Steve the Owl's Blog

Welcome to the third part of my series on the lessons of Citizen Kane. Today, I will talk about one of the key lessons in terms of personal development from this movie. While this is a movie that has a generally downward progression, there is still a key lesson that can be learned.

Declaration of Principles

One of the key elements of foreshadowing early in the movie comes just after Charles Foster Kane takes control of the New York Daily Inquirer. In the movie, it is a struggling daily paper that Kane’s guardian and executor of his fortune foreclosed. Kane decides that he wants to try to run the newspaper, and he brings his best friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten), who comes with Kane to work as a dramatic critic. Early in the movie, Kane is looking for something to make his paper unique, and he finally comes up with his answer: My Declaration of Principles. In the scene, he promises to give the news accurately and fairly, and to be a champion for the working man.

Jed Leland, however, warned Kane that he shouldn’t make promises unless he intends to keep them. Kane assures him that these would be kept. Leland serves as a moral compass, and he is my favorite character in the movie. At one point, Kane has a party celebrating the Inquirer’s ranking as the highest-circulated paper in New York and buying all of the staff of the New York Chronicle. In the middle of the party, Kane is celebrating, and Leland is clearly worried. When Mr. Bernstein asks why, Leland explains that it is because he wonders whether or not Kane is keeping his principles, and whether or not the Chronicle reporters are really dedicated to the policies of Kane, or whether they will change him without him even knowing it.

The Hard Lessons of Principles

(NOTE: This part of the post contains spoilers. If you want to avoid them, please scroll to the end of the post.)

The next major point in the relationship between Kane and Leland comes 18 years later in 1916, when Charles Foster Kane ran for governor against entrenched political boss Jim W. Gettys. Leland is the first character to give a speech for the Kane campaign, calling him “that fighting liberal” and the man to clean up after the corruption of the Gettys Administration. By the end of the campaign, Kane is the heavy favorite. However, Leland seems to hold back his enthusiasm at the beginning of the speech, only giving in to the thrill of the crowd later.

While Kane is the heavy favorite, Gettys is not licked yet. Instead, he knows that Kane has been visiting a young girl, and whether there was an inappropriate relationship or not (which is somewhat vague in the movie), it certainly looked bad, and a story is planted about them. After the election, Leland tells him that he talks about the people as if he owns them, and he says that he wants to move to Chicago because he doesn’t want to be there after the election.

Then, when Kane is with his second wife, she premieres the Chicago Opera House. The rest of the reporters for the Chicago Inquirer give her positive reviews, but Leland is passed out in the back room. Kane and Mr. Bernstein walk in, and they see that he has started to write a bad review. Kane finishes the review Leland wanted to write, and fired him.

In another flashback, we find out that Leland was given a $25,000 severance check (Keep in mind that this part of the story took place in the 1920’s, so this was a substantial amount of money.), which Leland delivers to him ripped up with the Declaration of Principles. Kane tears up the Declaration of Principles.

The Lesson

This part of the movie shows the beginning of the deterioration of Kane’s life. However, the real point to me is what that moment says about Jed Leland, and about people in real life. Leland did the right thing. He went into the newspaper business as something that is described early in the movie as somewhat of a “college boy prank.” However, Leland is really an idealist at heart with unshakeable principles.

His true loyalty to the movie isn’t to Charles Foster Kane, or to himself, but to principles. While there, he is the one who always worries when principles are at risk, and he is willing to sacrifice in order to maintain his principles when they are challenged. When he is shown later in the movie, he is someone of a genial temperament who is at piece with the decisions he made in his life. So, no matter what it is that you want to do in life, never forget your own Declaration of Principles, but remember to hold to them like Jed Leland, not Charles Foster Kane.

Welcome to the second part in my series on what I consider to be the greatest movie ever made, Citizen Kane. The first post was more of a general entry on why I think that this is the greatest movie ever made. Today, I will get into some of the specific elements that made the movie great, beginning with the innovations of this movie, both technical and storytelling.

