Head Games

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For the record, concussions suck. I’ve been trying to find an eloquent way to say it but I can’t. They suck –  big time – and it doesn’t take much to end up with one. So after more than a week off work, countless complaints and frustrations, a new mission, and a slew of people asking me questions I thought I’d share a bit about my mind jarring experience.

What happened?
A rather simple outing on a giant tube whist being pulled behind a speed boat took a rather nasty turn for the worse when I was flung off the tube after hitting the wake as I swung around the corner. The spotter tells me I was a good 3 feet above the water for around 20 feet before the tube hit the water, and when it did…. things got ugly.

I was on my stomach and when it hit the water again I bounced off the tube. Instinct told me to just release my grip and go limp. I’ve fallen enough times doing enough things to know that if you fight it you will seriously hurt yourself.

Unfortunately, the first thing to hit the water was the back of my head. I then folded over backwards (and as a note I am not accustomed to folding, let alone at a high rate of speed) and tumbled ass over tea kettle a few times before landing face down in the water.

Yes, I was wearing a life jacket.

Ouch. Did it hurt?
Yes. It hurt quite a bit. I remember the sound of my head hitting the water and the feeling like someone had just whacked me with a baseball bat in the back of the head. Once I got my senses, which was a few seconds and a good swallow of the lake later, everything hurt. Everything. My head felt like it had split open. I had cramps in my arms and legs, and I thought I was having a heart attack.

Then what?
The driver and spotter confirmed I had movement in my fingers and toes and pulled me into the boat. I felt dizzy, nauseous, disoriented, confused, and scared.

About a half hour after the accident I called my mother-in-law (she is a nurse). She told me to take it easy and look out for worsening symptoms and if I noticed any I should go to the hospital. A few minutes later I stood up to get some water and basically disappeared mentally for a few seconds. Off to the hospital. The doctor and asked me to do a barrage of mental and physical tests and confirmed that in his assessment I was concussed, with a mild case of whiplash as the cherry on top.

How long will it take to heal?
Another great question! Weeks. Maybe months. In the words of my family physician, “If we were in the middle of a hockey season you’d be done for the year”. Nice. On top of that she told me “Don’t hit your head again any time soon. I’m not even slightly joking. Another blow to the head and death becomes entirely plausible”.

So what’s it like living with a concussion?
It sucks. I’m not a happy camper at the moment. I can do everything but not anything. I can’t exert myself or jostle my head too much. I have to walk, not run. Take the elevator, not the stairs. Limit screen time and other visual stimuli. Even after 10 days of doing absolutely nothing but stare at the wall and check in with Twitter every couple of hours I was finding that it literally hurt to think.

I was told to expect to feel confused, disoriented, and distracted for weeks. I didn’t believe it. Then I tried to work. Rescheduling 5 meetings took me 30 minutes. I couldn’t focus – not in terms of eyesight, but in terms of targeting what I needed to do. Things that I used to just do would out of nowhere stump me and leave me staring at my computer, lost, and that would anger and frustrate me and just make it worse.

I can do things like write, but only for an hour or so before I start to get a headache. I am finding that am capable of more right-brained activities than I am left-brained. Using the left part of my brain right now is a challenge for some reason. I don’t know why that is. There’s no evidence I hit more on the left side than the right, but then again who knows, a bruised brain is a bruised brain and it’ll act however it damn well wants.

So what now?
I go on vacation. As my doc said, “Enjoy it. Force yourself to slow down and not think about anything. Just have a nice time and RELAX”. So that’s what I’m going to do. My brother is getting married in Germany and we’ve got an apartment for a week in Paris after that. The house/cat sitter is arranged. Work stuff is covered (thanks Jamie!) and I’ve got enough travel insurance to take care of any hiccup that might arise.

Is there anything I can do?
That’s very kind of you to ask. The answer is yes!

If you have 100 words stashed away in your head somewhere please consider lending them to me for my new project, “1000 Word Picture“. My goal is to raise money for brain injury prevention and people and families living with brain injuries.

Also, wear a helmet whenever you can, take care, and be safe.

