Seth Godin’s blog is one of my favorites. He does a great job of teasing out the marketing principles articulated in his books, and usually in a balanced and pithy style. Everybody has an off day though. Last week I noticed that one of his posts came off a little more ramtish than normal, but I shrugged it off and went along my merry way.
The next day, Godin wrote another post, writing about what happened later that day. He went to a coffee shop and noticed somebody surfing the web on a laptop, and then watched them happen to go to his blog, apparently for the first time. What he had written that morning was out there, intractable, naked. He was watching somebody get a first impression of him, and as you can imagine, it made him rethink not the truthfulness of his post, but what kind of impression that single post left about what kind of person he is.
Godin’s experience reflects a significant truth. It’s not that we need to orchestrate moments where we can leave the perfect set of first impressions, but we need the discipline of living out what we want the world to see as consistently as we can. That’s not to say that we hide behind a carefully gaurded front, but that we cultivate character and heart, such that what is within us is the front. With any one person, you may only get a single chance. But our goal isn’t to collect huge gatherings of people so that they can take in a well-orchestrated event of a first impression. The truth is, we are always on stage, always impressing, always trying to string together a thousand chances, each of which is itself the single chance we might have with any given person.
I’m writing this on the road from my phone. Ironically it is with this post in particular I must ask you to forgive my formatting. I’ll add a link to Godin’s post when I can properly clean it up.
I remember the old commercials that said, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” It’s good to be aware of that.
I work with a bilingual group attached to a larger church. We get some English-only visitors (both from outside the church and from the English main assembly). I cringe when the first song out of the gate is only in Spanish, because we also sing a lot of bilingual songs and the sermon is bilingual.
I know that those visitors can quickly be put off by the fact that they are singing a song they never heard in a language they don’t understand. That’s one time I think about the first impression.
Grace and peace,
Tim Archer