Thursday, August 20, 2015

The Infinite Amplification Potential of Smiles

Smiles propagate.

My wife recently connected with our son in a special way, exchanging links to music videos on YouTube via text message. Deeper conversations and more sharing followed. Two people, smiling, happy to have connected over something special. She shared the texts and videos with me, and then there were three...

Shortly afterwards, we had lunch with Allen and Gayle Giese, and shared the story with them. And they smiled. Hmmmm. Then there were five.

Allen and Gayle wrote it up in a blog post for Ride to Awareness and shared a link to it on Facebook. So far, 123 people have "liked" that post and 11 have re-shared the link. I don't have the stats for their blog, but let's just say "even more" people saw it there. Many many more have probably now seen it, and I bet many of them smiled, too.

Not bad, right? From 2 people smiling, to 3, to 5, to 123+, to ...?

The smiles of ordinary people can now propagate beyond the physical rooms they're in thanks to all this amazing modern technology. The amplification factor is astonishing: you can literally start a chain of events that leads to thousands of people smiling just by sharing something cool with someone you love.

So go ahead, share some smiles. :-)


Continuing the conversation, my son sent me another link to a YouTube music video just a few days ago. It has some awesome tech in it, and is a very cool piece of music, with some stunning visuals, physical effects, and super slo-mo video sequences. I posted a link to it on Facebook, and got an "IN. Credible." comment from my cousin, who immediately re-shared it, too.

Then, I'm poking around related links from the dude's YouTube video and other stuff he's done, and find him on Twitter, with an awesome retweet near the top of his recent Twitter activity. So awesome, in fact, I had to retweet it myself. It was that good. Now when I tweet something, or retweet, it automatically goes to my Facebook page, too. My daughter picked up on this one, and re-shared my retweet to her Facebook friends. And now my brother's Mom did too (sounds weird, right?, but true...), just now, as I was writing this. 2 shares, 8 likes here, a few more there ... this one actually made me laugh, not just smile.

The geography of all this, by the way, is worldwide. From New Zealand to Albany, NY to South Florida to Boston to Connecticut to Arkansas to Seattle to ...?


Smiles now propagate across the globe via the new Social Ether. Please use ALL THE MEDIA to full effect to help us all get a little bit happier...


  • Text messages
  • YouTube videos
  • Actual Lunch
  • Blog
  • Facebook
  • Web pages
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Vine



If you think something's cool, share it with somebody. You never know. You may end up making the entire world smile.

Propagate. Amplify. Smile, it's almost Friday! :-D