This past week we got to talk to classes at Misericordia University and St. Bonaventure University about storytelling and best practices around our business, especially the lessons we have learned and will continue to push forward on the other side of The Pandemic.
We always keep going back to some pretty simple ideas to move forward, including:
The value of showing up…
the ability to get comfortable in uncomfortable situations…
and the ability to sometimes recognize the value of randomness ..
I thought about all those things as I read a story by Laura Holson and Karen Hanley in this weekend’s New York Times on the life of professional skater turned dentist Elaine Asanaki.
The story, which you can read here, embodied all of those aspects of our business and creative storytelling, all over a period of 41 years. In short as a 10 year old Elaine and her mother ventured on the subway from Brooklyn to Rockefeller Center, where Elaine would skate on cold weekend winter mornings. She had some talent, yet untapped, but because she was one of the few people on the ice early in the morning and was a vibrant young girl she caught the random eye of a New York Times photographer who happened to be wandering by.
He took some photos of her on the ice, met Elaine’s mother briefly, and then left.
Ten years later the photo showed up in the New York Times, after Elaine and her family had left New York for California. What had not left, unbeknownst to the Times and to the photographer or to many who may have seen Elaine skate when she was 10 was that she had reinvigorated a skating career and was well on the way to accomplished success. The fact that the picture surfaced on a self described slow news day was totally random.
The beauty of the piece shows how valuable intuitive storytelling can be and how someone who takes the time to piece together a random narrative can sometimes strike gold. It brings us quite a circular tale of a young woman, her career, her love of skating and her success later in life as she enjoyed expanding some of the gifts that skating brought her.
“You have to be a little uncomfortable to get comfortable again, but you can do it,” Asanaki said about her journey back to skating and what it brought her…
None of it was part of a master plan, but it all knitted together so well by the authors who saw the opportunity and then put the pieces together.
Lots of bigger picture lessons come together, ones we talked about again this week, all through the lens of a young skater, a fortuitous picture and a path that was pretty much unplanned but showed the value of showing up and dogged determination.
