In middle school, I had one of the most incredible science teachers who ever walked the face of the earth. He threw aside an entire calendar quarter’s lesson plan in order to enable us to participate in a contest to write and create a public service announcement about “How I can Change the World” for PBS. It was the first time we’d all been treated as adults, and given a reasonable deal to participate in: take the contest seriously, and we could use class time (all of it) to participate; slack off and we were on our own. You might think that a bunch of 13-year-olds would find this a difficult deal to entertain, but somehow, we were fine with it. We brainstormed, we had tons of great ideas, we learned Robert’s Rules of Order and settled on a main theme. We just had one problem from there… It was hard to launch from “idea” mode into “productive” mode.

I was a young, overweight ubernerd in this class. I was unpopular, a mediocre writer, and a terrible artist — the class wasn’t going to be motivated by a sitcom-style speech from me, and I wasn’t about to write a vision document or throw out some storyboards. But there was one thing I was halfway decent at. I could write simple computer programs. And in those days, the artistic limits of computer games included pixel art with 16 colors; I was no star, but you could recognize things. Frustrated at our lack of progress, I took a weekend to assemble what I’d now call an animatic, showing a take on what our core idea might look like. The weekend turned into a few hours of coding some animations and motioin, many more trying to hammer pixels into recognizable shapes, and even some primitive sound synthesis to liven things up. Monday morning, I sneaked into class early and tried to show this demo to the teacher, who delayed and had me present to the entire class at once instead. And so, a room full of teenagers watched my homespun art for a minute or so.

Time for some honesty: that animatic was pretty much crap, and no bits of it made it into the end product. But seeing stuff moving on a TV screen inspired a couple of more visually-minded folks in the class to attack the storyboards with new vigor. Our class went on to win the regional competition, which enabled us to work with our stellar local PBS station to film the actual PSA spot. Their top-notch assistance and editing helped us win the national competition, and our PSA was shown nationwide. Pretty exciting stuff for a bunch of kids from a relatively backwater town!

The important thing I learned from this experience was that I had a unique voice — one that could motivate other people. The electronic medium turned out to be the way to release it. Your voice may be to carefully write perfect proposals, or you may be that guy who can sketch so compellingly on the whiteboard that how could we not have seen that ourselves already? You are comfortably speaking with your powerful voice; so comfortable that you may not even recognize it when you do. Take note over a few days. When do the people around you react positively? How did you just communicate? Was it spoken, was it your body language, was it a kick-ass prototype demonstration? When you know where your voice comes from, you gain the ability to use it consciously to help everyone you come into contact with.