- Jul 10, 2018
- 925
- 2,448
So, I've hung around just long enough to know that I intend to hang around a bit more ... which means it's probably time to write a bit about myself.
I'm old.
That's probably the best place to start. I'm old in many senses of the word. I'm old in the most straightforward sense that I was born in the 1960's, and so am now in my early 50s. I'm old in the sense that even for my age I hold to a few old-fashioned principles of an era before my time.
I'm also 'Internet old', in that the first modem I ever used had a cradle for a normal telephone headset to be placed into it. I remember Telex machines before faxes. My first programming experience was blacking in boxes on a sheet of paper from which punch-cards would be made. I became a web designer in 1995, and a specialist in Internet Marketing from 1996. I'm pretty good at the latter of those skills.
I'm a storyteller.
I wrote short stories and my own comics as a kid. I even won a few competitions for my stories and poetry. I can downgrade that last by saying they were only competitions within my home town. But I can then switch that back somewhat by mentioning that my home town as a kid was the city of London.
Storytelling is also a huge part of my career in Marketing. Marketing is all about narrative. Even the marketers who are slide-rule wizards with algorithms and charts have to put all those numbers into a meaningful narrative before they are useful. The human mind works with narrative. It's how we take our thoughts and impulses and apply meaning to them. We have to be able to read the customer's narrative to know what they really want, and we have to be able to relate the product, experience and brand narratives to that.
I'm flawed.
Well, everyone is, of course. On a site like this one there will be no shortage of folks with at least a few flawed deviances (to put it mildly). However, I also have a couple of medical conditions, one being severe depression. I was a total stress-junkie in my younger years (yes, all of them), loving my particular talent for thriving under pressure and being especially good in a crisis, and thus seeking out all the stress and crises I could to show those talents off in.
However, many of my flaws are also strengths in the right situation. Blunt honesty, for example, is either a strength or a weakness depending only on where and when it is applied. A strong desire to help is likewise either 'meddlesome interference' or 'awesome support' depending entirely on where and when applied.
Well, that's me in a very brief nutshell then - an old, flawed, storyteller.
I'm old.
That's probably the best place to start. I'm old in many senses of the word. I'm old in the most straightforward sense that I was born in the 1960's, and so am now in my early 50s. I'm old in the sense that even for my age I hold to a few old-fashioned principles of an era before my time.
I'm also 'Internet old', in that the first modem I ever used had a cradle for a normal telephone headset to be placed into it. I remember Telex machines before faxes. My first programming experience was blacking in boxes on a sheet of paper from which punch-cards would be made. I became a web designer in 1995, and a specialist in Internet Marketing from 1996. I'm pretty good at the latter of those skills.
I'm a storyteller.
I wrote short stories and my own comics as a kid. I even won a few competitions for my stories and poetry. I can downgrade that last by saying they were only competitions within my home town. But I can then switch that back somewhat by mentioning that my home town as a kid was the city of London.
Storytelling is also a huge part of my career in Marketing. Marketing is all about narrative. Even the marketers who are slide-rule wizards with algorithms and charts have to put all those numbers into a meaningful narrative before they are useful. The human mind works with narrative. It's how we take our thoughts and impulses and apply meaning to them. We have to be able to read the customer's narrative to know what they really want, and we have to be able to relate the product, experience and brand narratives to that.
I'm flawed.
Well, everyone is, of course. On a site like this one there will be no shortage of folks with at least a few flawed deviances (to put it mildly). However, I also have a couple of medical conditions, one being severe depression. I was a total stress-junkie in my younger years (yes, all of them), loving my particular talent for thriving under pressure and being especially good in a crisis, and thus seeking out all the stress and crises I could to show those talents off in.
However, many of my flaws are also strengths in the right situation. Blunt honesty, for example, is either a strength or a weakness depending only on where and when it is applied. A strong desire to help is likewise either 'meddlesome interference' or 'awesome support' depending entirely on where and when applied.
Well, that's me in a very brief nutshell then - an old, flawed, storyteller.
