People
who tell me they want to write but have little to write about just don’t get
it. I can think of dozens of moments—literally seconds in the vast timeline of
my life—that changed me. And I’m not talking about when as a pedestrian I
evaded an oncoming truck that would have flattened me, or when I stepped into
an abandoned warehouse with the elevator doors closing behind me and two
Dobermans snarling at me for an endless twenty seconds until the elevator
opened again. No Bruce Willis moments, although those are pretty cool
too.
I’m
thinking about the time as a ten-year-old kid I landed in Luqa Airport, Malta, after my first trans-Atlantic flight ever to meet for
the first time relatives I had heard about my entire young life. I remember
being tossed from one relative to another, kissed and squeezed and never before
having felt so much undeserved love. Or a decade later when in the Montreux
Jazz Festival, Switzerland, I heard Sonny Rollins soloing on his booming
tenor saxophone during “To a Wild Rose,” making me a committed jazz fan for the rest of my life. Or
only half a year later when I sat in a college classroom checking out a woman sitting next to me who I did not know
would become my wife of 36 years and become the mother of my two daughters.
I bring up these moments for two reasons. First, to remind
anyone who wants to write that you do have plenty to write about. Second, to
remind myself that new life-changing moments await me as I head to China next week for
the first time to teach report writing and presentation skills to graduate
students at the Beijing International MBA program. Writing opportunities lie everywhere: notice and record them
when they happen.
If you’ve
got a life changer, I’d enjoy hearing about it!