Different from the Beginning

One of the things that a viewer of classic films will note is that, unlike most movies today, the credits are front-loaded. However, Citizen Kane lets the viewer know that it will be different by simply opening the play with two cards for the credit. Both are on a black background, with the first opening with “A Mercury Production” and the words “by Orson Welles” dissolving in, with the title occupying the entire screen for the next card. One of the things that makes it such a shocking opening is that there is no music or anything for those few seconds. Then, the movie shows a light that stays in the back right hand portion of the screen, beginning with a “No Trespassing” sign. Each shot (involving a mix of actual scenery and matte paintings) gets closer to a mansion, with the light remaining in nearly the same shot the entire time. As the shot is up on the building, the lights go out, and when the lights come back on, you are in the room. There is an old man holding a snow globe, and he says the most famous one-word line in all of movies, “Rosebud,” drops the snow globe, it breaks, and in the next shot a nurse covers him with a sheet. My description is inadequate to describe the brilliance of this scene, so I will let the movie speak for itself (NOTE: The original aspect ratio of the movie was 1.33:1, so this is not scan-and-pan. It is the shown the way Orson Welles intended, except for the notice from the censors at the beginning. SPOILER ALERT: This video links to the original YouTube video. The comments there contain spoilers.):

What is the other thing that is so interesting to me about the innovations in this movie is how commonplace some of them seem today. After all, if someone points out that it was an innovation to begin at the end of the story, and summarize the story, which is then re-told through a series of flashbacks, that would not seem to be so daring. However, only two movies before Citizen Kane involved any flashback sequences at all, and one of them, Wuthering Heights, was based on a book that relied on just that. This was the first movie to tell the story in a completely non-linear way.

The Camera Angles That Shook the World

Another surprising element to the innovation of Citizen Kane is that, at the time, ceilings were never seen in movies. This is because they were shot on sets where the camera angles were mostly a straightforward one. However, Citizen Kane changed everything by using camera angles to tell a story. Orson Welles wanted camera angles so extreme that he literally dug out part of the floors of some of the sets in order to get his desired camera angle of floor height facing up, often with low ceilings to make the characters seem even more mythic. (In the famous party scene where Charles Foster Kane is dancing with chorus girls, Orson Welles nearly hits his head on the ceiling.) If there was a character who had a diminished or weakened role, the camera would always face down (such as with Kane’s second wife, who is often sitting on the floor).

Credit Where It Is Due

Perhaps the greatest contributor to the innovations of Citizen Kane from a technical level was Gregg Toland, who had worked in Hollywood for years as a cinematographer and was experimenting with deep focus photography. The key element of deep focus photography is that it demands attention from the viewer because, unlike traditional photography, the entire frame is in focus. Scenes of Kane’s childhood have Kane’s parents and Walter P. Thatcher discussing the future of young Charlie, and the eight-year old Kane is playing in the background just as clearly, forcing the audience to see all of the things that are going on at once. Even in scenes where Toland couldn’t pull it off, he used split screens to the same effect, such as a scene involving Kane and Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten) that had issues due to lighting, but the timing of the two actors was such that this special effect is completely invisible.

Willingness to Experiment

The reason Gregg Toland wanted to work on Citizen Kane was because he knew of Orson Welles’ penchant for daring from his theater and radio days. As a first-time director, Welles was open to suggestion, and he wanted to do something like no one had ever seen before. Some of the ideas may have seemed crazy at the time, but there is a reason why this movie is celebrated. As you build your business, there may be ideas that you have had that could totally change the industry. What would happen if you tried them and they worked?

Those of you who have read my blog knows that I have watched a lot of movies, and what you may not have yet picked up on is that some of the movies that I really enjoy are the great movies that have made the canon of great cinema. One movie that seems to show up over and over again at the top of the list of the great American or English-language films is Citizen Kane. I knew of its reputation, but for the longest time, I thought that the greatest American movie ever made was Gone with the Wind. In some ways, I think that the latter may say more about America, but I believe that Citizen Kane has more than earned its reputation as the greatest movie ever made. Because of its impact and its myriad of lessons, I have decided to offer a series of blog posts on Citizen Kane.

