Daily Inspiration: “The future always tells you what to do!” | “You’ll always know when it’s time to double down on your destiny!”

“The future always tells you what to do!” | “You’ll always know when it’s time to double down on your destiny!” – – Futurist Jim Carroll

Speakers who travel the planet live and die by their ‘highlight reel’… a short video clip that demonstrates their style and content on the stage. In the era of collapsed attention spans, people might watch but 30 seconds of video – and from that make a decision on whether to bring you in for their event. They might also glance at a few of your client logos, read your ‘brand positioning,’ and then decide whether they’re prepared to fly you to the other side of the world, paying handsomely you for your 30 minutes or 1 hour of insight.

The result? A highlight reel – and thet path to discover it – needs to be concise and to the point. With that, a ‘landing page’ – the home page of your Web site – needs to be concise, tightly focused and specifically branded. Just over a year and a half ago, I had the folks at Studio1Design in Melbourne, Australia, redesign my Web site to try to achieve this goal – the previous design was over ten years old and was showing its age. They did a brilliant job!

But that home page branded me as a ‘stage’ speaker, appearing ‘live’ at events. It ‘screamed’ on stage, in person, in a room. It didn’t get across the fantastic work and investment I’ve put into mastering this new digital, virtual format…

Of course, the world of on-stage performances is long gone – and will likely not be back in any substantive fashion for years to come. It’s disappointing, because my goal was to ride into retirement with great global events, massive stages, adventurous opportunities – one of my last events was for the World Bank in Morocco. But, on the flip side, so far, I’m alive and healthy.

How long before I might get back to the stage? I probably won’t, in all honesty. Since this global crisis began, I’ve been following quite a few notable pandemic experts and other professionals to try to get a real sense as to how our world might now unfold.

My thinking for quite some time has been that a) we don’t quickly get a vaccines and things go back to where they were and b) the timing is longer than people think – in the absence of negligent political homicide, we won’t see a vaccine until well into 2021, if that.

Not only that, but a vaccine is not a magic cure. The scientists are clearly indicating that it’s a long, long path out. My latest interpretation, hardened as an opinion based on a recent article out of The Lancet, tells me we won’t be out of this (or into any sense of normalcy) until 2022 or 2023 – or even further. If you care to, read this article, highlighted.

We need to calibrate our expectations for the 1st generation of #SARSCoV2 vaccines https://t.co/QTJbyOd9xQ @TheLancet by @gmleunghku and Malik Peiris @hkumed Pe-covid normalcy is not near. pic.twitter.com/Y15TqfoRlf

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) September 21, 2020

The upshot of this is that my stage life is gone, for years, and my virtual life is my new home. That change could very well be permanent. Accepting your reality is the first step;…

With that in mind, I had my Web design team come up with a bold new look for my home page, as well as creating the same type of branding for my ‘virtual events’ page. I’m thrilled with the results!

And as an aside, it looks a far bit better than my original Web page design of 1994, which I put together myself with some clip art! I’m going to work on a retrospective later today!

When the future changes, the future tells you what to do!