Just Bee Yourself

Originally published in East & West Magazine

We used to live in a world where access required money. If you wanted to get a message out to a lot of people you had to have a lot of money to pay the people who owned the means to create and distribute your message to the masses. Now anyone with access to a laptop and an internet connection can easily (if they are so inclined) create and distribute a message online. The barriers to entry for the creation and distribution of content are now gone. Now it’s all about who has the most compelling content.

If the metaphor for the old media model is a loudspeaker, where messages are created by a few and broadcast to the masses, then this new interconnected digital world is an infinite, electric meadow brimming with ideas and messages and information and entertainment, all sprouting up as flowers. In this metaphor we are the bees, buzzing around, hopping from flower to flower, bumping into and interacting with other bees, collecting, exchanging and disseminating information like bits of pollen; contributing in our own small way to the birth and development of new ideas … new flowers, which then in turn attract other bees. And the process continues.

We buzz around online, stopping here and there, sometimes leaving a little something and maybe taking something away. We consume, process, create, repurpose and distribute content. We reply to emails, read our friends’ Facebook statuses, visit websites, share links and watch videos, clicking from here to there to over there and so forth, sometimes ending up hours later in some totally (seemingly) unrelated place doing something totally (it might appear) different than what we had intended to do. The beautiful thing is that where we end up is the result of our acting honestly; doing exactly what we want to do at that moment, reacting exactly as we wish to. We don’t click on a certain link or visit some web page or register for some campaign because someone coerced us to. We do it because we genuinely want to find out more about it. This is nature at work.

When you fail to plan you plan to fail, as they say. But if you plan too much you fail to allow for all of those little opportunities and accidental wonders than emerge from the natural interaction of people in an open and free environment. It is the open, collaborative, accidental, random, organic nature of this connected world that enables the exponential growth of new ideas, technologies and ways of thinking which in turn will lead to the creation of things that we cannot yet imagine.

It’s time to stop looking for new ways to interrupt the flow of information and instead to become a part of the flow, to facilitate and enable the flow of information and explore new ways to make ourselves relevant and interesting to those we want to reach. Don’t look for new ways to shout your credentials at people … look for new ways to coax them to you. Grow your flowers. Grow flowers that people will buzz about. Invite people to sit on your flower for a bit and get cozy and let’s see what develops.