Somewhere in my vast collection of RSS feeds, I read this statement today: “What will you be remembered for?”
Now, I know this has been uttered many times before, but on the Internet we all seem to be obsessed with Twitter followers, RSS subscribers, blog readers, Facebook friends, etc. But will you actually be remembered for any of those things after you’re gone? Nope.
I thought about this statement and how carried away we have become with these numbers in today’s age of information over-saturation. The reality is that these things won’t matter when we’re gone. Only the tangible things we’ve done will be remembered. In a sense, we’ve become disconnected from human interaction in the most important ways that influence life. We need to get back to that connection. We need to get back into that emotion. We need to get back into that inspiration.
This comes at a good time, when I am building a nonprofit whose sole aim is to assist African technologists in the challenges they face. When all is said and done, it won’t matter how many “followers” or “fans” we have, but how we have reached out to these technologists in tangible, realistic ways.
If those fans and followers translate into supporters who contribute to the progress of webstartAfrica, then all the better. But for now, my sights are set on these ‘tangibles’ that we need to be delivering to African technologists.
What are your tangibles?