Ahead of Its Time

The first time I saw Citizen Kane, I was 22 years old. I was a junior at West Virginia University, and as a Christmas present, my parents gave me a VCR for my apartment in Morgantown. The local grocery store had a video store adjunct, and it had a section for classical films. This being a college town, some of them were part of the canon, including works by Bergman and Fellini (although I never watched any of those). They had a copy of Citizen Kane, and I thought that I would see what the hype was about. When I saw the movie, I could not believe that it was made in 1941. The camera angles, the lighting, the method of story telling: everything about that movie screamed something that was truly great and magnificent and in a class all by itself.

A Clear Dividing Line

One of the most amazing things about any great work of art, or any great artist (such as Marlon Brando), is the way that one sees a clear dividing line between the things that happened before and the things that happened after. Some of the innovations in Citizen Kane have become so appropriated in film since that it is hard to see just how revolutionary they were at the time. For example, it was the first movie to have a non-linear narration. This is something that is so commonplace today that moviegoers are used to seeing dates in place to keep one oriented in time.

Citizen Kane uses a different tactic. The movie begins with the title character’s death in 1941 and his last word, “Rosebud.” Then, the movie shows a newsreel to give a basic summary of the events of the story of the life of Charles Foster Kane, a thinly-veiled biography of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst with some elements of other figures and elements from the life of its visionary creator Orson Welles. Then, the movie retells the story through several witnesses, sometimes jumping back and forth chronologically (such as multiple tellings of his second wife’s musical career) in order to tell the story.

The Story Itself

Even if the movie were only a collection of technical advancements, it would certainly be remembered as a great film, but the real genius of the movie would be considered Gregg Toland, the cinematographer, not its director, producer, star, and co-writer. The movie is a compelling story of someone who started off with lofty ideals, but someone who became a victim of his own success whose methods were ill-suited for a new age. Seeing the deterioration of the relationship between Kane and his childhood friend Jed Leland is something that was painful to anyone who knows what it is like to see people drifting apart.

This is a movie that shows what happens when visionaries have a dream, have the talent, have the skill, and have the drive to make something that is truly great. Come back for more of the specific lessons from the greatest movie ever made.

One of the things that I enjoy the most about the world of online business is reading blogs of others who are working to carve out their piece of the pie. One of the keys for anyone who is trying to build a business is to discover his/her niche. However, there are times when I wonder if people cater to their niche to such an extent that they leave a lot of people outside of their niche.

Some Examples in Reading

One of the things that surprised me in reading so many blogs is how many of them work so hard to appeal to one particular demographic at the expense of all of the others. One of the biggest examples of this involves gender in family roles. I clicked on some blog titles that I found interesting, and some of them seemed to emphasize efforts to reach out to women, and some reached out to fathers. As a man with no children, I know that I don’t fit these demographics, but I found out that there was valuable information for me.

Are You Too Specialized?

I am not saying that there is a problem with trying to focus on a niche. However, I think that there is a difference between saying that the target demographic is the only group that is welcome. I think that one of the key ways to tell if there is something that is too specialized is whether or not the information is specialized or generalized. If the information really is geared towards a specific audience, there is nothing wrong with having a very narrowly tailored marketing effort.

However, if the information really is general information, is it something that people outside of the demographic can find value? If it is, this means that you now have a question about the way you market to your niche. One of my very good friends in the world of blogging says that women are the target demographic, but I noticed that men were well represented in the top comment section of her blog. So, I think that this means that, while she may have a target demographic in mind, she has cross-over appeal to other demographics.

Another blog that I saw had a target demographic, and even though some of the posts tended to be more generalized, toward the end, the call to action almost always addressed only the people in the target demographic. Maybe this person is doing fine with the target demographic, but knowing that I didn’t fit the demographic, I couldn’t help but wonder how many other prospects were left on the table because of that idea.

