This exchange would not happen 30 years ago. I wouldn’t be writing and you wouldn’t be reading. It would have cost us too much money to print and mail these updates to hundreds of people. The Sea Log would never have existed.

And we couldn’t have published Listen to Your Laundry because no publisher likely would have green-lit a book from a few no-names from Buffalo, N.Y.

But both of those things happen. We write and we publish.

The barriers to entry have been stripped. It doesn’t cost anything to share your art – whatever that may be.

You no longer need permission from the chief (publisher) to gain access to the tribe (readers).

For the first time in the history of the world, every person has their own microphone, is their own media platform and obtains access to virtually everyone else on the planet. A kid with braces in South Korea can influence us just as easily as the president of your own country.

You should have a blog if you want to have a blog.

It doesn’t matter that sometimes you’re not going to know what to say.

It doesn’t matter that some people won’t like it.

It doesn’t matter that 99.99% of the world won’t subscribe to you. (Currently 100% of the world doesn’t subscribe to you so I’d consider that a massive improvement.)

The power that was once squirreled away in a tower in the forest with only its flowing mane to brush and brush no longer is. It’s free and it wants to make friends. This matters to you a lot more than perhaps you think it does. Consider those epic periods in history when a major shift took place. The Railroad. Electricity. A Manned Flying Machine. The Radio. The Internet. Wouldn’t it have been nice to be one of “the chosen” who were at the right place at the right time? What if you saw the future before everyone else and got in when it was scary but early enough to ride the lightning into the sunset? We look back at those times and those people and it just looks so damned obvious, so inevitable. But it wasn’t to most and even some of those pioneers didn’t understand how their craziness would culminate. But, even back then, “the chosen” chose themselves.

Today might be one of those times. You might be standing on the platform and not even know it.

So just start.

If you want to.

“Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway.” – Earl Nightingale

Photo credit : Tulsa Photo