2017.10.26: After this moment we may never see each other ever again

Dear Journal,

A jarring title, right? As a business this is an important stance to take. Every time a customer sees our advertisement, it could be the last time they ever see our brand. This means our entire goal has to be to engage and delight our audience with every passing moment they experience us.

The title applies to human interactions as well. For example, I've often been told, "it doesn't matter what we do since we'll never see these people ever again." On the contrary, I argue, "we probably won't see these people ever again which means it's even more important to engage and delight them." If we don't, we may lose those people forever. We will lose them to their own lives and engagements. Now, some people, we could live without, perhaps many people we could live without, but if we want to be good at captivating our audience, at captivating the ones around us that we really care about, we better think long and hard about letting them slip away to exist in their own circle. Everyone of us has an incredibly interesting story that has yet to be explored and probed. Especially the ones we have very little in common with. Those are the ones we need to actively delight. The ones who have common interests will be easy to delight, just talk about the things we do and the experiences we have. To delight the viewers with less in common we have to pique their emotional interest. We need to find a way to communicate that seems trustworthy to them. For instance, most people enjoy the idea of science, they enjoy the exploration and adventure of imagining a black hole, however, they certainly don't enjoy the math of it all. If we expect to delight the audience around us, we need to start our communication with as little math as possible. We start by explaining the unintuitive and unique nature of a black hole. Once we captivate them, we may elaborate on some of the interesting qualities that exist in the math. And explain that, for instance, this piece of the math explains this quality of a black hole, and that piece of the math explains that quality. Essentially we have the task of tying the audience's unique experience to our own product. In terms of human interactions, the product is ourselves. So, the task boils down to learning about our audience so we may delight them with something initially "uninteresting."

From my own experience, I've learned nothing is truly dull. Even topics I believed were initially uninteresting have so much depth and challenge to them. People are no different. None of us are dull. I want to reiterate that point because I've heard from several people that they think they're inadequate or less interesting than others. None of us are dull. Even a man who was in a coma the past decade has a story to investigate and a perspective so vastly different from our own that we can enjoy conversation with them. In short, there's always something behind the curtain, if we let our audience slip away, we may forever miss out on the wonderful experience of exploring a new story.

In conclusion, the next time we think to ourselves, "meh, it doesn't matter, we'll never see them again," we need to see it as a call to action. We may never see them again! And that's a wonderfully frightening moment to realize we may never have the chance to explore a truly delightful story.

Sincerely,

Alex