Ways to Avoid Narrowing

In the world of politics, I learned that one of the worst words that someone can use is the word “too.” The reason for that is that it is a defensive word, as per the following examples: “Democrats care about national security, too.” “Republicans care about children, too.” Now, imagine how each of these phrases sound when the word “too” is eliminated. I think that it works the same way in marketing. I remember a few years ago when the men’s grooming trend was on the rise, and I saw a hair dye for men with the tagline, “because you’re worth it, too.” I have seen other commercials for hair dye that were geared to men that did not use the word “too” at all and branded itself “the leader in men’s hair coloring.” I don’t think you have to try very hard to guess which one sold more products. (Note: I am not endorsing hair dye, just giving an example of defensive thinking and marketing at work.)

So, with this in mind, whatever your niche is, always try to find the balance between targeting a group, and saying to others that they just don’t fit in.

I am an admitted film geek. I didn’t watch movies very much when I was younger, preferring the nature of TV. While I still love TV, I have definitely found that I can devour movies and TV box sets through the power of DVD.

How It Started

I am someone who has never been quick to adopt new technology. (For example, I bought cassettes as recently as 2002, and I always seemed to get a new video game console about a year before the newer model came out.) Perhaps part of this is the idea of never knowing which one will catch on. After all, BetaMax and LaserDisc were both considered to be technically superior to VHS, but neither was able to knock VHS off the top of the movie heap. That, and I just never saw the point of paying a premium price when what I currently have is just as good.

However, my jump from VHS to DVD actually came in 2003. I had just gotten activated and my college career was on hold until my tour of duty in Iraq was done. I had paid $20 in raffle tickets for a drawing for a DVD player at school. To my great surprise, I was the big winner. However, I could not use the DVD player until I got home, so I let my parents use it until then.

When we were overseas, we were able to get fairly decent access to technology considering our circumstances, and every tent had at least one DVD player in it. While I personally did not see the need to buy another one to add to the pile, I always told the people who had the DVD players there that they would be free to use any DVD’s I bought from the PX.

A Change in Perspective

In the desert, you have nothing but time on your hands. I used this time to finish reading a lot of books, but my speed reading abilities meant that I would go through books pretty quickly, and I would always have to go to the PX or wait for books my parents mailed me from so I could get more. (In time, I unlearned speed reading, but not deliberately, so I relearned this skill after I returned from Iraq and resumed academics.)

Because we had nothing but time on our hands, we would often watch the deleted scenes. Then, there were other times when I would find myself watching all kinds of DVD extras, such as commentaries, making-of documentaries, and other features that any DVD lover knows by heart.

The realization of the change in shift came to me in November. One of the movies that I saw in the PX that day was the DVD for the director’s cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I am not a big Trekkie (I don’t say this to insult Trekkies, just to be descriptive.), as I have only seen two or three of the movies, and about half a dozen episodes (all versions combined). When I first saw this movie a year and a half before, the big things that I remembered about the movie at the time were the slow pace and Lt. Ilia. Normally, this would be enough to steer me away, but I noticed that the movie had hours and hours of special features. Because of this, I was more appreciative of the pace and bought the movie.

The Value of Special Features

I don’t have a desire to be a film director, but I have found the features very fascinating, and some of the best have taught me a lot about the art and skill of making movies. Sometimes, I miss the metaphor, or something in the background, and it is interesting to learn about everything that went into the effort and onto the screen. While I don’t go to the theater much (the last movie I saw in the theater was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), I have found that the special features are one of the things that I look forward to the most when I buy a DVD, whether of a movie, or a TV box set.

In your business, what are your unlikely sources of education? I would love to hear from you. If you enjoyed this, please share it with your friends.

This blog post is something that is more personal than about building a business. However, there may things that i say that teach you about some of the things that you need to deal with that may help you in your business or in life in general.

Personal Demons

As I mentioned in a previous post, I suffered from depression in my childhood. What I did not mention is that I had to deal with something that I now know is depression since just before my ninth birthday. Most of the time, this is what could be called a low-grade form of depression, which expresses itself as more of a general malaise. I have had more serious bouts with depression in 1988-89, 1995, 1998, 1999, and 2003, with the absolute worst one being the one that I suffered in the summer of 1995 at the age of 15.

