Never waste an elevator trip

There’s a reason they ask entrepreneurs, what is your elevator speech?

It’s because a lot can happen in an elevator. Two or more people meet. There are limmited distractions. You have an opportunity to share messages. You might make a transaction.

Anyway, that’s the logic of it.

Like most things, there’s more than logic in promoting the elevator speech.

You’re making a mad dash to decent coffee. Your hair may or may not be combed. If you’re twelve, you may be going to your parent’s room in your swim suit.

Pretty quickly, you know if it’s okay to talk or if this is the ubiquitous silent ride. On the other hand, for the pleasant, hair-mussed individual I just encountered in the elevator, he shared two singers who will change my life. This guy (he pointed to the YouTube video page on his cell phone as we were leaving the elevator) will change your life (he repeated again). There’s never been a better singer before him and there will never be a better one in the future. I took pictures of the respective YouTube pages. I probably will take a brief listen. Maybe I’ll be surprised. Either way, it doesn’t matter.

In the matter of two minutes, a guy I never met before and will probably never meet again, shared something. In that encounter, we did something that made humanity more resilient and tolerant to the continuing erosion of our human potential.

We are in a desperate state where the predominant messages are those of agenda, force, imposition, taking, selling, looking for marks, and trying to slide one past our fellow human being.

However, in this two minute meditation on being human - an elevator trip - two people met with scruffy hair, scruffy beards, trying to get the first hit of coffee, and nothing to say but here’s something you might like.

Elevators, if we will accept our humanity and let got of our scripts, are altars of the most Sacred kind. It is there that we can do ethereal business. First, though, we must put down our weapons. Then, we give each other a gift.

I’m reminded of the ancient African word, Ubuntu. Roughly, it means this:

I am because we are.

That’s what can happen in an elevator.

Never waste that moment. We are both craving each other’s attention.