Lend Me Your Words

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Update!

A new site is up and running specifically for this project. You can find picture #2 along with the results from picture #1 here. Future pictures will be done through the other site in an effort to keep my personal work separate from the project.

Thanks,
Andrew

So while suffering from post-concussion syndrome I got this idea that would allow me to explore some creativity without me needing to be on the computer for too many minutes in a row (screen time hurts the head).

I wanted to put the adage “A picture is worth 1000 words” to the test. I posted an original photo of mine and asked the people of the internet (mostly Twitter, but also the blogosphere, Facebook, and Google+) to lend me 100 of their words in response to the picture.  Once I had received 1000 words I would then edit the submissions and post the completed work as a little bit of “flash fiction”.

The only rules were that people submit 100 words (or thereabouts) in the form of full sentences and that I would only rearrange full sentences and not just grab words here and there to create new text.

I am pleased to say that in less than 24 hours my post became the 2nd most visited page on my blog (next to the one Kevin Smith did a shout out for on Twitter – to 1.5 million of his followers) and I received just over 1000 words from 10 different people. I’m in the process of editing and I plan on having something complete soon.

At any rate, this has spawned a new idea for me that a couple friends think has some legs. I want to put a whole bunch of these 1000 Word Pictures together, a hundred words at a time, from anyone and everyone who wants to contribute (and hopefully some well-known / famous people) and publish the collection, or display it as an art exhibit, and use it to raise money and/or awareness for a worthwhile cause.

So what do you think? Do you have 100 (or so) words rattling around in your head just itching to get out? Do you know Margaret Atwood or Rick Mercer, and can you get them to spare some words? (please say yes, that would be SO cool). If so then please, email me at thousandwordpicture@gmail.com or comment directly to this post as I present to you the 1000 Word Picture (100 at a Time) #2:



I’ll Take “Words” for a 1000 Alex…

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Another Update!


The final results from the first photo are in and can be found here (at the new site).
Thanks to everyone for participating. I look forward to seeing where this takes me…

Update!

This was a huge success. So much so that I’m going to continue with this project and eventually put a collection together to raise money/awareness for charity. I have started the 1000 Word Picture (100 Words at a Time) #2 here. Once I get roughly 1000 words submitted for that photo I’ll post another, and so on…

More information to come on the project as a whole and the charities / foundations it will help support.

Thank you everyone!

Out with a concussion and unable to string together more than a half hour on the computer (and having deplorable handwriting) I’m in a bit of a creative holding pattern. Then I got an idea… maybe it’s not even a new idea, but it’s new to me, so I’m running with it.  It is said that a picture is worth 1000 words and I’d like to put that to the test.

Here’s the picture (thanks to Instagram for the iPhone – and yes, that is me):

Now, I need 10 people out there to each lend me 100 words of their own based on what they see. I need exactly 100 words in the form of complete sentences. As few or as many sentences as it takes, but totaling precisely 100 words when you’re done.

Post them as a comment here or email them to me or Twitter DM them to me or whatever, so long as it’s electronically transmitted to me somehow and there are exactly 100 of them I’ll take it. I’d prefer if they were written in isolation, free from the influence of other responses (I must try to maintain some semblance of scientific control over this experiment, you know)

I will then rearrange the complete sentences as I see fit (without taking single words here and there) to put together the 1000 words that this picture is worth. Read my blog, go through my Twitter feed, send me an email asking questions… all good ideas to start the words flowing. All I need is 100 words from 10 people, and I’ll do the rest.

I’ll post the completed work here and then credit each contributor with a link to their original words in a footnote. Please let me know if you are not OK with that and I’ll omit you from the list.

Go!

Making Progress

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In typical form this post started out as a bunch of randomly jotted down half sentences. Even as I typed this was not sure where it was going to end up. I’m considering the fact that words were typed at all as some kind of progress. In fact this is the first week I have instituted a word count target. Not necessarily daily targets but I have split them up into three categories: Blog, Novel, and Short Stories; each one with a modest target assigned per week along with a suggested breakdown of which one(s) get attention on which day(s). Monday’s (when this was written) would have normally been a “Novel” day for me but my head was not in the right space for it so the blog post won. 

