As I sit here, listening to my good friend and trusted contributor, Yardley, we realize that the best writing we do is through the power of teamwork. In listening to him, I realize that the best we have done so far is when he is writing with me as coauthors of the Bayou Observant. In hearing his tales about nefarious professors at our university, I do remember something that has been apparent to me from years past: the power of collaboration is strong, and in our case, very useful.
Jump back to three months ago, when Yardley and I were also speaking with another entrepreneurial spirit named Jacob, we realized both the potential we had and the lack of funds to follow up. Jacob, as explorative as he is, gave us the great idea and, sadly, the opposing view of a podcast based around this blog site. (Thank you, Yardley, for helping my diction). We decided, as collaborators, that a podcast is not in our wheelhouse, yet. We realized the medium of our content did not matter, we have some thing to say and we will say it the best we know how. After all, we are writers first, and a spoken word version is not quite in our realm yet.
Who is to say what is missed through the lack of collaboration? I would surmise that it is quite a lot. Wasted intellect, wasted time, worthless partners, et cetera. As this document is being written, aided by the hand of Anheuser-Busch, we are discerning such topics. The conclusion came to us as clear as day: we are better together than alone. With two people writing this article, there is an even amount of ideas created as there are mistakes corrected.
The creativity of collaboration cannot be discredited. The greatest benefit to collaborating is the expansion of creativity. Though each of us are creative in our own way, we are nonetheless confined to our own creativity. When we collaborate and bring our minds together, we allow new ideas and perspectives to broaden our horizons and free us from our intellectual cage. In the process of writing this article, we have come up with a thousand ideas of which 0.01% make it to print. Can anyone imagine the potential of collaboration directed in a different field? A different hobby?
The good, bad, and ugly, unfortunately, all go hand in hand. Luckily, through the powers of collaboration, we have been able to determine those ideas which we deem bad and ugly. We invite you to open your mind to the powers of collaboration that we have put forth. If you have read this far and still disagree, we hope you will experiment with collaborating before writing it off.
If you do not accept our message at first, please consider the words of famed rapper Vanilla Ice:
“Stop! Collaborate and listen!”
Bayou Observant 