The Island Magic of Being Invisible
(A Song for My Partners)
Six months later,
a thought occurred to me;
Writing for Youtube is like writing
for radio and TV.
Every writer has at their disposal
the same techniques and tools;
microphones, sound effects
and cameras of every kind.
But if you will succeed
you must limit yourself
to the microphone of your keystrokes;
the sound effects and cameras of your mind.
When we hear the words of Shakespeare
they become music in our ear,
and when we hear Robert Frost
we are no longer lost.
Those rhythms, mental music,
and refrains
remind me of the language
of the Bible of King James.
So what now,
shall we do?
I will try to imitate them
and you will, too.
We will write words
for television and radio.
We will tell stories and our clients
will get rich you know.
We will write essays
and teach everything we show.
People will remember
what we taught them
but forget who told them
that it was so.
We will write songs
that make singers
comprehensible.
But we ourselves
will always be invisible.
Why do we do this,
you and I?
We do it
because we have to,
we don’t need
to know why.
We do it because
we feel compelled.
Writing is the only time
we don’t feel
like we should be doing
something else.
Roy H. Williams
Pennie and I were in New York 40 years ago for ArtExpo in the Jacob K. Javits Center. We spent 3 days looking at more than 10,000 pieces of pieces of art and meeting many hundreds of artists as we walked those 500,000 square feet together. At the end of the show we went home with only 3 pieces, all of which were purchased from a relatively unknown Israeli artist named Reudor Gratch.
We invited Reudor and his wife, Effie, to dinner that night at “One if By Land, Two if By Sea” in Greenwich Village. We had an incredible evening with them.
The next day, I picked up a newspaper when I noticed that one of the serigraphs we had purchased from Reudor was one of only THREE pieces of art the newspaper had photographed for their review of that year’s ArtExpo.
You can see it at the top of this page.
Jim Ellis became a professor from 2007 to 2019, as well as the dean of the USC Marshall School of Business. Prior to that, he had a 27-year career as a CEO and an entrepreneur, Many of his former students are today’s business leaders!
A long list of attributes distinguish a great leader from an average one. But as Jim tells roving reporter Rotbart, “a discerning listener may be the highest leadership skill of all.”
You won’t need an MBA or even a high school diploma to learn from Jim. All you need is to tune in to this week’s episode of Monday Morning Radio at MondayMorningRadio.com