Zora Neal Hurston begins her book Their Eyes Were Watching God by saying, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” Ms. Hurston, of course, is referring to “hype.”
Hype is the title to this post. Hype is why you clicked this link hoping or maybe even skeptical that you’d find something great. Hype is why we stand on the shoreline watching the boats, as Ms. Hurston so eloquently put it.
All of our hopes and imaginations are out on those boats, and one of them has to have something good on it, right?
But hype makes us uncomfortable, and if you finish reading Ms. Hurston’s introduction, you see a very frustrating truth: hype can really suck. How many times do we bring those boats in from the sea—do we allow ourselves to reach for our dreams—and everything just crashes upon the rocks of the shore?
See, Ms. Hurston understands that people often much rather prefer hype to actually trying. Hype let’s you keep that boat out at sea. “Oh man, my boat out there is amazing! Someday, I’m going to bring it in and change everything.†But someday never comes, and that boat just sits out there, because you know that actually trying to dock it carries a great risk.
What if it crashes upon the rocks?
That’s one of the biggest struggles of a design firm. Maybe a more apt and cheesy name for our profession would be “Dream Dockers.†Our job is to hear and understand our clients’ dreams. We look out at sea, study the boats you have out there, looking for the best method to bring them to shore.
Then we throw out some lines. Maybe we dive right in and swim out to your boat. Maybe we sit back and strategize a bit. Or maybe we say, “That’s an awfully big boat, and these are some rough seas.â€
But we go for it, because we’ve seen what happens when we successfully bring one of those boats in. People around the docks start chatting, “Hey, look at that! Is that really a boat? It didn’t crash and fall to pieces?†We hear the admiration and congratulations—not to us, but to the client brave enough to risk docking his or her boat.
After helping dock so many boats, we start to see things a bit differently. Suddenly, we’re not so comfortable with just pacing the shores staring at the boats off in the distance. We’re ready to jump out there and bring them in. We’ve seen it done before. We know how to read the tides and navigate the currents.
We’re tired of the hype. We’re ready to bring some ships to shore.
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