I’ve been thinking about this whole “being online” thing quite a bit over the past week or so, so James Shelley’s The Overinflated Currency of Personal Brands struck quite a chord:

What happens when the fame contagion infects an entire society? [American historian Daniel Boorstin] speculated that “The quest for celebrity, the pressure for well-knownness, everywhere makes the worker overshadow the work.” Increasingly we will go about our lives and work not actually concerned with the living and working itself, but with being known for our lives and work. Our lives and work become nothing but source material for the promotion of our personalities. Ultimately, achievement and accomplishment come to mean nothing, if they are not mechanisms for propagating our individual cult stories.

I see this more and more online, and it’s a worrisome trend — this tendency to measure the value of our work by the number of people who see it and comment on it. Our search for meaningful work should always outweigh our search for recognition. This idea of individual stories and meaning remind me of Donald Miller’s words in one of my favorite books, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years:

If [it’s true about] a good story being a condensed version of life — that is, if story is just life without the meaningless scenes — I wondered if life could be lived more like a good story in the first place. I wondered if a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally.

Planning a good story for our lives has nothing to do with “well-knownness” and everything to do with the amount of meaning we pack into each day. I know I’m being a bit sentimental today, but it’s because our family is on the verge of a very big change, and much of it is driven by a renewed appreciation for living life with greater intention. Over the past few years I’ve seen my decisions increasingly being influenced by a desire for my daughters to one day say to their friends, “My Dad wasn’t afraid to take risks.” So that’s what we’re doing…