Intent
Have you ever caught someone in a lie? Why was it so easy to spy? It made you mad afterwards, right? That someone would so blatantly lie right to your face, as if you were really stupid.
Have you ever seen a con artist? Maybe you fell for it the first time, but the second time around you were smarter than that and immediately recognized the fraud. You called them a fraud so as to put the definition of the fraud on the fraud themselves, so others would know to recognize that going forward as well.
Have you ever seen someone talk about something they love?
It’s pretty captivating, right?
When it happens, your eyes are completely drawn to them and you stop and listen. Because for some reason, you internalize that this is something that you need to listen to while tuning everything else out. This is a person you need to take seriously. We might call this person a “natural.”
But there’s nothing really different about this person than any of the rest of us. They’re the exact same. So what is it that separates them from the rest of us? So much so that for that moment, we stop and intently listen?
Last night, I went to see Dr. Sarah Parcak speak at the Birmingham Museum of Art. If you are aware of the Global Xplorer website, or the term space archaeology and the related TED talk, that’s her. She’s also a professor at UAB, though I would never really have a chance to see her. I tweeted at her one time, and I’m pretty positive she ignored it because she’s super busy and serious about what she does. It’s like she’s running at a thousand miles per hour with excitement.
When she speaks, you can hear the love and care about archaeology and all of the projects she’s working on. It permeates in the way she speaks. Though she was trying to cram as much as she could into 45 minutes, it worked and you listened to every word because you didn’t want to miss one. Yes, her credentials and education set us up to respect at her, but she also has to deliver the content. Her intent for what she does is why people will go see her speak about archaeology after they get off work on a Thursday night. It is why people of all ages will gladly stand when they see that all the seats are taken in the auditorium.
You could hear the joy she had when she spoke of someone else in her field wrote a paper that completely changed the game. You could hear her feel bad at the end when she felt like she was selling you on Global Xplorer, as if it were burdening you with an additional thing/tool to learn about when you already have a lot on your plate, but that she needed to tell people about the tool so they could crowdsource archaeological discoveries in a fun way. Though she speaks at a mile every second and doesn’t change her tone often, you can hear the sadness in her voice when she shows the picture of an archaeology site where they dug deeper and deeper and then finally had to stop because they ran into water. You get sad. Because you hope that she could’ve continued to dig deeper until her team found everything there was to find about that site. When she wins, we all win.
Why does all of that happen when you see Dr. Parcak speak? Why does it feel so important?
Why does that not happen for us?
It can. And it will. Only if you put the time into it. Only if you actually care.
For example, if Dr. Parcak were only interested in archaeology for monetary purposes, she probably would not tell us how to find looting sites using Global Xplorer. She would keep that information for herself and just loot the sites. Instead, she’s telling us what looting sites look like, and why the looting spiked in 2011-12. It was already bad by that point, but because of the state of the global economy, people resorted to looting.
That last point alone is probably something that took Dr. Parcak 4-5 years to discover (I’m guessing, I don’t know here), but all we get is about a minute on the topic. When you multiply that by 45, you start to get an idea of how much time she’s spent learning about general ideas so she could shorten and explain it for us in a digestible, concise way.
All that. To be an expert, but not even really to be an expert. It’s more out of love and peaked interest. To make us interested. To share knowledge and love of what she does.
If your intention is pure, it will more than likely take you places. If your intention is strong, people will gravitate towards you. If your intent is real, it will come naturally to you, as if time didn’t exist until you finally couldn’t keep your eyes open any longer.
There is a quote I want to end on that I think sums up all of what I’d like to say. Jon Fishman wrote a statement about Bruce Hampton after he passed away, and the note was really celebratory.
He made everybody comfortable in their own skin, and as a result it always brought out the best in all of them. That’s why he was always surrounded by so much excellence. Not just in music, but in humanity. In intent.
Bruce’s intent was love. Period. I never heard him put that word to it, but he was all about intent. His mantra was ‘Intent, Release and Recovery’, but everything always started with intent.
Over the 27 years I’ve known him, in basically every encounter I had with him or interaction I witnessed him in, the love in his intent was consistently among the purest and most powerful I have ever known. It was like a sun. Seriously. It had gravity. It created orbits. And for those of us who experienced it one way or the other, if perhaps even only from afar, it had more of an impact than we could have ever realized at the time. But whether we knew it or not, since the first time we encountered it, it altered us, changed us, touched us, affected us… and from that point forward it permeated our beings and has come through the music we play, the gigs we book, the articles we write, the concerts we promote, the audience members we are, the food we cook…. the grace with which we handle the challenges of life.”
That is the ripple effect intent can have on people. So how can you start everything you do with the best intent possible, no matter the potential outcome?