An ant is tiny. The ant cannot comprehend the size of the continent it is on. It has no concept of the value and purpose it has in the context of the whole. It is digging, carrying, and working for the good of the whole with no any context at all.

Like the ant, a rat in a maze is wandering aimlessly through his labyrinth style prison following his senses looking for his goal.

To the ant, the ant hill is a large and a rocky knoll is a mountain. To the mouse the maze’s walls are the world it lives inside.

Our advantage is being able to stop and take a look down on their situations. We have perspective. There are globes to give us context of where we fit into the rest of the world. Our phones have maps with GPS to show us how to navigate the maze of roads, highways, and freeways we interact with.

How easily still do we find ourselves plowing through life with the same perspective as the ant and mouse?

My goals slowly narrow my perspective clouds from a wide angle at 150º or so down to 90º. Still a decent field of vision and useful to be successful, but not what it was. My vision still then narrows more until I am seeing less and less. At the end I am so focused on my goals I have been sucked into a 2 degree field of vision.

I am focused on my own problems and cannot see the value of my work in the context of the whole. I forget where I am and what my value is. I get my priorities out of alignment. I start to encourage marginal gains and growth sacrificing the bigger picture.

My tunnel vision is now costing us any progress we should be making and instead I cannot see around the biases I have developed. I cannot hear other voices through the noise I make. I are so focused on not tripping and being hurt again we cannot see the cliff we are about to walk off.

When was the last time you zoomed out on your life? When did you last assess your goals? What are your goals? What do you want to say you accomplished? What do you want to have said of you when you die?

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Someone recently posed the question to me, “What causes your generation to be connected to something?” Essentially, they were trying to figure out how to advertise to me. How to connect to me as a brand or a business.

How do they advertise to me? How do they sell me something? How do they become my resource for sales and purchases?

Simply put, “What do they need to do to sell to the iPhone generation?”

I was a little off put and realized, they needed to connect to me by connecting to me. They needed to tell me a story. They needed to bring me a message worth taking in. They needed to connect me to the story of their brand.

We jokingly talked about how my generation and I could so easily pick up our phone and seemingly tune out a conversation with four or five other people who are all talking.

I pointed out about how picking up our phone was not tuning out a conversation with four or five other people. It was choosing to engage in a conversation with the 300 people on the other end of our story.

While I might be connected to a conversation about the weather, the annoying neighbors, work woes, or the funny thing a pet recently did. As soon as I pick up my phone I have real peoples’ stories to join.

To read.

To watch.

To engage with.

All of a sudden the surface level conversation about the weather is trivial when compared to the content online. The content of seeing a child take their first steps on social media or the content of the guy I know going through a depression and expressing his angst. When I compare the content linking me to the family who donated all of their Christmas gifts to the needy to someone else’s work woes, I find myself more interested in the family making a difference than the same sad story about work woes.

I do not think I am justified to pick up my phone as if I have found the social trump card.

I do think I am expected to be worthwhile in conversation. When I am in a conversation I am leading, it is my job to be worthwhile content. I need to be digging into the conversation and making it worth everyone’s time sitting around the conversation we are having. Is the content I am providing in this conversation more interesting than the weather?

The weather happens to everyone, when is the next time you are going to talk about how you happened to the world around you? When you are in a conversation are you contributing something worthwhile?

Quality Content,

–JT