The World Demands an Elevator Pitch

Don't spend all your time in the past, they said, be present and presence works. How to future plan when you are in the present? How to live intuitively when the world demands answers, demands labels, demands to know who you are in an elevator pitch. Writes you off when you don't have something snappy.

How do we live when we know we're going to die? We live carefully, as though the only thing that will kill us is our own stupidity, as though death won't track us down anyway.

I need to get some things off my chest, none of it original. But I need to say it as it's filtered through my consciousness.

It's a hot summer's day, muggy and unrelenting. In my little corner of my little flat, I sit and I write. Why do I write? Most of the time I truly don't know but if you write then you know what I mean.

It's an itch, an urge. No sane person would do it if they could avoid it and they don't. But it helps, it helps to write things down. I think everyone should write if they can.

Most of my time has been taken up trying to explain myself to other people, to help them understand why I exist, why I am here. I have crafted and recrafted my elevator pitch and never once has it ever sounded close to who I really am.

It’s all an effort to make others feel more comfortable and so they can categorise you in a little box. They can say, they know what you’re about. But they have no idea if that’s all they see and they don’t take the time to really look at another person.

Maybe it's time to do away with the concept and embrace the slow getting to know people. To make time to establish real connections again. I mean this in business as well as life. Everyone thinks they're so busy but what they are really busy with is avoiding real connection. What they are really busy with is trying to control how other people see them.

I heard the other day on a podcast where the conversation had taken a very loopy spiritual turn, that the guest had been told when he was on ayahuasca that the human race only had 50 to 80 years left on earth, there was nothing we could do, no green initiatives, that was just it. The host responded by saying that it was weird he'd said that because the previous night she had dreamt that someone showed her a graph that said in 50 years it was over for the human race. There was nothing we could do, that was it.

They skimmed over this rather alarming part of the conversation but I felt a chill ricochet through me. I tell myself that it's just some weird end of days chat from people who have maybe gone too deeply into their own senseless minds. But maybe not.

But the point remains, we are going to die.

So we need to live. In the present and in a way that aligns with our inner selves, not how we would like to be seen. We've heard by now from that book about the regrets of dying people that the most common regret is not having lived a life more true to themselves.

It's not selfish, it's vital. It's only once we're no longer concerned with our 'elevator pitch' and how impressive it sounds that we can get on with the real work that has real benefits not just for ourselves but for everyone else. It's the opposite of selfish.