It’s amazing what a little progress can do for a person’s motivation. I mentioned my word count targets to a friend (a non writer) and their response was, “If you have to meet a target, won’t that start to feel like work?” You see, I have a day job, a regular 9-to-5 if you will, and I am just doing this to fulfill a creative desire, and because writing is something I truly enjoy doing, it never feels like work. How does that saying go? Find something you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life. Something like that. As you can see, I’m not so good at research.

Speaking of which, Albert Einstein has a great quote which I like to pull out for various occasions, this being one of them: “If we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be called research“. I usually pair it with another quote from my favourite scientist, Richard P. Feynman: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.“

I pretty much live my life according to these two quotes (along with another great one by Niel deGrasse Tyson, “When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.“) As modern, evolved humans, every day we challenge and interact and learn. Input. Observe. Change. Input. Observe. Change. If you don’t have some kind of end goal, if there’s no measuring stick in the ground, it’s easy to get lost, or worse, caught in a circle where it feels like all you’re doing is work but you’re not actually getting anywhere. There needs to be progress. 

In order to show progress you need to know where you are going and where you started. In order for that progress to have any meaning you need to know how to measure it, and what makes things really interesting is that as a society there are billions upon billions of individual goals all scattered about. Each one of us, knowingly or not, willingly or not, charting a path from Point A to Point B and often with very little regard for what impact our progress may have on the progress of others. When progress towards a goal doesn’t align with someone else’s progress towards a goal we end up with conflict, and any good storyteller will tell you that conflict makes for a good story. 

So go and do something right now. Create a goal, chart a path, interact with others, learn, adapt, change,  measure your progress, and above all else – challenge. If we had no way to measure progress, if no one was ever challenged, if there was never any conflict… I dare say that there wouldn’t be much to write about (and I’d already be behind on my word counts for the week.)

Tell Me a Story

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The world is full of storytellers.

There are enough columnists, authors, bloggers, tweeters, and filmmakers to make your head spin, and they are all telling stories (and I am one of them). But what about true storytellers? These are the people who can stand in front of a group and spin a yarn without any props, dictionaries, thesauruses, slides, notes, drawings, scribbles, doodles, cheat sheets, or pictures (moving or otherwise).

There is something to be said for listening to a story unfold before your ears as its told by a skilled storyteller. I have to admit, it’s probably been a long time since I last heard someone tell a story that wasn’t some recounting of an event in an effort to relive the experience, or boast, or simply hear themselves talk. We all gather around the water cooler, or at the bar, or in the kitchen at someone’s house, and we tell tall tales about the one that got away (fish, girls, boys, all of the above), or the single greatest / funniest / scariest / offensive / interesting / cool thing to happen that week. But how many of us actually stand up and tell a story simply for the fun of it? For the sake of the story alone.

Well after heavily researching the history of storytelling (OK, I briefly skimmed this page on Wikipedia), I can say that storytelling is not completely gone, and there are many practicing storytellers – and even storytelling associations – today. That being said, I do have a concern that all this writing and multi-media and social media might be damaging this ancient art.

Everything today is documented, recorded for posterity, indexed, and completely searchable with a few clicks. The company that went on to become Open Text Corporation put the Oxford English Dictionary in an electronic format and at the time that was a major accomplishment. Just a few years later, all the information online surpassed that stored on paper, and a lot of that information includes transcription of previously existing text, as well as audio and video of just about everything to happen (and everything made up) since we figured out how to keep track.

Where would we be today if more than a handful of people could read and write back when Pontius Pilate was holding court? Jesus in the 21st century would have a webcam in his tomb and a billion people would be watching it 24/7 like those falcons in Alberta.

Some guy: “Did you hear about the crucifixion?“
Some other guy: “Dude, some guy tweeted the whole thing from his basement and didn’t even know what was happening!“

I guess what I’m getting at is that everything today is so traceable that it’s to the point where even someone telling a story is on YouTube. Part of me thinks that’s a little bit sad.

