Will you please love me?

There. Do you love me now? No?

Well of course not.

You can't love a person on command. Love, respect, admiration... all of these must be earned. They are organic involuntary responses to stimulus. (Not that your attitude going-in doesn't make it more or less easy.) If I want you to love me, I can't just ask you to because you can't just agree to. Instead, I have to inspire you to love me. I have to engage in the behaviors that will make you love me (if the underlying conditions are favorable).

So if this is true for love, why do you think that asking me to be your fan on Facebook is going to work? I may like you. I may love you. But I cannot be your fan unless...well, I'm your fan. So don't put the onus on me by asking. Put the onus on yourself to inspire me to identify as your fan, by engaging in the sorts of inspirational behaviors that will automatically produce fan-ness in me.

Asking me to be your fan is like a lawyer simply admitting that he doesn't have a case and just falling on the mercy of the court. It's like telling me that there is no good reason I should be your fan but asking me to please ignore that and do it anyway.

Is that how you think you can succeed?

C'mon. You can do better. Show me your greatness. Share your excellence with me. Inspire me. If you don't have any greatness, excellence or inspiration then you do not deserve fans. If you do, you will not need to ask for them.

Writing takes heart

If you look at some of my recent posts, you'll notice that I haven't written much lately. Part of the reason is that I've said much of what I wanted to say and I'm not going to write just because there is a social media diktat that you have to keep the content flowing. I write when there's something to say. But it has felt to me like there's something more behind my recent radio silence.

And it occurred to me the other morning that I've been suffering from a lack of inspiration. Work has not been enjoyable for me for some time now. It has been extremely de-inspiring. Not uninspiring. Uninspiring is just a lack of inspiration. Work has been de-inspiring. It has actually been sucking whatever inspiration I do have, right out of me. And it has left me either with nothing to say or without a desire to say anything.

And here's where it gets interesting to me. In order to have something to say, you need to keep your eyes and ears open. You need to care enough to look and listen around you and make observations. You need to think about those observations and play with them in your head so that you develop an idea with some measure of novelty that is worth sharing with others. In short, you need to be inspired.

This is why I have long been such an advocate of innovation and, particularly, creating cultures of innovation. It's not that I appreciate the new cool stuff that comes out of innovation efforts. Although I do. It's not that innovation is good for the economy. Although it is. It's that innovation allows for the human soul to reach its most elevated purpose. It allows us to take our most valued gifts - our hearts and minds and souls - and use them towards their most treasured end.

We all want to innovate. Or, more precisely, we all want to engage our hearts, minds and souls in the direction that our passions take us. And we want to channel those explorations and the ideas that they generate towards the common good. (Unless you're an evil bastard, but I'm not talking to you now so go away.) When we are allowed to do that, we find ourselves inspired. We are happy. We are productive. And everybody wins. When we are not allowed to do that, when institutions block our efforts to pursue our humanity for the common good, when we are forced to spend our time in fear of politics or in meaningless pursuits, then we become de-inspired. Unhappy. Unproductive. And everybody loses.

I'd love to end this post on a happy note. But I can't do that now. I hope that soon I'll have more inspiring news to share.