I had a friend compliment me about how much I read, blog, tweet and whatnot.
He’s a sucker.
You see, it is all pretty simple and – if I’m doing it right – my system of learning and exposing myself to ideas feels really natural and easy. That is where virtual community becomes a bit faker than real community. All I have to do to appear wise and bright and thoughtful and intelligent is write a couple of paragraphs every day? Find and retweet interesting links? Reword old ideas in new ways? Reference popular books, authors, or thinkers?
Yup, that’s about it.
Online, it is easy to consistently be awesome. In fact, it’s so easy that people who aren’t awesome blow our minds. We’r SO surprised to find a company or church with a lame website. When someone doesn’t understand what blogging or twitter is, we’re at a loss for words. It’s like they’re from a different planet.
Online Awesomeness is low-hanging fruit. It’s the fad diet of achievements. Anyone can do it.
What is a lot harder is to be awesome offline; to continually interact with real people and leave them impressed. It’s hard to learn a difficult skill when you don’t have the time or energy. It’s hard to be kind to jerks. It’s hard to give a rip about people on the other side of the world who will never pay you back for what you do. Those things take years and years and years to master and LOTS of people, companies, churches and societies fail at those. In fact, so many fail to be awesome offline that those who are remarkable (MLK, Mother Teresa, Jesus, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, etc.) blow our minds for years and years to come.
So here’s a challenge, if you like blogging and tweeting and facebooking. Great.
If you aren’t into it. Great.
Be awesome offline. Be remarkable in reality, not virtual reality.
really made me think. thanks. im excited to hear you at fall blast!