Successfully Being Heard

[New Metrics for Success - II]

Who is my audience? “Audience” comes from the Latin word meaning “to hear”. But in an age of mass media consumption, does anyone really hear anything? Or are we all just ingesting so much, so fast, that we don’t do anything but simply open the intake latch?

Of course we hear!

I heard the lady up on the ski amountain the other day lament her struggles at work.
I heard the powerful lyrics to a Bon Iver song last night.
I heard the Shel Silverstein poem my daughter read to me last weekend.

“Hearing” names more than just ingestion, intake, consumption. It means slowing down a bit. It means attentiveness. It means presence.

Who is your audience? Who slows down to hear what you have to say, hear your message, “hear” your art, your new idea, your insight, your program, your game, your craft, or your discovery?

It doesn’t matter if it’s one or 100,000. Success is fundamentally an act of giving to them. The person that will stop and listen, despite all the noise, is the person to whom your work matters.

Now, ask them Why? And you’ll save yourself months, maybe even years, of wondering what success looks like.