On Relevance

Aron Solomon
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Copenhagen is Paris. I say that from Copenhagen this morning but were I in Paris this afternoon, it would resonate 100x. Copenhagen is today and tomorrow. Paris is wonderful but it’s done and what we perceive as great about it today is just pieces of the past reflected in new lenses.

Relevance killed the San Francisco 49ers. They had a chance to become America’s Team and all that comes with this elusive and fictitious crown, including massive global merchandising dollars. But they were everything that is Peak Silicon Valley and now they’re nothing again, irrelevant in all conversations outside one small but potent bubble.

They did nothing to weave into a broader imagination, as the Dallas Cowboys did decades earlier. Relevance resides inside the mind. It’s something we burn to capture, and that captures us in return, as does a TV show about the family machinations of oil wealth, a Texas city no one understood, and how our own lives could possibly be that big.

Relevance is your business. It takes you from 68 to 100 or directly from 85 to 4. Relevance is snakes and ladders.

Relevance gives you the advantage of a unique moment in time or escorts that same moment away. You can crush relevance with myopia or pride or a deadly belief that you are far, far, FAR more talented than you actually are.

Relevance is the jar of secret sauce. It’s that thing missing in someone who picks up on one less social cue than necessary for people not to notice.

Relevance cleaves the next big thing from that which has become stale.

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