Memorable…

I’m reading Churchill A Biography © by Roy Jenkins.  Churchill of course, was a world famous leader with a world famous persona and someone often quoted even today - 59 years after his passing.  59 years after?  I’d call that memorable. 

His critics (of which he had many) would suggest what he spoke about and how he spoke it was, 

     More memorable than meaningful 

                        Roy Jenkins 

Winston Churchill certainly had a memorable style.  He was meaningful, too.  Here’s what I found on Google (but don’t ask me to remember where I found it): 

Historians widely attribute Churchill with being “the greatest statesman of the 20th century.” Churchill was an effective leader and statesman because of his tremendous ability to inspire people; his unique strategic insight; his relentless passion; and his imperturbable personality. 

In addition to being highly publicized during his time, Churchill was highly criticized.  To be fair, that’s nothing unique.  He was a politician and a leader.  Plenty of fodder for criticism there: 

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected. 

Will Rogers 

When I led sales teams I always worried about connecting with my salespeople.  When criticized, it made me feel I was failing them; made me question my inspirational skills.  Criticism can have that effect.  We all have our critics, even the great ones.  But meaningful leaders don’t let criticism get in the way: 

The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided. 

Casey Stengel 

I get the challenge of being meaningful in the 21^st century.  As a leader or a parent or a teacher or just an individual, meaningfulness in today’s day and age seems to be fleeting.  Is it going the way of memorable? 

Have you noticed the disappearance of memorable, especially as it pertains to social media?  Maybe it’s related to our ever-shortening attention span which I wrote about recently.  (Did you see it?  Do you remember it?)  Maybe we are losing “memorable” on purpose: 

Irish Blessing: 

May you never forget what is worth remembering, or remember what is worth forgetting. 

Unknown Sage 

Struggling with “worth remembering” vs. forgetting happens to me all the time.  I see something posted on LinkedIn, Facebook, or some other social media site and it doesn’t register immediately.  When I go back and try to find it I feel the weight of 2.5 quintillion bytes of Internet data (that’s 2,500,000,000,000,000,000) created each day preventing the ability to retrieve anything.  Meaningful; memorable; it doesn’t matter; it’s buried. 

“Don ‘t worry, Gary” you might offer; just use the Google machine.  Ian Leslie wrote this about that in Curious ©: 

Human memory is inefficient and unreliable in comparison to machine memory, but it's this very unpredictability that's the source of our creativity.  It makes connections we'd never consciously think of making, smashing together atoms that our conscious minds keep separate.  Digital databases cannot yet replicate the kind of serendipity that enables the unconscious human mind to make novel patterns and see powerful new analogies, of the kind that lead to our most creative break throughs.  The more we outsource our memories to Google, the less we are nourishing the wonderfully accidental creativity of our unconscious. 

Not being “wonderfully accidental” might mean we are all becoming less memorable (and less meaningful, too).  Relying on Google and the AI machines can lead to diminishing meaningful, don’t you think?  Ah yes, “thinking”… don’t get me started! 

                                                            GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.