This post is both a history and an update on the purpose and focus of the SpeakingGump blog.
The Start
This blog started started on November 5, 2009. The original stated purpose of the blog was to focus on personal responsibility and how it affects both our professional and personal lives. I initially committed to write twice a week (Mondays and Thursdays). For the most part that goal has been kept. My blog has been dynamic. It has been an evolving journey.
Life Lessons
In late January 2010, I first wrote a life lesson from the movie Forrest Gump. Since then, more than 200 posts have been published making a reference and lesson to the movie. Every scene has been described and analyzed. A few of those scenes have become a foundation of my presentations. The majority of the scenes today serve as icing on the cake and are used frugally during presentations to sweeten a story.
Gumption
The concept of Gumption was born in this blog and evolved into today’s form in August 2011. Prior to the current version of Gumption which has three principles, the original version had two big ideas and eight supporting principles. It was confusing! Many of the blog posts written served as a single idea. These single ideas were like bricks building a wall – one-by-one.
Stories of Gumption
A regular feature Stories of Gumption was born that profiled people who are living their lives with Gumption. These stories haven’t appeared recently, but will most likely make a return in the future.
Learning to Write
One of the best lessons from this blog was learning how to write. Before starting this blog, the mechanics of sentence structure and grammar were mostly understood – but I’ve gotten much better. More importantly, my writing was very mechanical. While technically correct, it was dry and without personality. Developing a writing voice just happened. It happened by consistently writing. Who would have figured?
My First Significant Time Out
I took a two-year break from writing from 2013 to 2015. The break started when a consulting project evolved into six-month full-time job. My writing routine was broken. I decided to re-start with the launch of an updated website. What I initially envisioned would take four months ended up consuming a year and a half. Imagine a project taking longer than initially expected?
Re-Start
In the spring of 2015 I did restart but it turned out to be a false start. The real re-start occurred in November of 2015. During that re-start, I said the purpose of the SpeakingGump blog is: everything Gumption; how to live a gump-like life; and the life lessons from the movie Forrest Gump. The life lessons project continues to this day. All of the life lesson writings are bits and pieces of a future book. Piece-by-Piece or one brick at a time I’m laying down the foundations for that book.
Gumption Experience
Also in 2015, I launched an additional, complementary website GumptionExperience.com. At that time, I stated the purpose of GumptionExperience was to focus on how I work with organizations: make meetings more productive; be host to create engagement and a better attendee experience; and be a messenger to help create the change that organizations urgently needs. In that same post, I stated: the SpeakingGump blog will continue to be about Gumption and my philosophy of the way life works.
What’s Next?
So where does that leave me today? What’s the future of the SpeakingGump blog?
Gumption and personal responsibility have been fairly we’ll defined over the past six years.
The Life Lessons from he movie will continue and get further refined and then collated into a book.
The biggest opportunities and challenges are in three areas:
- Better define what it means to Live a Live with Gumption or Function with Gumption
- Articulate and incorporate my own philosophy of the way life works.
- Integrate Gumption and the movie Life Lessons with numbers 1 & 2.
SpeakingGump blog will become more of a philosophy. It will define a way of living. It will include more stories from my own life journey. The image below is my attempt to visually define what it means to Function with Gumption. Stay tuned … the best is yet to come!