In the process of helping a friend get some insights from David
Allen's book on Getting Things Done, I found myself telling a few
stories about how other people use the thoughts in the book, and how
he could adapt it to his life. Stories!

I'm not a technology evangelist as much as I am a storyteller. I can
tell stories about non-technological things, and in fact I _love_
telling stories about so many different things and so many different
people.

That's it! I want to tell stories!

Here's how my grad school research ties into it. My master's thesis
will be about how to tell newbies stories about a social computing
system so that they can understand the value of the system, so that
they'll _get_ it.

I'm looking forward to going to work tomorrow. I plan to be on the
first bus out and the last bus back so that I can catch up on all the
stories on the blogosphere. I'm looking forward to writing, to calling
attention to other people's stories. I'm looking forward to preparing
more talks and articles, polishing stories and facts and ideas into
presentations that might persuade people to try things out. That's
what my life purpose translates to in terms of my very next action.

Short-term? Let's talk about one year. My master's thesis is one of my
top priorities, of course, and I see it as a good reason for me to
find out if stories are useful and what kinds of stories might help
people understand social bookmarking. Orgchart, location, network?
Lots of other ways to take advantage of someone's context… Anyway,
it's shaping up to be a really exciting project, and something that
I'd love to see translated into other areas like blogging.

No, I have no idea yet how I can make a living through storytelling. I
want to learn how to write books and speak well. I may need to figure
out what to do in the middle, while I'm still not “respectable”…
<laugh>

I want to listen to people's. I want to tell people's stories. I want
to learn about how to do those two things really, really well.