Contributing to the conversation

Very recently, a relative of mine was starting to wonder about the value of her liberal arts major, which led me to think about my own educational choice. Let me be very clear up front: I have never regretted getting my degree in English. Point and laugh if you want, but there's value there that most people overlook. In the case with my cousin, her studies were called into question by some business major friends of hers. (I'm working on an MBA right now, so I understand that point of view too, I just don't agree with it.)

"What's your major?" is typically the first question students ask each other on a college campus. The second question is typically also a standard, but the answer to the first question determines the intensity.

"So what are you going to do with that?"

As I fielded that question, people generally assumed that I was going to be a teacher. English is only good for teaching more English, is the thought process there. My plan was to be an editor. And for the record, I'm a damn good editor, but that's not how my life has worked out. We make plans and God laughs, as the saying goes. I've been working in business for the last 10 years or so, doing just about every kind of business writing you can think of. Sure, I've done some editing, using what I thought I would be doing with my degree, but it seems like the real strength of my education has been in finding application of what I learned in school in places that aren't clear applications.

I'll probably share these from time to time, but the first application is what's leading me to write this blog post. It's all about contributing to the conversation.

Where I studied English, we had to study a major author and had a choice between Milton, Shakespeare and someone else that I don't remember. The key here is that these are major authors, their writing has been around for centuries and commented on by some of the greatest literary minds of history. I took the class on John Milton and one of the requirements was to write a research paper, using a topic that hadn't been addressed before.

When I read that project description in the syllabus, I kind of freaked out. One of the most famous commenters on Milton's work is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Yes, that one. (I realize I'm a giant dork.) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner author, Samuel Taylor Freaking Coleridge. And that was also hundreds of years ago. What could I possibly come up with that could even compete with what Coleridge and hundreds of scholars since him have said about Milton?

As the assignment got closer, I voiced my concern in class and the professor looked at me and said, "I just want you to contribute to the conversation."

The paper I wrote didn't have to be groundbreaking, earth-shattering or paradigm shifting. He just wanted us to be informed and express our own thoughts, the main point there being that the thoughts had to be ours. And then we had to share them, we couldn't keep them to ourselves.

That led me today to be thinking about what conversations do I want to contribute to. What do I care enough about that I don't mind putting in some work to learn about it and then contribute to the conversation about it? Sure, we have Facebook and Twitter and, well, blogs like this one where we share thoughts of all kinds, ranging from what food we ate, where we are right now to having fantastic ideas that we should legitimately share. And I'm as guilty as the next person when it comes to creating my own noise to drown out good thoughts, but it's important to contribute your own thoughts to the conversations you've got an emotional investment in rather than sitting back and just letting the opinions of everyone else just wash over you.

Create something. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be yours.