September 25th, 2013 2:30 PM by Nick Rapplean
Every year, I spend about a month in Boulder, Colorado, teaching an intensive designed to help high school seniors complete their College Entrance Essay. As you probably know, applications for college generally require pages and pages of data, a student's grade point averages, SAT scores, special projects, awards, descriptions of athletic activities, and on and on and on. Nowhere, though, are there pages of the student's own explanation of what he or she wants from college... and from life. Who am I? What rights my bell? What am I passionately interested in? What contributions am I anxious to make to the college I attend?
Writing such an essay is very tricky. As I've learned in teaching personal marketing to people in real estate and real estate finance:
1. Bragging about how well you do your business is often sadly unconvincing. Call on me for assistance with your transactions and you’ll call on the best. (Says who?)
2. TELLING people to call on you for professional help never works as well as SHOWING them why they should. This happens to be an English teacher's rule- Show, don’t tell- from way, way back... and it's as true now as it ever was.
3. Instead of trying to manipulate potential buyers into working with you and, eventually, signing a purchase contract, your job is to work for and with THEM in meaningful ways, to be their guide and coach, to help. Pretty soon, you have a stream of clients and potential clients at your office door, all of whom have pretty clear ideas of how they expect to be treated by you.
Your business grows because of the way you do business, not because you've become terrific at twisting people's arms when they worry about and hesitate over the decisions you’re asking them to make.
Okay- as I said, I go to Boulder for a month each year to do this work, and it feels like it kind of sums up all I've learned in my careers as writer, teacher, and marketer. I have proof that it works, too- in the success of my students in getting into the colleges they want to attend.
This year, though, what has been described as "flooding of biblical proportions" in and near Boulder has made the experience very different- an experience that seems to want to tell me something, but I have little idea of what it is. I've seen new mountain roads broken into pieces as if some terrible monster had taken huge bites, leaving nothing but a drop-off into a messy river. I've seen friends standing in two or three feet of water in the basements and living rooms of their homes, trying to keep furniture, books and clothing from ruin. Water- what has always been a life-giving, nurturing, and necessary part of being alive- has shown its ability to kill people, to knock over homes, to make a familiar landscape completely unrecognizable.
And yet we will obviously always need water. It is the most persuasive agent of change I can think of, other than explosions that simply eliminate their targets. Maybe I need to remember: the vast majority of the time, we work in something like harmony with water and it helps to sustain our lives and help us grow.
Don't try to push the river, the wise men have said. And even if we carefully avoid acts that try to manipulate the direction and force of the water, it is still ready to remind us, again and again, we are not the only prevailing forces on this planet we call our home and we really have no choice but to prepare ourselves as well as we can for possible catastrophes.
One last point: It has been thrilling to see people so ready to help their neighbors, and to feel so much pleasure in helping those whose experience of the floods was harsher than their own. It is a way of making some human sense out of a tragedy over which we have very little control.