Community Thief
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Below is a transcription of this video Hey, this is Justin. I’m recording this video on 5:23 AM on March 21st and did a little response to Seth Godin’s blog. If you don’t know Seth Godin, you can read him at SethGodin.Typepad.com. He makes a post everyday and I like to read these posts and do a response and just really figure out how to apply these things to my life. We are talking about is the big us and the little us. It’s talking about communities and the community that we’re a part of.
I’m going to start off with giving the example of nobody is going to really steal from a church when you go to like a church banquet, getting seconds in line or if you go to a potluck where you’re supposed to make something homemade, or you purchase something and then you dump it into a homemade bowl. There are those “gray areas of ethics and integrity” but you know just aren’t the right things to do. You turn your car unwashed and it’s funny because we all say that we’re community players and we give to the community first and we take our peace after that but the fact of the matter is we have a tendency to separate ourselves from the community and look at the community as different than who we actually are. You realized, if you’re taking from the community, you really actually taking from yourself. The key is the people have the most non-success are the ones who can own the community and incorporate the community into themselves. When you’re doing your online work and I started online form before and it takes extraordinary amount of work to get a form started to be able to share information and to be able to get people engaged because people start off just apathetic and blind. There’s so much stuff out there that they can’t see what you’re actually doing and nobody cares about what you’re doing so you have to quit an extraordinary amount of effort in the beginning just to get people to take notice and then when people take notice, a lot of them are going to be negative.
They’re going to go into the negative direction; they’re going to judge you. The person who created the community, they’re going to want to take out their complaints about life on the communities and I’ve experienced this probably on both ends actually. When we’re talking about online communities that are so fleeting and there’s a sense of anonymity online for people but you can give those people who are angry more opportunity to take something out of the community. I just realized, being part of the community takes extraordinary amounts of work and those people who are digging the well help them to dig the well, support what they are doing, support the community, support building up and look at the community as a part of yourself. When you’re serving the community, you find that you’re serving yourself at the same time. This is really a call to action to say, “Hey, give and give and give.” It is a wake-up call for me when I’m looking at some communities that I’m part of that I’m not necessarily looking at myself from stealing from, I’m not doing it over an act to steal from the community but the fact that I’m not doing everything that I can to support the community, is by default actually, stealing at the community. It’s really an opportunity to step up your game in every area of life. Thanks a lot for listening. Make today an awesome day.