vision statement vs mind movie

sometime last last winter, january ‘07, i stumbled upon a fellow named malcolm cohan while creativity blogging, and something about mal’s open and upbeat spirit (coupled with a sense that he’d seen some trouble in his life), and this remarkably simple idea of his just hooked me in immediately. there was a couple of months there where i swear i told everyone who would listen about the amazing malcolm cohan and his equally amazing vision statements.

here was an idea/process/technology that just couldn’t have existed much earlier in time, an idea whose time had come, and here was malcolm delivering this thing, bubbling with excitement about how he was going to change the world with this great new idea of his…creating a slideshow of beautiful pictures with affirmative statements, set to some rocking music.

and the best thing about it was mal’s combination of wide-eyed idealism coupled with a grounded sense of reality…his knowledge and comfort with the ways of us humans…that even though deep inside we are all just searching for love, and desirous of creating and inhabiting a loving world, our outer nature is a lot more interested in stuff! mal’s real genius is in revealing that these seemingly incompatible drives are actually mutually supportive…if you work them that way.

cut to august this year…a week ago? i find myself being bombarded, in the worst internet marketing fashion: affiliates hitting you left and right, emails about this great new thing, paid internet advertisements disguising themselves as customer reviews, pages that open up and instantly begin talking at you. about what? ryan higgins’ mind movies of course.

well, easy enough to ignore all this nonsense of course, just email my friends back and set them straight about the lineage of this idea and how to wade into it without feeling kind of dirty and oozy: skip the mind movies, go for the vision statement. even the titles reveal the active/passive dichotomy, the create/consume polarity.

and then i sit with it.  obviously i’m biased. i have a style i like and a style i don’t. a side of the playground i hang out on and a side that i don’t. no need to turn it into a fight. i might even go over to ryan’s side of the playground and see what all the fuss is about. maybe.

and then. i open up a page of ryan’s. and listen to him speak almost word for word malcolm’s joy-filled spiel from jan 07. except ryan has the aura of a porn star. an out of shape porn star. there. i’ve said it. 

alright then, second post and already courting controversy. i can’t help it. controversy finds me. i’m a beacon. so be it. shiny happy me!

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