The Power of Connection

What do you think of when you see traffic?

What about parking lots and parking decks?

These are some of the questions I ask students who are completely clueless about my chosen profession of electrical engineering.

I ask them about anything OTHER than electrical engineering.

Why?

For the same reason that the people at your local Farmer’s Market ask you about your personal situation and how you are doing.

These people are part of your community.

They aren’t corporate tools shilling for a buck and a commission.

They actually live, work, and play in the same sandbox that you do.

Your concerns and well-being are theirs as well.

If you don’t start from there, then your message and lesson just sound…well…canned.

Like that professor or substitute teacher who stood in for your class that one day and tried to continue reading off the slides about the laws of thermodynamics.

No context. No reference. No connection.

Just reading off the slides or blankly staring for a few seconds before saying, “not sure about this one, let’s move on…”

Meanwhile, your notebook is blank, just like your mind that day.

You wasted an hour of your life that you ain’t getting back.

Cool story, bro…so what?

There are three things that I’ve realized about learning:

1. You need to be your best self to do it

2. You need to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses

3. You need to have a passion for what you consume and share it

Prismatic thinking is based on these principles.

Everything that I’ve done up until this point and explored in this newsletter:

• mind mining (exploring the makeup of our brains)

• inspirating (educating, inspiring, entertaining others)

• exploring knowledge theory (how we gain it, where it comes from)

• projecting presence (being connected with others and in the moment of our daily lives)

has been to reach this point.

So this is the first aspect of it that I choose to share: how are you connected to what you are consuming?

To go back to electrical engineering, traffic is something everyone is connected to on some level.

Whether you are a passenger or the driver, you’re a part of the system.

You have to start at your home (source), travel to a destination (the sink or the load), and return once you’ve done whatever it was you were doing there.

That’s a circuit.

That’s the basic idea behind electrical engineering; the design of the millions of circuits to accomplish actions of billions of electrons all travelling around and around.

That’s the first idea that I share to anyone.

If you aspire to become a prismatic thinker, in theory, you can explain anything to anyone on any level that you understand the concept.

Yes, there are limitations to your mastery of the content, but that’s not the point.

The point is to share and communicate and connect with others.

That’s what the people at the market are doing for you even if you don’t buy anything from them.

At least you know they’re local, they care, and they have something to offer even if it’s not the product or service they are selling.

They have their experiences.

So do you.

P. S.

I’m going to be sharing each of the seven principles before exploring them in more depth and detail. If this is compelling, let me know what you think of them as I reveal them.