Tea with McNair

• thankful

WHAT I'M THANKFUL FOR: a.) A GREAT YEAR WORKING WITH ENJOYABLE CO-WORKERS ON THE IMPORTANT TASK OF RELEASING CHILDREN FROM POVERTY IN JESUS NAME.  b.) LIVING IN THE BEAUTIFUL ROCKY MOUNTAINS OF COLORADO SPRINGS WHERE THEY'VE TRADED IN BREATHABLE AIR FOR A REASONABLE COST OF LIVING.

c.) A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS WHO SUPPORT, ENCOURAGE, AND INSPIRE ME—EVEN FROM FAR AWAY, d.) A CREATOR WHO LOVES WHEN I AM PURSUING MY PASSIONS.  

  

• original source

Websites, blogs, news reports, radio talks shows,  magazine and newspaper articles, and chats with good friends are all full of it. Full of ...? Misinformation. Untruths. (Formerly known as lies.)

misinformation | misinfer may' shen -noun, false or inaccurate information, esp. that which is deliberately intended to deceive

"But it must be true," a friend says, "I heard it on (name of well known TV program)...I read it in (popular magazine or blog site)." So what? Untrue is untrue. We rarely hear, read or site the original source. Without that bit of key info, the statement should be suspect to all. Always—especially if it seems counterintuitive. That just doesn't make sense.

One of the top speakers and business consultants for many years is Alan Weiss. I have heard him speak and attended his course on the business of consulting that he teaches with speaking maven, Patricia Frip. Alan is adamant about tracking down original sources. Al says:

Believing non-original sources. Just because someone says something at a meeting, from the stage, in a loud voice, or with authoritative inflection, doesn’t make it true. Nor does a listing in Wikipedia. Find the original source, especially if you’re going to use the information with a client, as part of your intellectual property, or in writing.

Those of us in the speaking and writing biz love to sight exciting statistics and outrageous quotes—especially when they gree with us and assist in making our point.

Rich Buhler is a journalist, radio host, and the proprietor of the highly useful website TruthOrFiction.com. He is a frequent speaker at conferences of journalists where he implores them to pursue original sources. He loves to sight his top ten most repeated fictions.

No. 1 fiction in Rich's book for years: 50% of all marriages end in divorce.

"But it must be true, I heard it on ...I read it in . . ."

So, what? It's not true. Not even close. Where does that "fact-lette" come from? What was the study and how was it validated? You can Google all night and not find the original source because it doesn't exist. It grew, like any juicy rumor, from a series of trends, probabilities, and political agenda.

Far too many of the "truths" we all love to sight are cobbled together from estimates, probabilities, and conjectures that are too often based on a pre-desired outcome. 

It's not always easy to get at the the truth but it is always worth pursuing—even when you discover that there are actually five times MORE polar bears today than there were in 1950 and the warmest year in recent history was 1997. (And it has been getting cooler ever since—contrary to those now famous estimates.) Whatever you thoughts are on "global warming" (or the more innocuous phrase "climate change") you should look around. The truth is out there, though sometimes it is difficult to find the unpopular truth—the truth the corrects popular fiction.

A key part of this truth telling business is for authors and speakers to tell your story. But when you find a good story (from someone else) that illustrates your talk or article, quote them. Tell the source, accurately.Telling another persons story as though it happened to you is plagiarism. It is the same as telling a story that is not true.

A key story in my signature presentation Recapturing Your Creative Spirit (keynote address for conventions) is the story of my conversation with an member of the men's USA Olympic kayaking team. I have received reports of other speakers telling this story as if it happened to them. It did not. Ask Max Miller, Tim Swift, Terry Olson, and a host of other friends with whom I was working at the time (at the Olympic games in Atlanta.) It is a good story. Just quote me on it. I've been telling it since it happened in 1996. I have never made any effort to track down speakers who have used this and other stories of mine. I know what's true and am comfortable in telling that story as it happened to me.

For the last eleven months I have been at Compassion International's Global Ministry Center in Colorado Springs. I am the Compassion Experience Manager heading up a team of staff members who serve as hosts for our three-times-a-day building tours.  The biggest change I instituted was that we are story tellers not statisticians. A few statistics go along way. A few more and you've lost your audience. In the new "FIELD GUIDE for Tour Hosts" that we created, we separate out all the stats. We use the stats mostly in response to direct questions. We also double and triple checked all the stats, even when the source was one of our execs. "Where's that from?" We asked everyone.

We had been telling our guests that 27,000 children in the world die everyday of preventable causes—malaria, HIV/AIDS, diarrhea, malnutrition, etc. Then Dr. Scott Todd, on our staff, shared the latest number 25,000. More interesting than that and more important Scott told me that less than ten years ago the number was 40,000 a day. "It's coming down and we can make it much lower."

Now that's a story. What's yours?

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