Storytelling is an intricate part of the human experience
Greetings
Having worked in multiple industries over the years, it has always been difficult to answer the question, “what do you do?”. Identity, and dare I say, value (from 'society’s perspective) is often tied to profession or career but I have had a non-linear approach to work. It wasn’t intentional, it just seems to have worked out that way and so, when answering the question, I have tended to include a couple of ‘positions’, often determined by who I am talking to.
In more recent years, I have settled on ‘storyteller’, which feels like it encompasses everything I do. As a writer, as a podcast host, as an editorial strategist, it seems logical but even when I worked in IT, fashion, management consulting and retail, I do feel I was crafting stories, just not in an obvious way. As a business writer, all I am really doing is helping businesses craft their stories. As Seth Godin is quoted as saying, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.”
Writing fiction is my grail. I have procrastinated over the years on fully committing myself to exploring fiction. The only fiction I have ever written, which I have shared on the newsletter before, was The Hermit, for Doek! The Namibian literary magazine. Instead of actually sitting down to write, I spend more time reading short stories, novels and books of writing fiction as well as watching videos on writing fiction, like this short film George Saunders - On Story.
As they say, one day is one day.
I love a good curation/aggregation’/personal knowledge management tool. I have experimented with everything from Evernote to Notion to mymind, Pocket and Pinterest. I have used these to clip articles, pictures, quotes, ideas, etc as a way of keeping track of the stuff I come across, with the intention of using or referring to them in the future, including for the newsletters I work on, namely this one and the Ogojiii newsletter.
In the Recommendo newsletter, I came across Sublime, and have been playing with it for a couple of weeks. In Recommendo, they refer to it as ‘a literary Pinterest’ and I couldn’t have put it better. You create cards which you can group into collections. The beauty of it is that ‘highlights’ similar to something you have saved on a card will crop up, from other people’s cards. I also like how I am able to clip quotes and the like straight from a site, with the browser extension installed. And I have been able to import highlights from some of the books I have read. You can follow people and/or their collections.
How I have been using it is to create collections around topics I want to write about. Now it is a matter of doing the actual writing. I am currently sitting with five work-in-progress blog posts that I started about two months ago and haven’t looked at in the last month, at least.
It is still in beta phase but I was able to join using the Recommendo link. This is my profile.
The AI discussion continues to rage. This piece from Guy LeCharles Gonzalez explores some of what I have been grappling with, Catch-22: Thoughts on “AI” in Marketing and Inevitability.
I am also currently halfway through reading Mo Gawdat’s Scary Smart and, frankly, it is scaring me because, if we are honest, human beings can’t be trusted to do what needs to be done, as a collective. “Technology is putting our humanity at risk to an unprecedented degree. This book is not for engineers who write the code or the policy makers who claim they can regulate it. This is a book for you. Because, believe it or not, you are the only one that can fix it.”
America’s Smithsonian Institute, which bills itself as ‘the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex’ has created the Smithsonian Open Access, which provides access to ‘millions of digital assets—2D and 3D images and data.’ These are all in the public domain and can be used for anything without needing their permission.
Since my last newsletter, we (yes, there’s now a small team) have published two episodes of the Listen To Your Footsteps podcast, namely:
I continue to be grateful to my guests for sharing their experiences, their stories. I always walk away from these conversations with valuable lessons on life.
This was a fun read. Envisioning a world when the Internet is no more.
I have various Adinkra symbols as tattoos as a way of connecting with my heritage. Random. When I went in to get tattooed (with a print out of all the ones I wanted), the tattoo shop I went to, in South Africa, had them in a design portfolio (from which you could select the tattoo design you wanted) and had purchased the designs from someone. I saw it as an attempt to trademark cultural symbols.
That’s it for today. Please share, subscribe and/or comment.
Also, check out my podcast and book Listen To Your Footsteps.
Easy
Kojo