If I told you that we were going on a hike in the Issaquah Alps that sounds pretty good by itself, maybe even exotic simply because of the term alps. If I added that we were going to hike Cougar Mountain it sounds even better like some kind of outlaw hideout or danger filled wilderness. Add to that a waterfall and an historic townsite and we’ve got a mystical adventure in an exotic wilderness right? I mean a hike up Cougar Mountain past a historic townsite along a well groomed path through the lush forests of the Issaquah Alps to a cascading waterfall sounds pretty good on a brochure. To be fair we had a great hike, but when you know that Cougar Mountain is more a hill than a mountain, many of the Issaquah Alps have neighborhoods on them, the historic town dam is about four feet high damming a creek, and the waterfall is maybe twenty feet high and five feet wide, the reality doesn’t quite live up to the billing. For the most part I knew what I was getting before I did the hike, but I just kept thinking how everything on paper sounded so good.
Marketing
It’s amazing what words can do. The way you describe something can make the mundane magical or the magnificent morose. Like I said, the hike was fine and we had fun so the reality is what you make it, but there is something that words can do in painting a picture that doesn’t lie, but is so much more than what is really there or at times so much less. Perception can be influenced by expectation and one persons reality is rarely the same for another person.
How we choose to talk about something or not talk about something whether consciously or subconsciously has a direct effect on how others will experience it. If I sell you on this great hike through the pristine wilderness, I have raised the bar on what it could be significantly, so your expectations will be high. If instead I just said lets go for a hike up Coal Creek Trail, on this particular hike that might make it more enjoyable because there are no expectations. I am all for high expectations, but sometimes it’s nice to enter into something without them because then you are free to experience what really is. Sometimes I guess we are just trying to sell people on things we know they will enjoy so we paint that picture. On this particular hike I tried to get my oldest daughter to walk instead of being carried so I didn’t even bring the second pack. I worked her up telling her she could do it, comparing it to distances she has walked before and talking about how we had built up to this with her hiking a little more each time we head out. She ended up walking only about a third of it, but I did convince her that it might be fun to roll down the the downhill parts, which she thoroughly enjoyed, so my marketing did in fact enhance the overall experience for her even if carrying her without the pack was much harder.
Anyway my point is about the influence of our words and the way we share about something. When I was at the NCCCUSA event a couple weeks ago and there was a campaign called, “words matter.” This hike was kind of a silly illustration, but it made me think what you can do with words. We have to be careful because our negativity may ruin something good, and though our enthusiasm may set a difficult bar I would rather try to achieve the difficult than be brought down before I started.
Tripping the Light Fantastic 