My social media experiment with the fool on the hill

Since coming back from SOBCon in Chicago, I’ve had two ideas swimming around in my head:

• Don’t play by other people’s rules.
• The future will be crowned by those who act on their inspirations.

The first one is easy. We all know the “rules”. Just start breaking them.

The second one is not so easy – because it requires trusting ourselves. Trusting the brilliant blip of an idea you have in the shower. Or at 3:15AM. Or in response to a leaf scraping down the sidewalk on a fall morning. Crazy insane ideas that we never seem to act on…

It’s kind of a shame when we choose not to live fully because we’re afraid to be that “fool on the hill“.

But the future has been won by fools on hills (and that’s a good thing)

• Two married fools created a simple way for non-profits to raise money on Twitter.
• Another fool thought that kids can change the world!
• One fool created a microblog – because he was bored at work.
• A fool in Chicago said asked: “How can we connect better with people on social media?”
• How about 100 elementary school fools who wrote a book using Twitter!
• And look at Scott Ginsberg. This “fool on the hill” has pursued one single, insane idea for almost ten years!

A case study of a fool on the hill

So, I had this crazy idea last night in response to Threadless Twitter t-shirts.

I wasn’t too inspired by their offerings, so I quickly created my own t-shirt on Spreadshirt.com and launched out this Tweet:

Then I saw Guy Kawasaki tweet out:

To which I responded:

He then shot back:

Not sure if I offended him, but our exchanged ended after I tweeted:

My point here?

A. I’m now closer to God because Guy Kawasaki retweeted me?

No. The fool on the hill has no ego. Nor does he pursue money before he pursues his mission.

B. You can gain massive followers on Twitter by trying to get Brogan or Kawasaki to retweet you?

No. The fool on the hill does not try. He just does. Also, trying really, really hard to get retweeted reminds us all of high school – which sucked for most of us.

C. My T-shirt design is completely amazing?

Uh, no.

My point is that I acted on my inner-fool’s orders and and someone pretty damn smart responded (clicks followed). Granted, this is a teeny weeny experiment, but it certainly validates three natural laws of social media:

1. The universe will respond in a positive manner if you act on your inspirations.

2. The more you act on these inspirations, the more the universe will respond.

3. Snowballs roll downhill.

Try this: The next time you are inspired, just act. Don’t focus on outcomes. Just act.

And let’s honor our fools! Mine are Henry Rollins and John Lennon.