Disclaimer: If this email turns out too good to be just an email, I'll publish it
I've lost count of the times I've been crippled by imposter syndrome. It's like I build castles near the sea which get washed away every time there's a wave of imposter syndrome.
I'm not doing much. I'm really not. I'm a second-year undergraduate student pursuing journalism. I'm interning for a newspaper publication called The Morning Standard. I've interned at media organizations like Travelxp and Outlook as well.
There's this I made. It's called The Red Megaphone (theredmegaphone.com)(The website needs work. I know) I'm trying to do media differently. I'm trying to connect it to people so that it starts running through them, to us, back to the people, and so on. I'm probably not making a lot of sense right now, which is what scares me. I want to make this big. Really big. I know we can do it because I see how a single of ours creates small ripples of change and influence. Maybe it's new. Maybe it's not.
Maybe I'm doing extremely well for my age (as I've heard and rejected way too many times) and maybe I'm just another wannabe. That right there is my biggest fear. I fear mediocrity. Where the greatest of humans advise finding beauty and peace in mediocrity, I detest it. Journalism doesn't pay very well. Not enough to put me and my baby on the Forbes list. I've to find a way to integrate tech into it. That's how we won't have a broken building for an office. I want to bring journalism and communication to silicon valley. And what's the worst part, I'm not a tech person. At all. I'm just a good writer. My gift is that I can articulate the most intrusive of thoughts. We all need this gift. Communication needs to be reintroduced as a concept. It will solve more than half the problems of mankind today. We think something, we text something else, and on call, we say something else, we tweet something else. We have way too many channels of communication. We get entangled in syntax and conventions. Clear communication is lost. Instead of blaming tech and social media for this, I want to use it to solve this exact problem. But I'm not sure how. I haven't figured it out yet.
I don't have the money to do it. I don't have the resources for it. I don't have the team for it. I don't have a solid website for it.
What do I have? Me, my passion to change and fix lives. My urge to run a comb of clarity through people's messes. Someone's gotta do it. Or at least someone's gotta teach them how to do it. A bit of psychology, a bit of creativity and a bit of tech and we're good to go. Everyone needs this. You need this. And me? I need this more than anyone on this planet.