This kind of universal browser history allows us to track pieces of information back to their origins and then analyse the differences between versions of this and variations of that, and to compare and rank and +1 and re-tweet… and I get the sense that the phrase “word of mouth” might actually be losing its meaning.

Somewhere along the way we’ve forgotten what it’s like to just sit… and listen… and enjoy.

Thanks for reading 😉

Gut Feel

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Once again the amazing Julia Rosien points me in the right direction (it’s like she knows what she’s doing or something…) She recently tweeted a link to a blog entry by Erika Nepoletano on listening to your gut. Now, I fancy myself as someone who tries to listen to his gut as often as possible. It’s usually right. Not always, but enough that I have learned to trust it. I love my gut. I feed it steak as often as possible.


After reading Erika’s wonderful story I thought about all the times my gut has come through (even after more than a few nights of treating my gut like a test kitchen and drowning it in alcohol and jalapeno nachos):

  • My first real kiss
  • My first real job
  • My first *ahem* time
  • Picking a University
  • Meeting my now wife for the first time (at University. See? I told you my gut was good)
And this one…

Back in 2009 my wife and 2 children had been living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada for almost 5 years. We were a good 5 hour drive from my family in Toronto and a good 6.5 hour drive from my wife’s family in Woodstock (only 60 minutes from Waterloo – where my wife and I first met).

On March 13, 2009 (my 35th birthday), while my wife and daughter were in the Dominican for a girls getaway, my father-in-law David called to tell me that my wife’s brother Ryan had died. Tragically, accidentally, and well before anyone should have to leave this earth, he was gone.

On June 24, 2009 I received a phone call from a headhunter about a job back in Waterloo with the interview to happen on July 2nd. I was going to be at the beach with my family and my wife’s parents on July 1st for Canada Day, and the cottage was less than 3 hours from the interview, so I was seriously considering it.

There was much discussion between my wife and I over the complication and risks associated with moving our quite comfortable life from Ottawa back to Southern Ontario, but in the end it was my gut that told me what to do. Even before I went to the interview and well before I had any decision to make, my gut was telling me, “DO IT”.

On Canada Day after all the festivities had wound down, David took me aside and wished me good luck on my job interview (he’s good people). At that moment I shook his hand and gave him a hug and I promised him that I would bring his daughter and his grandchildren back home. I guaranteed it.

After two and half hours of driving in July with no air conditioning (and in a suit), three and a half hours of interviews with 2 Managers, 2 Team Leads, and Human Resources, and another two and a half hour drive back to the cottage, I was sipping a nice Shiraz on the beach. A little thank you to my gut, who does enjoy the grape very much as it turns out.

On July 13, 2009 – exactly 4 months after my bother-in-law died – I received a letter of offer for the job in Waterloo.

Exactly two months after that, and exactly 5 months to the day after Ryan’s death, and on my wife’s birthday! (August 13) the Government of Canada created a new agency with an office in Kitchener a mere 17 minutes from my office in Waterloo.

On August 24th, 2009 – exactly 8 weeks after that first phone call from the headhunter – I was working my first day at my new job and had moved into a house in Cambridge (27 minutes from work, and 41 minutes from my wife’s family). 

In September my wife interviewed for a job (at her level even) at that government agency in Kitchener, and on November 2nd she had her first day on the job.

We’ve been here for almost 2 years, we’re both still at our jobs and loving it, and my wife and I and our two children get to see my wife’s family practically any time we want. Everyone is smiling, and I’m presently enjoying a nice Shiraz as I edit this post.

Trust your gut. It knows. You can thank it later.

Sum of all Parts

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This is the third post in a series about Twitter, and it’s impact (or potential impact) on today’s technologically engaged society.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately, at least with respect to writing. I’ve had a couple of half ideas but nothing really worth mentioning. It’s was very frustrating, and I decided to turn to Twitter. Did it help? Not especially. Well, at least not at first…  I went to Start Up Drinks Waterloo (#SDWat) and just chatted about start ups and new technologies and usual good-to-see-you stuff. 

