There are days when it’s really tough liv­ing on the front end of the bell curve, and clearly Dave Lankes had one of those last week. But instead of let­ting it get him down, it caused him to redou­ble his efforts and even write an inspi­ra­tional post for the rest of us. (Empha­sis below is mine.)

“We live in Shake­spear­ian Times”

“…I won’t get into the details of the meet­ing, but suf­fice to say I had a choice to make — be silent or speak.

You may imag­ine the choice would be easy for me, but it was not. I too face deci­sions between easy dis­con­tent and uncom­fort­able action. To stand up invites more work, or deri­sion, and in either case courts con­flict. It is just eas­ier some­times to let things pass.

I know I am not alone in hav­ing these choices to make. As I go around the coun­try I encounter too many librar­i­ans who see the vision, who embrace change, but have grown too tired and dis­cour­aged to hope again. They are qui­eted by the scars of past opti­mism. These are the con­ver­sa­tions that I have the hard­est time with. I want to ‘go all inspi­ra­tional’ and call them to action, but I too have those scars, and have plenty of times when I tried and failed. It is not a good feel­ing. I would like to avoid it too. So I never want to fault oth­ers for their decisions.…

It may sound sim­plis­tic, but for me it comes down to need­ing some encour­age­ment. We need to know that we are not alone. We are not. There is a whole pool of fel­low librar­i­ans that ‘get it.’ We also need to real­ize that those who get it aren’t just new librar­i­ans, but direc­tors, man­agers, and pol­icy mak­ers. We have a lot of good exam­ples to show the way as well. When I have those bad days, the first thing I have to do is decide to speak up. Then I have to do some­thing. Even if what­ever I decide to do is wrong, it is some­thing. Finally, I lis­ten to Shake­speare. Seriously.

For some peo­ple when they need to get a pick me up it is music, for oth­ers a movie, for still oth­ers it is ‘the story’ I’ve talked about before (that time that you as a librar­ian changed someone’s life for the bet­ter). But for me, Shake­speare … Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day Speech. I have to thank George Need­ham for intro­duc­ing me to it.…

How do I stay opti­mistic? I real­ize first the issues I face are minis­cule to the good I can do. How do I get inspired to face intran­si­gence, or lazi­ness, or inep­ti­tude? I look right past them at the real goal, and those who really need me.

Block me, and I will go around you. Build a wall, and I will build a door. Lock the door and I will break a win­dow. And if I don’t have have a leader to inspire me, I will lead. If I don’t have a team that will sup­port me, I will recruit a team from beyond the orga­ni­za­tional bound­aries — every pol­icy has a loop­hole, every sys­tem has a hid­den reward.” [The Par­tic­i­pa­tory Librar­i­an­ship Starter Kit]

I think I’m going to print this out and post it above my desk, so thanks for writ­ing this, Dave. And along these same lines, I want to note one other thing about librar­i­ans. We don’t get the credit we deserve for lead­ing in the 2.0 world, but more impor­tantly, we don’t give our­selves enough credit. While I always think there’s more we can do, exper­i­ment with, and improve, it’s also impor­tant to take a step back and sur­vey just how much we’ve done in this sphere as a profession.

Librar­i­ans were one of the first pro­fes­sions blog­ging, and by a pretty wide mar­gin. In fact, I’ll even go out on a limb to say that behind the techies, I think we had the largest crit­i­cal mass first — ahead of the jour­nal­ists, mar­keters, lawyers, and other trades that have a large pres­ence in the blo­gos­phere. And in terms of try­ing out new tools and inte­grat­ing them into our ser­vices, I’d be hard-pressed to find more early adopters in a pro­fes­sion other than librar­i­an­ship in the areas of instant mes­sag­ing, wikis, Face­book, and Twit­ter. We swarm on a new tool and play with it faster than 90%+ of the folks out there, and we’re con­stantly try­ing new things.

Sure, there’s a wide range of skills and adop­tion among librar­i­ans and only a small per­cent­age are on the front of the bell curve, but the next time you hear some­one berate libraries for stay­ing stuck in the past, don’t let them make a gen­er­al­iza­tion. We all need to keep mov­ing for­ward, but there are a lot of good things hap­pen­ing in the pro­fes­sion, mak­ing it an excit­ing time to be a librar­ian. Make a wall into a door and keep try­ing. It’s worth it, and you can make a difference.

Tags: david lankes, encouragement, inspiration, librarians, libraries