A year ago today, I fell down the stairs, a fall that put me in the hospital for three days.
It’s easy to imagine the stereotypical, almost parody version of a social media post on this topic—talking about resilience and getting back up after a fall.
But in reality, there is no lesson for you. It happened to me. I could easily have died or become paralyzed. Maybe don’t try to take the garbage out down a poorly-lit staircase at night when you’re having episodic vertigo due to a migraine. That’s it.
So often, people share business anecdotes as if they contain some sort of object lesson. Or they share oddly declarative proclamations as if they offer some sort of universal truth. It’s performative insight, but it means nothing.
People in the content industry are notorious for these fake axioms. What they say sounds true, but it’s actually just something that happened to them. Or occurred to them. Or maybe neither, but that’s a different topic.
Change even one detail—a different team, a different strategy, probably even just a different day and time—and the pearls of wisdom revert to sand and oyster goo.
