Remember That Zoom Is a Tool
Unless you’re Tim ‘The Toolman’ Taylor, don’t love the tool; love what it will do
If you don’t remember “Home Improvement,” you probably don’t remember the 1990s. Tim Allen starred as Tim “The Toolman” Taylor, who lived for bigger, better, more powerful tools because, well, tools!
Perhaps you are a Tim Taylor clone, but most of us fit the mold I learned from a former student who worked at a hardware store. He told me, “People don’t buy drills. They buy holes.” In other words, customers don’t care so much about features. They care about benefits — what the tool would do for them.
Effective communication has always utilized tools of one sort or another.
The human voice itself is a tool. Somewhere around 5,000 years ago, various means of making marks on a surface extended our communication tools. The printing press revolutionized that form of communication. Relatively recently we developed other tools — wax cylinder recordings, vinyl recordings, acetate film, daguerreotypes, reel-to-reel tape, radio, television, etc.
All these things merely foster communication, though as with any tool, the tool itself affects the end result. In the hands of a skilled artist, a palette knife yields a very…
