It Takes A Team: Will’s Sixth Lesson

(If you’ve been following this series, you know I’m working on building a TED talk about what my son – with a communications disorder – has taught me – a communications professional – about communication. I’m delivering the talk this Saturday at TEDxMU. I’ve been chronicling the presentation development process here on The Daily Blur in the hopes that – by watching me deconstruct the process I’ve gone through many times – you’ll begin to look at public speaking with a little less mystique and anxiety.)

As I was putting this talk together, I began to get overwhelmed by two things:

1. How quickly time has gone by since that first night Dee said the ‘a’ word to me,
2. How many people have come into our lives – into Will’s life – to play a role in this development.

If we’re looking for people to use as role models, let’s start with them. At one point, there were four different therapists – occupational, speech, physical, behavioral – coming to our home every week. They became our friends. They became our family.

This team helped to transform Will from a kid who couldn’t talk at age 3 to a kid who we can’t get to stop talking, stop being imaginative, stop asking the most interesting questions, who will probably crack cold fusion someday. (Either that or build the world’s most amazing roller coaster, like, ever.)

Let them serve as a model for the rest of us. Let them serve as our guide for a construct of behavior.

If it’s true, as Pennie Williams says, that there are only three ways to truly measure success:

1. to make money,
2. to make a name for yourself,
3. or to make a difference,

let’s – then – let’s look to this team.

Team Willie. Willie’s Angels.

Look to the therapists, the adovcates, the change agents for our greater good to teach us how to live in this next age. This next era. An era of giving of oneself – of marshaling our forces together toward some greater good.

Technology is in our corner. Forces have come together in art, science, literature and technology to set the table for a great awakening like at no other time or place in human history.

And humans – most humans – have this great gift of capacity for learning and understanding and sharing.

But our curse is that we get distracted. We take our eye off the–SQUIRREL!

What we choose to share with others – has never mattered more.

We have got to come together as a team of our own and help people separate the truly important from the merely urgent. and we cannot do it alone, but if we work together – and we leverage the powers of technology for good instead of using them as junk food for our brain – the whole can become exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.

IF … you do your part. And if I do mine. If we do ours.