” and finding my-worth marketing gurus.
I eased into the weekend with some online reading with a definite intention: I wanted to get to know a few people better who I’d impulsively (or you could say instinctively) had begun to follow on Twitter. I even said so on Friday with as much intention as I could tweet in those 140 characters:
Aloha Pō‘alima: Aloha Friday Twitter plan ~ Click on your links, read some good stuff, comment in those places, cut back my own noise here.
My instincts were pretty good; I got reacquainted with a few people, and was somewhat startled by how much they had accomplished or changed since I last visited their web pages, for new looks have popped up everywhere, and initiative is flourishing. As just one example, I love what Mark Goren is now doing with his Planting Seeds. (I wrote about Mark 15 months ago on Joyful Jubilant Learning and will need to update my links there!)
In several instances, I was very startled (though I am not sure why I should have been surprised at all) by the bravado and almost-audacity of youth.
Wisdom unfolds before my eyes in a remarkable way on Twitter. First there is this spark of brilliance. Then another tweet reveals that it wasn’t just a spark; there is a warm ember glowing there. The tweets someone shares get hotter and hotter, and as they do, I suspect I need to know this person better, and as I did over the past two days, I begin to explore and probe, from Twitter bio link to blog, to About Page, to a Hire Me statement of some kind, until I find their intentions —and more often than not, their Storefront.
What has been startling me is how young so many of my Twitter Sages are revealed to me as. Not in their content, just in their pictures. Twenty-somethings. Thirty-somethings.
What is so delightfully refreshing is that these “brash youngsters” are not allowing their age to hold them back. They know what they already have to offer the world, and so they are. Not only that: They are capitalizing on their in-born talents magnificently.
Within my own not-so-random sampling, there is not a single “internet marketer” in the bunch. If you have that statement in your bio I’m sorry, but it really rubs me the wrong way; in my consciousness, “internet marketers” have become the sharky car salesmen of the online world (with apologies to ethical car salesmen and women everywhere).
Those who have impressed me over the past two days of my focused web-reading, are all what I’d call ‘my-worth marketers’.
They know their Ho‘ohana, or at the very least they are dabbling in experimenting their way toward revealing it, and now they are busy at this new expression of the business of life. They are busy within their very intentional work, and they are contributing to our world as they do so.
Their About Pages and their Hire Me pages may be somewhat shallow in testimony to what they have already done, but my goodness they are goldmines in what they confidently offer about what they now DO. Age is irrelevant, but wisdom is highly relevant, and it is present.
My generation (and yes, I wish I didn’t have to write it that way, but it’s an accuracy, a point of reference) was way too hung up on paying our dues and logging our past experiences, when in fact, past experience is no guaranteed predicator of what will happen in the future. We lost so much valuable time, and we took too many hits to our self-esteem.
In comparison, I am really loving what I am seeing emerge right now. I am enjoying learning from the wise young.
Thank goodness our kids are not following our example.
Some kind of squash I think”
I love the way that vegetable vines like this grow with such eager exhuberance. They reach out, latch on to something, with no hesitation, no doubt that they belong wherever they end up.
Postscript:
Karen Wallace has stimulated a thoughtful discussion at Joyful Jubilant Learning this morning with a posting called Expecting Perfection. Another way of saying this might be that I don’t expect perfection from others, not at all. I do expect initiative, and I do expect people to manifest the strengths they have to offer, and that’s what I’m cheered by this morning, that the generation of my son (21) and my daughter (24) is delivering those things already.