My senior year of high school, I was one of those people at graduation who delayed the cap-throwing and silly string-releasing with a look back on the past four years of high school. My literature teacher (who, after my j-school professor, was one of the best I’ve had) suggested we take a quote or speech and build our comments around it. I looked no further than Jim Valvano.
Sunday marked the 17th anniversary of the “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up” speech by the former N.C. State basketball coach, a speech eclipsed perhaps only by his ESPY Awards acceptance just a few weeks later. Both came 10 years after the Wolfpack’s famous 1983 national championship run.
Valvano Speech – Reynolds Coliseum
Michael | MySpace Video
There are two things in life I just can’t help: Being a Wolfpack fan and being a writer. Depending on what sport season it is and the outcome of the complex mathematical formula Inspiration – Writer’s Block + 2(Tight Deadline), it’s both a blessing and a curse.
As a writer, I’m always looking for the elusive “stickiness” – the sometimes undefinable property of communication that stays with a person, whether he or she is a journalist, friend, consumer, co-worker or blog reader. In terms of stickiness, Valvano had superglue.
I’ve been talking a lot lately with Kipp Bodnar on how the best content on the social Web is broken down into bite-sized, actionable points readers (and journalists, and bloggers, and consumers…) can digest, apply, share and repeat. This type of content doesn’t replace books, feature stories, investigative series or columns, but it makes the transaction of knowledge – in this great big world we’re living in – a bit more sticky.
Bullets and numbers help, as do a clear understanding of the end results. Kind of like this, via Valvano’s ESPY awards speech:
To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.
How do you make your online content more valuable to your end-users? Do you to digest the content you read on the Web differently than other media?
Tags: blogs, ESPY, Jim Valvano, Kipp Bodnar, N.C. State University, Wolfpack
