I can’t stop thinking about resounding words.
I blame it on a singing bowl. Have you ever heard one of those ring?
It’s a special kind of sound—at first it’s like a gong, but if the practitioner applies the mallet effectively, the initial ringing fades…and then just when you think it’s gone forever, it resounds, circling and expanding in a way that feels textured and powerful.
I witnessed the artful ringing of a singing bowl the other day, and it got me thinking about how sound can carry, and how words in particular can be amplified (or ignored).
What makes the difference between resounding words and speech that is dismissed?
I wish I knew what made words resound.
I’ve worked in marketing long enough to have cracked the code—if there were a code to crack. My best conclusion is that to some extent virality is a crapshoot.
It’s impossible to predict what gets repeated and amplified and what falls into the abyss of the unshared.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t indicators and patterns and best practices and good suggestions, of course. (If you want to know more about what those are, feel free to ask me.)
And I’m pretty sure passion and persistence have a lot to do with it. But there are no guarantees.
Let your words resound
So the wisest thing to do is to speak as if your words will always resound.
Because to some extent, they do. Like a stone tossed into a still pond, your words always have ripples. Even if the amplification isn’t (yet) global, what you say nonetheless impacts anyone who hears.
Even (especially) you.
Love > fear,