Remember my post about how Twitter changed my life? Remember the one about proximity to greatness being effective? Well a conversation started about my lack of ideas for another blog post and a mini brain storming session broke out. How Twitter changed our collective sense of humour, turned into a commentary about how Twitter just generates more headline writers. Eureka! I argued that to write well you needed to edit. You don’t write, you RE-write. Twitter forces that on you 140 characters at a time.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but with that kind of word count anything’s possible. The challenge is doing more with less. Screenwriters do it all the time. For screenplays less is more and it’s the writer’s job to be as descriptive AND concise as possible. So can a writer use Twitter to break a complete thought down to its purest form and use it as building blocks for a larger story?

I say yes.

Twitter, with its “restrictions” and “limits”, can force the succinctness out of even the most verbose scribes. You just have to allow it. There are cheaters or hacks that use leet speak or abbreviations, and there are those who simply won’t ever conform to 140 (Kevin Smith). There are also writers like myself that will accept this as a worthy challenge and use that to sum-it-the hell-up (for a change).

Embrace the limitations of Twitter and use it to improve quality and challenge others to do the same. Don’t dilute the imagery – perfect it. Be careful though, we don’t want to lose the art. I want recreate each of Shakespeare’s works in a single tweet.  I fear this is a bad idea.

Hamlet: If you’re a king watch your back. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern take one for the team. Be true to yourself or die like everyone else.

Then again, if Homer had a smart phone high school English might have not seemed so bad after all.

Stealing slightly from MasterCard:

Writing = 3 hours
Words = 416
Characters = 2383
———————-
19 Tweets

Priceless? You tell me.

My Stanley Cup

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I filed this under “Random Thoughts” but it’s not really that random. I’ve been doing a post like this (or something on Facebook, or on my family website) just about every year since 2003, the day after the Stanley Cup is awarded. This year however I am posting it a little in advance, reasons for which will become apparent in a couple paragraphs.

For as long as I can remember I have watched the captain of the winning team hoist the Stanley Cup above his head and plant a giant kiss on it. This memory is burned into my brain from at least 1980 onward. Certainly for my entire adult life I know I have not missed the raising of The Cup once. Even an overtime game on the West coast couldn’t keep me from watching. 

I normally root for one particular team to win The Cup but this year I’m actually rooting for The Cup to be decided TONIGHT. You see, this is the first time in 9 years that this particular situation has arisen. I like to think of it as my own version of Halley’s comet.

Back in 2002 my wife was pregnant with our first child who was due on July 4th. I was always a bit ticked off because of all the days for a True Canadian to have a baby, I got stuck with American Independence Day as a due date. Three days earlier would have been ideal.

At any rate, there we were living in Cambridge, Ontario and as always I was watching the Stanley Cup Finals. It was mid-June. In fact to be completely precise it was June 13th. Detroit was playing Carolina in game #5 and Detroit was up in the series 3-1 after losing the first game.

As I mentioned, for as long as I can remember I have watched the Stanley Cup get hoisted by the captain of the winning team. I can go back to when I was a kid and my dad would let me watch them hand out the cup. I’m not sure what it is about it, but growing up with a dad who played hockey at a very competitive level and playing it myself for 10 years, and having been down to the old CNE grounds back in the day to see the Hockey Hall of Fame when I was just a small kid and having seen the Cup up close – and having even touched it, well it’s just something that’s hard to explain.

So, three weeks removed from our first child, my wife and I are lying in bed that Thursday night and Detroit wins the Cup. Lidstrom gets the Conn Smythe for playoff MVP (of course) and then Gary Bettman comes out and presents the cup to Steve Yzerman. Stevie Y hoists the cup over his head and plants a big kiss on it.

At that exact moment I turn to her (she was pretending not to watch the game) and pat her on the stomach and say, “OK, you can give birth now”. At 05:00 the next morning she wakes me up with, “Andrew, we’re going to have a baby”. More than half asleep I reply, “I know”. She replies with, “No. We’re going to have a baby TODAY. My water just broke”.

So we go and have a baby and at 17:17 weighing in at 7lbs 7oz our daughter Avery was born.

