Camouflage — The art of hiding to survive is of no use anymore.

I happen to be one of the many professionals working with others ability to speak in public, make a product demo, pitch an idea or design a fundraising presentation for early stage investors.

This line of work is not something you can call standard (I’ll get into that in a later post). Many of us landed on this industry after failed attempts in other, very different careers, such as advertising, engineering, journalism, professional sports like basketball or rugby. So we have as a collective not many things in common. Some of us needed to teach ourselves how to do it, others had the luck to work with the pioneers and geniuses of our time.

All in all, what we share is a passion to tell stories. To craft messages. We like the feeling of people paying attention. There is some deep unconscious pleasure in propagating your voice beyond your presence.

But it becomes evident (and quite quickly let me tell you) that our world is not shaped for this kinds of desires and visions. Or is it?

Well, we do tend to fall into averages. We do repeat time after time known formulas so that there is no differentiation between candy and trees anymore. We’ve been cloning processes and ideas that work on the hope that chances of failure are lower. We’ve cloned ourselves to the point where any deviation of the standard line becomes a huge celebrity (have you noticed the amount of center place individuals that seem to have come from nowhere).

Here is what I think the story must have been, is, and needs to become:

1. For early humans, surviving must have surely been related to hiding. This must have been the case at least at the very beginning (Citation needed). Hence there must be a Why we hide so naturally.
2. Humanity is 180.000 years old, give or take, and in that time, there must be a fluctuating history for hiding.
3. Since the IT revolution, rules have changed for many many things. Among those changes I feel hiding is no longer an option.
4. Self exposure has never been this popular, and never, ever was treated in this pro humanist manner. We are growing out of the Atari® generation, anonymous and invisible into a more “come out and play” society. You can come, and you can choose to stay in.
5. Do you self hype? Are you sure? We do it so naturally nowadays. We don’t even notice it anymore.
6. All three points above make me think about how to pick and choose a story to tell. Let it be at least one in which we have a voice we like.
7. Once that story has a recognizable form, we use many channels to communicate it (citation needed again). Little that we know, apparently, there is only one medium, and thats ourselves.
8. But no message can go unpunished by design and so, there will be a basic design knowledge we need to democratize. Think of it as a basic Math of sorts.
9. The good news is that as a species, we have been collecting tools for this moment for some time now. There are many rocks on which we can start building.
10. The ultimate idea is to stop hiding behind social camouflage while designing, growing and nurturing an individual style.

This was not exactly a planned exercise but, when my list was done for some reason (maybe I wanted to do it all along), I saw it as an index. A book Index.

So here we go.