Your message
Your banner
Your thing
Your why
Your overarching reason for showing up to the work over and over
Once you uncover it, it’s yours. It’s a gift that you get to filter all of your professional decision making through. It makes decisions simpler.
It’s made up of a combination of your personal values mixed with what works in the market.
You may not know what it is but you’re probably already doing it.
1. Songs make a bigger deal out of things than need be…
A song takes a small snap shot of life and puts it under an elevated, idealized microscope. It highlights the emotion, adds grandiose metaphors, adds drama, stirs in the truth, and claims to be a story worth telling and hearing again and again. Is any moment worthy of that?
2. and yet not a big enough deal.
The greatest songs ever give us the best possible glimpse of the beauty of the snapshot. I’m not sure a song could ever over-state the beauty life shows us.
The audacity to write a song about anything is a bold claim of the content’s value. And yet maybe every moment is worth that and much more.
A few years ago at the beach we were watching a beautiful sunset. White sand, turquoise water and the sky going from blues to purples and oranges and pinks.
Just down the beach from us we saw young couple getting engaged. The guy got down on one knee, the girl cried and said yes, and a bunch of friends and family who were hiding nearby came out to celebrate and take a million pictures.
The perfect moment in the perfect place and time.
But my guess is the engagement was going to happen regardless of the weather. The engagement wasn’t going to get rescheduled due to rain or in hopes of even deeper purples and reds in the sky next time.
The engagement was the non-negotiable. Everything else had some bend to it.