So fast forward a few years to the point where Avery is old enough to watch a hockey game for more than 5 seconds. I start recording the Stanley Cup presentation ceremony and the morning after they hand out The Cup each year I sit with Avery and watch the last few minutes of the game, the handshake line (because that’s just good sportsmanship), and the Conn Smythe and Stanley Cup presentations.

Tonight is June 13th and the Stanley Cup will be in the building when Vancouver meets Boston in Game 6. I’ll be watching it live, and recording the game just in case. 

OK Vancouver, you can win The Cup now.

Proximity to Greatness = Effective!

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I was fortunate enough to attend a Social Media Breakfast at which the wonderful Julia Rosien spoke about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and general social media presence for businesses. Even though I’m
not a start-up, or a business, or even a small business, there was one point in her talk where a light bulb went off in my head. It was not so much a “Eureka!” as it was an “Ah ha!” (there’s a difference).  It was the moment where I finally realized exactly what problem I was trying to solve.

Part of my recent foray into the social media world is to network,  be more involved, and better enjoy and appreciate my community and the people within it.  In addition to that, I’ve been trying to establish (for lack of a better phrase) a fan base. A readership, if you will.

You see, there are stories I want to tell, and as much as I say I would get all the satisfaction I require out of simply writing them down, I know that’s not true. I want people to read them, and the best way I can come up with for getting someone to read something you’ve written is write something that they actually want to read.

My “Ah ha!” moment came during Julia’s talk when she said the easiest thing to do for a small business with a website was to add a search bar and keep track of what people were searching for.

That statement, along with the feedback from my last post, convinced me that I would continue to blog about anything and everything I wanted to, but I would hereinafter do it with my senses more aware of what was going on around me.  Further to that, it brought be back to a conversation I had with a good friend of mine about a screenplay I was writing.

He asked me why I wasn’t writing it as a book and I didn’t have a good answer. It’s just always been a movie to me. Every story I have ever told has been a movie (in my mind at least). Any story I would ever want to tell would be a movie.  Only it’s not a movie. That’s not what the search box in my brain is telling me. It’s a book. And now that I know that much, so much more is becoming clear. Ideas and character development and plot points are pouring out of me like some literary keg with a broken tap.

So what does this have to do with proximity to greatness? Well, I know I am writing quite the love story about Twitter lately, but it was once again the jumping off point for me (and now I’m starting to recognize a trend).

Twitter allows me to completely immerse myself with wonderfully interesting and amazing people who are willing to share their thoughts and ideas and feedback candidly and honestly.  Twitter can be remarkably useful, if you choose to use it to accomplish something useful.

In order for me to do this I have uncovered some very important rules:

  1. Pay attention
  2. Go outside your comfort zone
  3. Allow yourself to be wrong
  4. Allow others to be right
  5. Allow yourself to be heard
  6. Allow others to be heard first

When I got to sit in a room with a hundred people from Twitter you could just sense that there were more ideas than people sitting there with you. It was as if just being around awesome people allowed all kinds of ideas to form. Ideas aren’t just born out of the ether though, not even the ones accompanied by a “Eureka!”

I would argue that there are very few ideas that live within a single mind that ever make it out into the world. Certainly the ones that do are memorable – the heliocentric model of the solar system and E=MC² are two that immediately come to mind – but even both of those needed a little help from others before making their impact. They needed to be challenged and shared with a larger community before they would realize their full potential.

The seeds for a good many ideas – the good ones at least – are often planted deep within the mind, and then cultivated as their host explores and interacts with the world and people around them. It can hardly be considered a surprise when really great ideas come from people who not only are great or aspire to be great, but who also surround themselves with greatness.

Twitter isn’t just mindless chatter. Facebook isn’t just birthday reminders and noticing how you’ve aged way better than many of your high school friends. Active listening on social media might just be the most important skill you can acquire. Your phones aren’t smart – you are. So plant your idea and let it take root. Give it food and nurturing to help it evolve. Keep a close eye on it, pay attention, and stay engaged.

If all else fails hunt it down ruthlessly and don’t give up. Greatness will be yours.

