Everything You Do Should Be Helpful
Let Them Know You Want To Help
by Paul Grimsley
If you were to look at the work you do — whether you write, put together ads, design websites, or sell things — and you were to assess whether what you do helps people or hurts them, and you were to give plus points for the former and minus points for the latter, how would you fare?
The aim for most people is to be helpful, and they often have great knowledge that they want to share, but then they go and package it in a way that looks to be critical rather than positive. Best foot forward isn’t always the easiest thing to do, and often the impetus to do so is placed on a higher shelf you just can’t reach the day you decide to sit down and do the work you need to do.
The thing is, you know that there are people in your life that you like talking to, and there are those people that light up a room when they walk into it, and you want whatever you create to work in a similar way. You want people to want to hang out with your work, and to enjoy seeing it — you want your work to get invited to the party; you want to get to the point where people can’t think about having a party without inviting your work.
The thing is, if you hit just the right note, you can actually talk about anything, whether the normal perception is that the subject is heavy and not approachable in this manner. Look at some of the areas of life and history that have been tackled by comedy, and you start to get the idea that nothing is out of bounds, as far as a positive outlook is concerned.
For help to be needed a problem has to exist, but frontloading an article with all the problems and providing no suggestion that there is a way to handle the problem can make the person feel that reading your piece is just going to remind them how bleak it all looks, and to just add knowledge about more problems to their thinking. Who wants that? No one.
Why does the story of Emma Gonzalez and the kids from Parkland resonate so much at the moment? Because what they are doing is working towards a solution that they see as being necessary — they are helping people.
Whether helping people to understand something, or providing them with practical steps to get something done, I believe the most popular things on Medium are driven by this urge, and are presented in such a way that lays this intent bare.
That is what Medium offers. It is where Facebook is most helpful. When something adds to your life and is helpful it is going to stick with you. The aim is to do that, and to be perceived that way, and the title really helps people to see that the article is going to do that, as does the picture.
