What Are You Bringing to the Table?

Somewhere in the course of every family gathering I experienced as a child, my dad would tell a story.

My dad's stories were all true, or at least started out being true, and were usually about something you wouldn't necessarily expect to be funny. Nevertheless, he would always bring his audience to tears of laughter.

It was all in the way he told his stories.

My dad was big on visual aids, so he had to stand and use a lot of exaggerated hand gestures to illustrate his tale. My favorite part was how he would act out the reactions of his various characters. Dad might have made a great comedian.

Our family gatherings just wouldn't have been the same without my dad and one of his stories.

Every gathering is like a tapestry. It is woven in a combination of colors which cannot be duplicated anywhere else. If any one person is added or removed from the gathering, the tapestry will be changed.

For many, the holidays are a time for gatherings. They might be with friends, co-workers, or family, but at every gathering each person brings their unique contribution to the table.

But what if instead of being themselves, each person studied a manual and followed some formula for being "A Person At a Party" or how to converse at a party?

The tapestry would be a dull beige.

My last post discussed how information is a commodity and how information-based blogging might put a blogger out of business.

"Bloggers whose blogs offer commodity information diminish their brand, turning themselves into information middlemen."

While there is nothing wrong with blog posts which offer information, information is not all that makes a blog valuable. If an informative post is left at the commodity level, then the blog and the blogger move into the background. Your visitors will come, go, and forget you; only a nucleus of visitors will remain. But if we bring our unique qualities to the table, our posts and our blogs can never be a commodity.

What are you bringing to the table?