Me Thinketh

A fellow bee named Daniel Anderson asked a question that is often asked "What is a Toastmaster?".  One can certainly google an answer to that question but still not get to the root of it, because at the root of it is the difference between an educator and a salesman.

Very few people outside the Toastmasters organization know who Ralph C. Smedley is, or actually even care.  He flew under the radar Smedley was not a salesman, he was an educator and it was not until his thinking was incorporated into an organization called Toastmasters that clubs began to formalize around his pioneering mind.

Smedley was an education director in the YMCA and from 1906 to the formation of Toastmasters International in 1924,  Smedley moved jobs around the YMCA and everywhere he moved he opened a club, but every time he moved the club he left behind died.  It is not until 18 years later that that his initial ideas had taken hold.

There was a salesman who did become friends with Smedley and he was fascinated by his ideas.  That salesman eventually decided to go a different route with his program and he chose the for profit route and not the not-for-profit route.  After they had met, that salesmen started the company that still carries his name, that company was called Dale Carnegie.

Dale Carnegie even changed his name from Carnagey to Carnegie so that his name resembled the famous business tycoon of his age who was Andrew Carnegie.   Another salesman not connected with Carnegie also based his fame on emulating Andrew Carnegie and his name was Napoleon Hill who wrote the book "Think and Grow Rich".  Like Hill, neither met or personally knew Andrew Carnegie, both were master salespeople.  When Dale Carnegie began with his "Five Drivers of Success" those drivers were not in anyway different to what Smedley was formulating and had formulated well before he met and became friends with Carnegie.

Today, the entrepreneur is still held in high esteem over the educator and we live in a world where the group-mind is still preferred to the individual educator.   We think nothing of the idea of moving from me to we, but in this assassination of the idea of "me", we did not ask ourselves why this idea is valid, instead it was embraced fully as if it represents a truth.  If anything when I think of the me to we concept, it is completely ass-backwards.  It should be we from me not me to we.  In the latter case the premise begins with a dysfunctional me and it ends in a dysfunctional we.  That is why I prefer Jiddu Krishnmurti's thoughts on what an "INDIVIDUAL" is, which he said meant undivided and whole.

Using the ideas of Mandelbrot about fractals, the individual therefore should be viewed as a fractal of the whole.  We continue not to think in the language of complexity science but in the dogma of the group.  It is like asking whether the bee is more important than the hive or the hive more important than the bee.  The answer is both are and the answer to that is just as never-ending as the question "did the chicken come before the egg, or the egg come before the chicken" - the best answer is that it does not matter - unless the idea of a chicken does not matter.  That is why I say "ME THINKETH".  I am the bee first and I decide the learning that transforms into my hive.  Hence "College Toastmasters" is the hive that I then created. 

That is also why I do not spend my money on a Dale Carnegie course and instead appreciate the mind of Ralph Smedley.  Just because I appreciate the mind of Ralph Smedley does not necessarily mean that Toastmasters International is an absolute replication of that mind.  The organization today called Toastmasters is run by minds that respect Smedley, but that does not mean they are Smedley.  I know that for sure, because when they had an opportunity to create a Smedley Award, they did not create it to mark the best educator but as a name for club membership award - as a marketing award rather than as an educator award.

This is why I have had at best a fractious relationship with former clubs that have stressed the need for awards rather than focus singularly on education.  Smedley never took the role of President because of his dedication to education.  He did not care one iota to carry a famous name like Dale Carnegie - his entire focus was on the education and betterment of an individual.  There was but one flaw in his focus, that he worked for the YMCA, that betterment was for men and even Smedley insisted that if women wanted a similiar club, that they should start their own.   When Toastmasters began to admit women to its membership in 1973, it was a most welcome change.  Women are a vital contributor to the Toastmasters organization today. 

When it comes to this mental shift between a me to we focus and a we from me focus, the dysfunctional me to dysfunctional we becomes much more obvious when we substitute me to we with narcissism to groupthink.  I don't want to go that way and Toastmasters is the only organization I have so far found that allows me to think and express my own opinion as a part of my own learning journey.  Otherwise the online space has been my learning journey.

My learning journey began way back in 1998 at the Fast Company boards and at that time it was in a group created by Heath Row.   When I came across a new group called Yahoo, I wanted to challenge the idea of the group with something I called the "Chamber of Self-Expression" - the joke being that if anyone wants to be a member of my group, they had to leave it.  Yahoo groups had written to say that it would be shut down, nearly two decades later they have not, but I abandoned that space long ago.

"Me Thinkest" is more than just me expressing an opinion, it is an opinion which is based on metacognition (i.e. to think about one's own thinking) and opinion therefore based on learning and not an opinion based on broadcast.   This is a crucial difference and why I think the idea of me to we is so dysfunctional.   I support the idea of a healthy we from a healthy me.  This is my learning journey.

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