Chapter 9. Real Simple

Your message is like a flock of beautiful white doves. As you organize and prepare for the big day, you feed and coddle your doves with doting commitment, as though you were the mother dove. You pour your heart and soul into these innocent birds, whose stark white plumage and gentle cooing seems to personify the ideals of peace, hope, and love. When you watch them take flight, you feel transported to a metaphysical land where mortgages, sales quotas, and third-quarter projections lie in calm docility beside your bank account. Happiness and harmony are there.

Doves, however, are considered by many to be the rats of the aviary world—right next to pigeons, the possums of the same. A flock of garbling, pigment-less flying rats swooping through the air calls to mind bird crap and avian flu—not peace, hope, and love—to these practical realists. That's your message I'm talking about.

What happens when you set your message loose over an audience? Does the audience swat at the dumpy projectiles, or do they outstretch their arms, hands, and fingers as perches for worthy inspiration?

In other words: How do we control what our message is once we surrender control and give it to others?