Keep it real

A few weeks ago I was walking from my car to a restaurant in the Washington park area. On my way I was approached by a young lady in her early 20's who wanted me to donate some money to save the trees. I really wasn't interested in giving money to a stranger, but I was impressed with the fact that she was willing to make a stand for a cause that she believed in.

I stopped for a few moments to listen to her story. When she reached a natural pause I asked her why she was willing to take the risk of looking foolish just to save a tree. She let me know that she had her fears, but she wanted to make the world a better place. I thanked her for her time, took a brochure, and let her know that I needed to leave for my meeting.

As I thought about her words I was reminded of my own desire to make a difference. In fact, I left my comfortable job at Sprint to re-write a book that I wrote to help people live a life of faith without the religious obligation and guilt that is frequently associated with organized religion. The fire in that young ladies eyes was the fire that I once saw when I looked at my own reflection. Over the last few weeks it has become clear that the fire has grown cold.

I stopped working on my book because I was afraid that Christians wouldn't like it because it was to irreligious. I was concerned irreligious people wouldn't like it because it seemed to "Christian". So about a month into my journey a friend helped me to launch the Denver Twitter Guide which I felt would be a great way for me to monetize the phenomenon that we know as twitter.

Within 45 days that project went south. So I branded myself as a "Social Media Strategist" and started networking to drum up some consulting business. The problem I had was most people at networking events have something to sell and very few are willing to pay for consulting services. I did get a few great customers that way, but overall I learned that traditional networking is inefficient.

Being the cause driven person that I am, I started this website to simplify the networking process for others. When I learned about poken, I immediately jumped on that bandwagon because the product makes real world networking 10 times more efficient. Unfortunately, social media consulting is not wildly profitable and the margins on poken are relatively low. Taking it one step further, I am not really a social media strategist...I am a teacher, singer, and author who wants to help people live life like Michael Jordan played basketball.

Many of you have knowingly or unknowingly given me the courage and inspiration to pursue my passion. I hope to complete the rewrite of my book "Christianity Unplugged" during the next 6 weeks. What that means is I will be tweeting about this journey. I am guessing that talking about how the religion called "Christianity" has become inconsistent with the teachings of Jesus will create a mass exodus of twitter followers. It may or may not impact this communities view of me, but that is something I will have to live with

The Denver Twitter Connection is not the platform for this message and this is probably the first and last blog of this nature that I will post here. I will continue to serve this community as the site administrator. However, I will not be actively promoting my work here on twitter.

So many people compromise who they are in order to make money or to please people who really don't care about them anyway. My path may not be your path, but I want to encourage everyone reading this post to be authentic and live your truth. God created each of us to be amazing and you are doing the world a disservice if you choose not to become everything he created you to be.

Sharing this creates a lot of tension and uncertainty for me. But I have got to keep it real. If you have been wearing a mask like me, I hope this will inspire you to do the same.

Sincerely,

Eric D. Canaday
President - Inner Witness Media, Inc.
"Know Your Purpose, Live Your Dreams, Transform Your World"