Chris Brogan was talking about shotguns and it made me think about:
- Steaks
- and Cheeseburgers.
Or rather, Organic and Manufactured (Processed).
In the words of the swashbuckling Inigo Montoya (from The Princess Bride):
"Let me ‘splain, " *pause* "No, there is too much. Let me sum up."
How do you forge relationships? Organically or Processed?
It all came from Chris’s Shotgun post about marketing. Which got me thinking more generically, about how we relate to one another.
Most relationships evolve over time. The people we work with, even if we aren’t friends, are known to us. Our relationship has grown organically, by the simple fact that we experience together.
I still remember the first time I watched The Princess Bride. It was twenty years ago, I was in year six.
We don’t have trouble forging relationships with characters in stories. I instantly bonded with Fezzik and Inigo as they rhymed off each other. The love story between Westley and Buttercup made me want the same thing. Not a small amount of reasoning because of the fantastic music.
There’s a lot of holes in the above. Stories don’t talk back. Characters don’t tell you how to live your lives.
But still, it shows how ready we are to relate.
Most of the time, in our reality lives, this doesn’t happen.
Sometimes, sometimes, you meet a person and instantly click. You get excited about the same things, you have had similar experiences, or just that for some higher reason, you get on really well.
And even more rarely, these "sometimes" happened in a manufactured situation. An obvious manufactured situation is Arranged Marriage, but that’s not what I want to talk about.
Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, YouTube, <insert web social networking service>. To begin with, the relationships that start here are manufactured (it’s the same when you start working with other people).
If you were/are anything like me, you blazed into the arena shouting out your name and very exciting and important details about yourself to anyone who would listen. And because of how these services work, to everyone who wouldn’t as well.
Digressing a little. Why? Was it the allure of fame, wanting to be another Scoble or Rose or Zefrank? Was it because I desperately wanted to use these fantastic new services to shoot my business into stardom? Was it because I’m a bit lonely, and these new paradigms of community building would be a fine place to start my new life?
Not really. Not mostly, heh.
It’s because since I was a wee lad, Friends have been vital and innately natural (hmmm) to me. Relationships energise me.
That’s why it still hurts a little when someone doesn’t respond to my Twitter. When nobody "likes" something in my FriendFeed stream. I know, Scoble has four gazillion follows, and I understand that. I know that in the same place, I’d be a lot worse. It’s not because I’m angry that they wouldn’t pay attention to me.
It’s because I long to be friends with people. To share, to grow, to laugh and talk about comics.
To build stuff together. To reminisce about the time we mooned the president.
To brainstorm ideas. Get better.
Forge new stories.
These hurts however are so insignificant in the bigger picture that it would be petty of me to mention them, except here they serve a point.
Thankyou for reading this post. Please leave a comment. Twitter me. Friendfeed me. Say G’day. I’ll promptly reply with some comment about wombats.
And here’s the point:
Be content to let your relationships grow Organically, even if they begin Manufactured.