The best ideas come from the gut. They emerge from a feeling that what you’re creating is important.
They gestate for days or months or even years. Consciously or subconsciously, you’ve been collecting all that time and storing stuff up: Experiences you’ve endured or enjoyed, words you’ve heard, images your brain has captured.
You’ve been building empathy.
And then, one day, a ripped photograph shows up in your back yard.
You don’t know the people in the picture, but you know where it came from, because a few days before, tornadoes ripped through cities and towns that surrounded your own. And while your town, somehow, was spared, many, many more were not. Houses were destroyed, and priceless personal possessions were blown away. Some, for hundreds of miles.
The photograph in your hand, of a little girl in a cheerleading uniform, or grandparents on their wedding day, is a visceral reminder that it could have been you who lost everything.
This happened to Patty Bullion of Lester, Alabama. When she found a ripped picture of an older man and his dog, she posted it on Facebook, on a page that she created, titled simply, “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” A woman 175 miles away posted almost immediately that the picture was of her grandfather, who had died in the tornadoes. You can only imagine how much the picture must have meant to the woman.
You can read about what happened from there in The New York Times, but as you can probably guess, many, many more items have since been posted, and many people have claimed them.
If you read some of the posts on the page, you’ll see the true genius of Social Media and how it gets people engaged, involved, and prompts them to do something. It certainly proves the power of people who care. That’s the first step in creating an idea that gets people to act.
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