More Than Tweets the Eye

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Some people don’t “get” Twitter, which is understandable if you’ve only ever scratched the surface. I have been on Twitter since sometime in 2009, and it wasn’t until recently that I started becoming more active, and it wasn’t until very recently that I started to see its real value.  I can honestly say I this point that Twitter is improving the quality of my life, and I can point to two key moments that opened my eyes to this.

I’m not being overly dramatic just to appease my readership (all 7 of you!) either. Read this short article on ways Twitter can change your life. It may over state some of the claims but the key message behind each one is true. What it fails to outline however is that if you are planning on using Twitter for more than just random updates about friends’ lunches or celebrity gossip then you’ve got to use Twitter just like you would any other tool.

The wonderful Julia Rosien of Social North put together this quick read. It begins, “Whether it’s a hammer or Twitter, a tool is only as good as the person wielding it.” I’ll take this a step further and suggest that any tool, used for its intended purpose, has the potential to be a very valuable tool. Sure, a pocket knife can open a can of beans, but it’s a much less useful pocket knife if the blade is all dull and bent and you’re sporting a 2 inch gash because the bean juice got on your hand and the knife slipped and now the helpful nurse in the ER is asking you, “Why not just use a can opener?“.  Why not indeed.

More to the point (and hopefully getting us closer to those two eye opening Twitter moments) Twitter users are now using the tool in remarkable ways, 140 characters at a time, FOR FREE. That’s right. Free. Twitter does not charge you to advertise, promote, share, recommend, endorse, or spam, though that last one will get you kicked off (and rightfully so). I don’t know too many other services out there that have the potential to capture such a globally diverse audience, in real time, with no charge.

Celebrities such as Kevin Smith have actually started using Twitter to promote their brand and business. Hell, Kev’s gone a step further and is practically pinning the hopes of his latest movie on word of mouth  advertising, and Twitter was his jumping off point. With over 1.8 million followers on Twitter and a flick that’s looking like it will be in the black before it’s even released it’s hard to argue against the value of the tweet.

It is really just a question of knowing what problem you’re trying to solve:

  • How can I reach a larger, more diverse audience?
  • How can I get immediate feedback on an idea?
  • How can I become more involved with my community?
  • How do I get more than 7 people reading my blog?

My coming out party on Twitter started when I saw this tweet.  It was from a friend of mine that I haven’t been seeing enough of. He works hard and has a family, I’m lazy and have a family. Life just gets in the way sometimes, but after reading about his awesome news I ran straight out and joined the celebration, and you know what? I met some truly amazing people. Friends of friends, and interesting and remarkable people right in my own backyard: Mike, Ben, Melanie, just to name a few.

That led to me hearing about a scotch tasting at the KW Art Gallery where I got to meet Robb, Mark, and Dave, which was followed up by an invite (sent out via Twitter) to Start Up Drinks Waterloo where I had some great conversations with Matt “Dennick” about Twitter as well as good talks with Craig and Tera (who shares my crazy obsession with getting a Twitter @ mention. It’s like crack, I tells ya).  Soon I’ll be off to the Social Media Breakfast and then Ignite Waterloo.

To think this all started with one Tweet.

The other defining moment for me came when I spent a couple weeks putting together a song using some online music creating software. I wrote a 54 second instrumental in the hopes that Kevin Smith would “buy” it and use it for one of his podcast introductions. I tweeted him this, and all he did was tweet this a few minutes later, and within a half hour of me posting the blog entry I 500 hits and the song had over 200 plays. Next thing I knew I was exchanging emails with Jordan Monsanto. Awesomely surreal.  The whole experience showed me that Twitter in the hands of the right people can be a powerful tool indeed.

So whatever problem you’re trying to solve, or whatever it is you’re looking for, all I can say is that Twitter can help. Identify the problem you want to solve, read up on how other people are using Twitter to solve similar problems, and get on there and start getting engaged.  Well, not necessarily THIS type of engaged.  I can think of much better ways to propose, though I do highly recommend sharing the good news on Twitter afterwards.