylinder heads, combined with the open-ended mindset of youth is a potent concoction. Having that Lego set was one of the highlights of my youth!
Will my own kids have the same feeling when we buy them toys? For context, my brother and I got many of our playthings at Goodwill so the extraordinary aura around that Lego set which now costs $450 if it’s complete and with instructions, by the way, was notable. Really, the question, properly put is: Since we can afford a lot more for them, will Michael and Sophie be able to look back at any of their birthday gifts with the same feeling of gratitude and awe that I felt receiving the Imperial Trading Post? I sure hope so.
Corporate Personhood
Can you define yourself in a sound byte? Like an elevator speech but where the elevator is a slowly departing cab and I’m waiting at the curb to hear who you truly are. Do you look me in the eye and say “Project Management Guru for Global Brands!” or “Data Analyst with a Heart of Gold!”? That’s if we have a professional relationship, but what if we’re friends and you can get personal? Would you say “Adventurous Committment-phobe with a Weakness for Puns” or maybe “Satisfied Homebody Crafter”?
What if, for a moment, the world become comprised only of giant social network profiles and each of us was limited to a line of text under our names and photo? Would your friends, family, and work colleagues define you in roughly the same way as you would define yourself?
Are you sweating right now? Is this the stuff of nightmares? I find delving into the marketing mind challenging as well.
I just finished reading Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars (Portfolio/Penguin, 2005) a couple of weeks ago and I’m still have no idea what he means when he usses the word “story”. How do you tell your story? How does this product tell a story? When a customer enters this coffee shop it tells a story. This packaging tells a story. Godin is telling a story by having the book’s subtitle start, “The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works…” which is weird because there’s nothing undergound about this book and it’s odd to call your own book a classic four years after it is released. My edition, released in 2009, has this cover:
While the original was this:
It is a lie that the book is underground and a classic, but is it really a story? Godin is certainly positioning his ideas as subversive and enduring. If I had to define Godin in short, I’d call him a “Marketing Author with Sound Byte Ideas”. Words box us in and words release us, which is why it’s so hard for us to reduce ourselves to a tagline.
Self-help authors often go on podcasts and tell their “story” — a distillation of their life’s narrative mostly focusing on going from down and out to up and about. Do lives really work that way? Did I go from Goodwill to do-good? You know, Goodwill toys to doing good at the library? Not explaining it is much flashier!
I think mostly I’m trying to work out if it’s truly possible to be both a personal brand (the erstwhile narrator of your secondtop favorite weekly newsletter) and a whole human. Today, I wrote about my snake farts, my son’s career goals, a favorite gift from my youth, and this bit of marketing panic. What is HMF even about? And is it really okay if I answer that it’s about everything?
Would it be better if it was only about a small subset of things, eschewing — I don’t know — essays on nudity, tips for new parents, sumo, casing houses, jewelry shopping, and the thirty or forty other topics I cover here? It’s been almost a year of these weekly missives (between 140-150 little sections, not counting the introductions) and I’m still careening headlong through the Library of Babel.
In any case, thanks for flying along with me!
thank you for using "clo-popping" in this week's post — i'm always reading for something that will make me cluck as seeing that did.
Legos having little men included is a demarcation line. I now know that you are at least a generation younger than me. I liked Legos as a kid but they were literally little blocks and nothing else. Like the gold and silver colored crayons in a Crayola variety box, I used to search for the clear Legos—those were the precious windows for the houses I built. Yes, I think I basically only built walls and houses.
Now, Erector Sets! THOSE were precious toys. I built factories, bridges, Apollo spacecraft, laser guns, and race cars out of those metal strips, bolts, and nuts.
Oh. Get your kid the Park Ranger hat, for sure.