However, my childhood dream was to go to West Point (I did not, but I am definitely glad that I finally ended up at West Virginia University for my undergraduate studies.) and I knew that this was a demon that I would basically have to battle alone because there was no way that I could get into West Point with a history of mental illness. By the time I left my first college, and came to WVU, I had mostly accepted  my depression and figured out how to handle it.

By the time I entered seminary in 2005, it had been two years since my last serious bout of depression, and I had to take the big diagnostic psychological profile with all of the true/false questions. (I think it was called MMSI but I can’t remember the exact name), and I found out in February 2006 that I had been diagnosed with depression. This was something that did not surprise me, and it did not surprise the person running the program that I already knew, because he said that a lot of people are pretty self-aware about such a diagnosis. Fortunately, my depression is a type that I have been able to treat without the use of anti-depressants. (I am not opposed to any and all uses of anti-depressants, but I personally do not like the idea of being dependent on any medication to get through the day.)

It Returns

Earlier this month was a good time for me. I had started to get the hang of building my blog, I moved into a new place with my wife, and my personal development had really kicked into high gear. Then, out of the blue, I started to have another bout of depression.

The cruel irony of depression is that it is something that will make it that much more difficult to do the most basic things in life even if, or especially if, these are things that are important to getting out of the depression. However, I have been through the ringer enough to know that this is the case, and I know that, if I want to cut down the time of this bout with a bigger depression, I have to know that there are times when I must do like George Costanza and say,

“If my instincts are wrong, then the opposite must be right.”

I know that this piece of advice won’t necessarily land me my dream job with the Yankees or anything like that, but I know that, faced with my depression, I have two choices:

I can either choose to let my depression get the best of me, or I can choose to fight. Well, I choose to fight.

I love movies. One of the things that is so great about movies, and a lot of great art, is the way that it so eloquently describes our conditions and our dreams. I have seen a lot of movies in many genres. One of those genres that I have thought about recently is the romantic comedy. Some versions of romantic comedies are geared towards a heavily female audience, and they get the sometimes undeserved label of “chick flick.”

The Need for Competition

My favorite romantic comedy of all time has to be The Baxter. It was released in 2005 starring Michael Showalter in a movie that examines what happens to the other guy in romantic comedies. In this movie, the other guy is referred to as a “baxter,” the man who is destined to be dumped. This got me thinking: how many romantic comedies that I have seen have the other person who is destined to be dumped because the leading lady is already in a relationship at the beginning of the movie? In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it is a battle between Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy; in You’ve Got Mail, it’s Joe Fox vs. the Greg Kinnear character. In The Baxter, there are actually multiple competing love interests going on involving people who must get hurt. However, this movie is a satire of the genre. I realize that there are times that there are multiple people who love the same person, which means that someone’s feelings will get hurt. However, there are also plenty of relationships that start between people who happen to be single when they meet.

The End… Or The Beginning?

At the end of Bridget Jones’s Diary, the words “The End” are crossed out and replaced by “The Beginning.” However, how many romantic comedies end things right there when the couple have found each other? With the prevalence of divorce, I wonder how many people decided that the reason why they couldn’t be in the relationship any more is because the “new relationship excitement” is gone, and they become junkies for that feeling. However, here is the problem with that line of thought: real life is often what happens after we lose that initial excitement and decide to commit to a lifetime.

Why This Happens

I don’t think that romantic comedies are doing this with a goal of sabotaging the institution of marriage. I think that they are trying to present a storybook fantasy, and they skip over just what “and they all lived happily ever after” really means. So, why do they end there? Because, from a cinematic point of view, the interesting part is the chase. There are some movies and TV shows that illustrate the difficulty of this thinking, although it seems more prevalent in TV where the artists get years to develop a character, as opposed to a few hours.

So, if you are looking for that fairy tale moment, never forget that these movies are meant to convey a fantasy. There is nothing wrong with fantasy at all, but we have to be able to tell the difference between the two, and decide every day to make the commitment to make our marriages work.

