Results May Vary
In many of the meetings I’ve taken I have been asked about turn-key things one can do to achieve their goals. This includes asking for specific places they should go, people they should talk to, and most recently, specific “scripts” they can use to get the things they want. My answer to these questions is sometimes disappointing because I tell them the truth:
I can tell you exactly what I did, but your results may not be the same.
Some of these people listen to this and ask me to tell them anyway. They take careful notes of everything I say and go off to parrot everything I just said to them, some get into a more in depth discussion with me about motivation and why certain people listen to certain things, and some just become frustrated and keep asking me to boil it all down for them. The thing that is fascinating to me about this hunger for turn-key solutions to everything is how we have become so impatient and so lazy in many cases as a culture. I often address this in conversations with writers who are looking for funding who blindly email producers asking them to produce their work.
We live in a world where we can go to a website and have food delivered to our door, books sent to us, and with the click of a button can watch anything we want. It’s no wonder that people have begun to see relationships in the same context. Here’s the thing:
People are not slot machines.
Each individual has a different set of values and experiences that make up who they are and what they like and don’t like. No “script” is going to work on everyone you meet and more importantly if anyone you talk to has read that “script” before they are going to see you coming a mile away and know exactly what you’re after. The most important thing to understand in all of this is that communication is one of the first things that we learn, but the one thing we never truly master. The way I approach someone about a project may not resonate with some people in the same way what I’m writing now may not resonate with some people. I do imagine though that if I googled “How to write a blog post that gets read” I’d find a number of suggestions for how I should have written this post. If I followed those things to the letter and wrote exactly what they told me to write, this post would lose something:
My voice.
If there is something out there that you want, by all means, do some research on what has worked for other people, but don’t look at any of it as a magic pill. Human beings are complex and the way we communicate is even more complex. No one way of saying anything works on everybody. You’ll have to test out different ways of approaching people for yourself and if something doesn’t work, you’ll have to look at that and adjust and try something new. Nobody has all the answers and if you put all of your faith in one person’s way of doing things then you lose the most important thing of all:
Your own voice.
So if you’ve been looking for a “script” to get what you want and you haven’t found one yet, maybe it’s time to write your own. There’s always room in this world for more stories and more voices.
Let us hear yours.
Excelsior!
