Navigating the Cereal Aisle of Life - Irmgarde Brown

I didn't get to blog this yesterday: Harford County's own Irmgarde Brown provided a rigorous training session; Navigating the Cereal Aisle of Life: How to Build a Personal Mission Statement.

Irmgarde explored the paradox of "too many choices, and explained how the overabundance of choice in today's society makes it more and more difficult for people to decide what they are about and to develop a mission statement that suits their own lives.

She then explained developing some sort of personal mission statement is essential to have a meaningful life, make our lives more productive, and give you more control over your own life, among several other benefits.

The workshop consisted of a series of exercises designed to get us to think about who we think we are, based our gifts, talents, passions, and core values. Finally, we had to work out who or what cause we would choose to serve in life. These probably sound like really whopper concepts and ideas. They ARE.

One of the key benefits of this workshop was that Irmgarde provided WORD LISTS of possibilities, with similar types of possibilites all provided in one place. (At first, I was reminded of playing "Mad Lib" - remember Mad Libs, where you fill in the blanks and get a goofy statement at the end?) But no - these lists were provided some help to someone like yours truly. I didn't get overwhelmed because "the-possibilites-were-endless-but-I couldn't-think-of-a-single-one." I had examples right in front of me, and I could use those examples, or think of similar related ideas of my own to use.

The workshop was 2.5 hours. Naturally, something like a personal mission statement couldn't possibly come together in this amount of time. Irmgarde provided us with a good solid start and imparted some pretty healthy thoughts and tools to get us moving along the road towards developing our mission statements.

I don't know if Irmgarde plans to do this workshop again in the future, but if she does, I recommend it highly!
akg

General Session - The Long Tail - Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson is Wired Magazine's editor in chief. He came to speak with us today about his concept of "The Long Tail."

The concept of the "long tail" describes statistically that while only a few examples of media (like blockbuster movies) draw the majority of interest, the rest of everything else that is "out there" garner the interest of a few people each, but collectively, garner the interest of just as many people.

Example: Movie theatres usually try to show all of the top hits - the movies which will gross the highest amount of ticket sales. However, there are many more independent films that may never be seen, because it isn't "worth it" to market a film that relatively few people will want to see. But if all those independent films could be shown at no cost, just as many people would view those independent films collectively as those who would view the few hot movies.

Traditionally, the commercial world has done what is economically more sound by providing products that are one-size-fits-all. Fewer choices have been marketed to us, because our commerce is driven by how much space is actually available to house products. We can't possibly house every possible book in any one library, for example.

The Internet, and other technologies make it easier to cater to the "long tail," which represents the interests of the many who are interested in the less popular content collectively. Bloggers and users who review products and services provide free advertising and recommendations. Digitized information that can be downloaded and read, printed, or viewed, or otherwise requested on demand reduce overhead to zero.

Anderson's address provided several eye-opening examples that illustrated the concepts quite nicely.

akg