Obstacle or the Game

Distinction

Another great distinction from Straight Line Leadership (I really need to do a quick post on why distinctions are not some mental trick to make yourself feel better that is actually rooted in our basic relationship to our environment; pretend this parenthetical tangent didn’t make you forget the beginning of the sentence):

Obstacle Vs. Conditions of the Game.

Are you looking at everything that’s happening in your life as obstacles, or simply part of the game you have to play?

Kids screaming -> Obstacle to happy family, or part of the game of raising kids?

The larger your “game” can become, the more resourceful you can be. There are always ways to address the world when you don’t see it as something to freak out about.

Circumstance

Facebook hates my middle name.

I wanted to start a new profile, because I deleted my last one not too long ago, and I didn’t really want friends and family friending me just yet. I am working on some side hustles.

Apparently you can’t use your middle name, or they will cancel your account.

Look, fine Facebook, I don’t actually want an account in the first place.

But you, Facebook, told me that I needed an account to make a Facebook page for the business I want to start. And I dutifully complied, not realizing you wanted to apply this level of scrutiny to how I identify.

And what’s especially infuriating about this is that if I wanted to feminize my name to something that is not at all my name, they would be completely cool with me using a name that’s not on my birth certificate.

Yet here I am, using my God-given (middle) name, and they turn off my account and tell me the decision will be final and cannot be appealed.

Applying the Distinction

This is online marketing. This is the game I am choosing to play. And I will win it, with or without Facebook. Somehow, I will turn this game into something I can win.

And when I have won that game, my next game may very well be applying all my knowledge and skills to changing the way the entire world thinks about Facebook so that everyone’s default future is deleting their account and moving on. (Yes, that’s my revenge fantasy that I am choosing not to focus on right now).

In the meantime, I will be working on opening up other social media accounts, and finding people in my network who know how to deal with this kind of thing, and how I can get access to my store’s FB page again.

All part of the game¹.

1. Of course who could forget the 1980’s movie War Games and the line: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”? At times, online marketing and sales feels like this, either as the seller or the sellee (is that a word?). Should we even be doing this whole internet thing in the first place? Is it really working out so well for humanity? ↩︎