It never ceases to astound me how tiny gestures can have such a huge impact.
All of this was brought very much into focus last week as I was preparing for some (very much needed) time off from my day job. To give some backstory, about a year ago I started using one of the whiteboards in our student resource center as a dedicated place to list that week’s events and reminders for the campus. At the time I was also publishing a weekly newsletter for the campus staff, which had a very popular segment we called “Speed Bump”- quotes I’d found from my readings each week that made sense to me. Because I had space on the board, I started putting those up so the students could see them as they walked in.
A few months later, overhearing a conversation I was having with a student about why citations in papers were important (always give credit where credit is due), our security guard came over to confess that he’d been “stealing the quotes from the board” each week and using them to craft his sermons to his church group each Sunday.* Aside from being a little flattered that my offerings had resonated with someone else, I didn’t think much about it until several months afterward, when I was out the week of Orbfest. I’d neglected to update the quote on the board before I’d gone. As a result, three separate students that week told me how disappointed they were to not have a new quote the week before, and the secretary of the local Toastmasters group told me I derailed her meeting because they’d taken to using those quotes as an idea prompt for impromptu speeches.
Oops.
By this point, I’d also started snapping photos for my Twitter feed under the hashtag #MondayMotivation. Twitter doesn’t give me the option of pre-setting posts yet, so my actually getting the snaps up on Mondays is hit and miss (TuesdayTruisms might be more accurate). But oddly enough, they still have their fans – I have several people who follow me on Twitter solely because they liked the quotes I tossed up under that hashtag. Earlier this week, a friend asked if I was going to keep posting them (again, forgot to snap the picture this past Monday) because he wanted to start stealing them for in his classroom.
The icing on the cake, however, was the comment made by a couple of my students upon hearing I’d be out this week: “You’re gonna change that board up before you leave, though, right? Because we look forward to that.”
It’s hard to guess sometimes what will resonate with people. There have been times where I spent an insane amount of time on an article or story I was proud of that released to little fanfare, and other things that I just cranked out that for some reason exploded with views. Likewise, there have been skits we’ve put a lot of work into that weren’t nearly as popular as the little one-off jokes we harass each other with. The internet is rife with those “who’da thunk it?” stories of people whose videos went viral or whose simple ideas sparked a much bigger movement.
But that’s the fun of being a creator – trying different things, seeing what sticks and what doesn’t. Sometimes you find ideas that don’t make a splash when they first come out, but later find the audience they were meant for and fulfill their potential. The point is to keep sharing ideas, sharing a part of you, and seeing where that little seed of inspiration takes root.
Because you never know how far a simple idea can go.
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*James is an older gentlemen, and in what was probably the most adorable conversation about what does and does not constitute as plagiarism I’ve ever given, it took me a while to convince him that his use was not plagiarism, even if he didn’t “use the APA.”
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