Have you ever known people who seem to have energy that you can only dream of? Have you ever wondered why some people are able to be much more productive than others? One of the best books that I have read that sums up everything about the need to make the best use of our time in order to live the life we want is The Other 8 Hours: Maximize your Free Time to Create new Wealth & Purpose by Robert Pagliarini.

How Much Time Do You Need?

A lot of people in the world of network marketing keep their day jobs. This is something that Pagliarini advocates in his book. In this case, you may be arguing that you are totally exhausted by your day job and you can really do is just unwind at the end of the day and relax. If you are exactly where you want to be, this is just fine. However, if you want something else, the time do that is the time between work and sleep. Pagliarini argues that devoting more time to things that build us up is the only way to have the life we want.

There are several ideas that I think are very interesting in the book to get people started. One of them is something that he calls “boosting,” or finding a job with little-to-no effort required where someone is present. For college students, sitting at the sign-in desk at the dorms or a computer center is an option. For others, working as a clerk at a low-traffic hotel or at a fitness center where you can use the time sitting there to read. This is something that I think is valuable for someone who wants to get involved in business, but is looking for seed money.

A Great Time-Management Tip

My favorite piece of advice in this book is the concept of “bunching.” Bunching is a smarter way to multitask. The concept of bunching is different because it divides activities into two groups: head activities and body activities. The idea is to do one while you are doing the other whenever possible. One example is listening to something educational while driving. When doing this, it gives you more time to spend with your loved ones, and isn’t that what personal development and time management are all about?

Are You a Cre8or?

The most important elements of building a personal income through business is to make money doing what you love. Creating something of value or doing something you have always wanted to do can only be done in your other eight hours. The book has an inventory of some of the key moments in life, and the question of whether these occurred at work, school, or in the other eight hours. I think that most of us will admit that it is the other eight hours. If you have always wanted to learn a foreign language, this is how you do it. If you have wanted to learn a new skill, this is how. If you wanted to write a book, this is how. Robert Pagiarini has a term for people like this: Cre8ors. So, are you a Cre8or?

One of the things that has amazed me the most in the world of business is the dichotomy between those who seem to try to make things too difficult, and those who try to make them too easy. I think that the steps themselves to success in business are pretty basic, although some of them definitely take know-how, and we cannot ignore the fact that there are some external and intangible forces that must always be accounted for. It is times like these when I am reminded of something my sixth-grade teacher said in math class that has given me a lot of confidence whenever I think about it:

Every addition problem ultimately breaks down to nothing bigger than “what is nine plus nine?” There may be a lot of steps, but this is what it is at its most basic.

The more I thought about that, the more that I realized what a profound statement that really was. Of course, in a room full of 11- and 12-year-olds, we did not realize what he meant at the time, and some of the people who had difficulty with math really seemed offended by his statement. Then, he explained it by putting a math problem on the board, and his statement was right, because any two numbers that you added was a series of additions with basic elements that were no more than 9+9, no matter how big the number got.

What This Means for Business

I am not trying to see that the world of business is nothing more than adding single-digit numbers. However, at its core, there are several basic elements to any business. Look at blogs: some blogs can look pretty complicated, but once you get the hang of it, some of the plugins are extremely easy to operate and maintain. While there are definitely going to be times when there are things that we don’t understand yet, I think that we can definitely use the things that we do know and build each of them by breaking them down into smaller parts that are not so overwhelming.

How I Applied This Later

In high school, when I did track and cross-country, I had trouble in the beginning doing the run up Oakford Avenue, the steepest hill in town. Then, I was told something counterintuitive that was really surprising. I was told not to look at the top of the hill, because that would only make it seem farther away. The road was paved, so simply trust my navigation and focus on the next step. The very first time I did it, I was able to touch the steps at the top of the hill without resorting to walking once! This was another example of Nine Plus Nine Thinking (I just came up with that phrase. I don’t mind if you share, but please acknowledge that you got it from your old friend Steve ) at work. After all, the elements of running are really simple, and it involved lots of smaller actions, but the end result was the same.

