My brother worked for TRW before the aerospace company was purchased by Northrop Grumman. As a child I remember him finding and playing with a plastic hovercraft; he started working at TRW during summers while he was a college student. When I had a question about computers or the web I asked my brother, who would later work on the communication system for the Cassini project. "If Cassini ever stops sending back images and data," he once said, "JPL will send a car for me."
The other great teacher in my life was my dad. He was a brain and nerve researcher, and worked for 25 years on the spiral electrode that now enables the deaf to hear. A lifelong learner, he was able to explain the most complicated science concept so that a child could understand it. Science was a topic often discussed over dinner, even before my brothers, sisters and said our first words. While he was Dr. Yuen at work, the kids next door called him "Ted."
When I attended USC, visiting agents, heads of studios, top writers, entertainment attorneys, directors, producers and others in the film and publishing industries talked about how hard it is to get a project produced or published and even more difficult to reach an audience.
I saw directors such as Irvin Kershner study new technology and marvel at the new things it would allow them to create. I heard an attorney who had worked for the Writer's Guild talk about how a decision, made by the brightest minds, about a new way of distributing content (the DVD), would eventually cost writers and agents millions of dollars in income for a single project.
I discovered a playground when my brother, who worked for our college's radio station, took me along when he attended NAB. I've followed their publications for many years, and read about content distribution, and publishing and film industry news every day. NAB show follows me on Twitter, and once contacted me, urging me to become a social media influencer at their show.
That's how my philosophy about content creation and distribution was formed.
Several years ago I began writing to the various directors in my department, urging them to create a voice for the health sciences organization where I work. I now believe that creating great content encompasses far more than voice.
A few years ago one of the VPs called me into her office. She had made it a priority to know each of her new employees and valued the unique skills each of us brought to the organization. "Philanthropy writing requires the ability to move hearts," she said. She then said that the writing I did was able to do this. She had searched for seminars or courses that taught this, and hadn't been able to find any. She wanted me to work with the writers on campus to teach them how to create this type of writing.
Great writing captures, as clearly as a photograph or video, the miracle of a high school cheerleader, leaping joyously as a gazelle, the wheelchair that she once needed for mobility unused. It's not about writing about how a patient has been healed or the results of a research study, it's showing how being healed has changed everything in that person's life and has changed people in their lives. It's focusing on real peoples' lives, changed because of research.
This is the type of content that will never age, will be read and shared and shared again.
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