In between the other stuff I’m doing, I’ve been gradually scrolling my way though an excellent new Seth Godin eBook entitled What Matters Now.

It’s another one of those savvy Godin-esque compilations of short, meaningful entries from a veritable who’s-who of the interwebs celebesphere that I’d heard about at Twitter and threaded within the folds of a recent Twist Image blogpost and podcast hosted by ueber-media maven Mitch Joel of Montreal, Canada.

Despite the work’s brevity — clocking in at a mere 82pp — I find myself being somehow unable to just breeze through the posts as would normally befit something so tight. Sure, the sentences might be punchy, but the message is profound. I’ve observed myself reading a couple of paragraphs then suddenly leaning into my hardbacked chair exhaling, then pondering the universal significance of what all of it means.

You of course realize there’s a delectable art to conveying something pregnant with such gravitas within the narrow confines of 300 words or less. It’s quite a remarkable feat for those who can do it.

Which is why Gaping Void’s Hugh MacLeod’s contribution on “meaning” really had me going (now marking my third reading of it), but first a bit about the man behind the message.

Hugh’s a cartoonist, so his preferred choice of conveying heavy ideas is through simplified graphical representations of what might take other creatives paragraphs of wagon-circling to describe. Rather than encapsulate some pithy, schmaltzy inspirational kudo in three tight paragraphs, Hugh’s page ten of Seth’s PDF depicts a nifty little cube with the following slogans forming the symmetrical sinews of a square. Here’s a sampling:

• “If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.”
• “You have to find your own shitck.”
• “Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this Earth to climb.”
• “The best way to get approval is not to need it.”
• “You are responsible for your own experience.”
• “If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being ‘discovered’ by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.”
• “Power is taken.”
• “Put the hours in.”
• “The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.”
• “Allow your work to age with you.”
• “Write from the heart.”
• “Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.”

This novel take on a tried-and-tested technique moved me enough to share it here with you.

I’ll be done with the rest of the PDF today and promise to share again if something busts through the haze once more.

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