Even Easier Than School

Still, despite such advice, there are some people who are not as good in math at others. There are also going to be some people who are better at marketing and blogging than others. However, we don’t have to have the perfect blog in order to make our business work. All we really have to do is have the basic tools in place. Something else that I’ve noticed is that so many bloggers are more than happy to share the basics with others for free. With that in mind, I know that nothing is too difficult, and I know that in time I will reach my goals because everything that we need can be broken down to its most basic element where it can be understood.

Like a lot of people of a certain age (I was born in 1979), I watched a lot of TV as a child (probably too much). However, one of the things that I think was of a great value to me as a child was children’s television. I must admit that this blog post was originally going to relate a different lesson from children’s television, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew that this was the better lesson to reflect upon for you, my friends and followers, as it provided an even better value.

In a lesson on the Law of Attraction, a theme song for a Christian children’s television program that I had not even seen while flipping through the channels in about 16 years, Quigley’s Village, came into my head over the weekend. While I was doing training for my summer job with the Census Bureau, I saw five of the episodes on VHS at the library of the church where we held our meeting. So, using YouTube, I didn’t find whole episodes, but I did find several excerpts, including a video of one of the puppet characters, a lion named Danny, singing his night time prayers, and words cannot express how much it moved me as it struck a nerve that I didn’t even realize was there. (As a kid, I preferred the storylines over the songs in Quigley’s Village.) So, this made me think about the connections that I have from my days of children’s television, and what this has taught me about personal connection.

Profit Cannot Be Our Primary Goal

Over the last 50 years or so, almost all of the major children’s television has been produced in the non-profit sector, whether for public television (such as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood) or religious broadcasting (such as Davey and Goliath). So, this made me think: why has so little of the children’s educational television that has captured the public’s enduring imagination and consciousness come to fruition from networks and cable? (Even without the focus on “educational,” most of the work that has endured that was made by the profit sector tended not to be marketed to children, such as Looney Tunes-era cartoons and The Three Stooges, which were targeted to a more general audience at the time, but only later found to have large appeal with children.) I think that the reason for this is simple: sometimes there are things of value that the market does not recognize. If you grew up watching any of the children’s educational programming I mentioned, would you put a price on the values and lessons that you were taught? I know that I wouldn’t.

Still, when thinking about connections, it thrills me most to see that something that I wrote in my blog meant something to the people who stopped by and read it. Whether or not any of these people find something of value that results in a financial reward for me, I know that I cannot put a price on the friendships that I have formed through this blog.

Be on Your Audience’s Level

As a doctoral student, there is an enormous temptation to try to show the world how smart you are and how much you know. However, I think that the old saying, “People won’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care” is absolutely correct. I am not saying that knowledge is bad, but I am saying that it is a tool like many others.

While I was filling in for the pastor at my church this past Sunday, there were a couple of kids in the congregation. I was trying to teach a lesson on patience and endurance during the children’s story. However, they were two years old and nine months old, respectively. As much as I tried, I couldn’t figure out how to connect. I’m not sure what it is, but these stories do connect, and they still have a resonance decades later.

Don’t Be Ashamed of the Source

I’m sure that there will be some naysayers out there who look down on such programs, but they taught me values that I will have for a lifetime, and even though there were times when I was older than the target demographic (the first time I saw Quigley’s Village, I was 11 or 12, and the target group was 2-7), and I struggled with what I now know was depression, the simple message contained in these shows was something that I desperately needed at the time. So, if it takes singing puppets interacting with adults to get through, there is no need to apologize for it. Instead, embrace the things that work.

Lead from the Heart

The video that moved me so much is not a technically-perfect work. It is obvious that the puppeteer is having difficulty hitting some of the high notes in the middle of the song, and you can hear his voice straining at some points. However, I think that is part of what makes it so moving. It was a heartfelt song by someone who wanted to communicate something of value, and that is why it means so much to me.

Here is a download that I found of the video that inspired this post. (If the owners of the copyright ask me to take it down, I will gladly do so. I am not trying to steal anything, and I want to share what has helped me so much.) Yes, the song makes specific references to one faith, but regardless of your faith, I hope that you can see the beauty that I saw in this short video: