Week 95 - "Age is no guarantee of experience." "And youth is no guarantee of innovation."

Hey, everyone!

The quote this week is courtesy of Q (I don't know the actor's name) and Daniel Craig's James Bond, respectively, from Skyfall.

It's funny--we haven't been given a huge amount of direction as missionaries (we've been trying to come up with that direction for the missionaries that we work with). We were talking about it with some other missionaries today, and it's almost as though the expectation is, "You're young! You know social media! You can do it!" and that's all we're given. That's an exaggeration, but sometimes it can feel that way. The lines of communication aren't buzzing, and some things get lost between different missionaries--there's a missionary who was a social media specialist last transfer and never got these slides that every social media specialist is supposed to get, so he's been flying blind for a full six weeks. It's sort of the blind leading the blind, but we're trying to fix that. And we're all new to this, so "[mission] age is no guarantee of experience." Yay for being a pioneer... No, but honestly, it's really good. We're getting our bearings, and hopefully we're allowing other missionaries to get theirs. We're working on some things right now to basically get people reoriented and help them understand what their role is in social media missionary work, how they can contribute, and so forth. We're trying to build a foundation and a framework, because it feels like a lot of things have been rushed, and we need to center ourselves and really figure out what we're doing instead of just going a direction for the sake of moving.

Honestly, there's not a whole lot else to report. We've powered through finishing a 13-part series teaching missionaries some basics of content creation, and now we're trying to hash out some content strategy and delegation type stuff. I don't want to send a super-short email, but there honestly isn't really much else to talk about. It's been a short week, since it was the week after transfers, and that's really all we've been working on. I used the story of "Stone Soup" to try to explain one of our ideas. That was cool. Also, every area in the zone has a page, and we want to help them get a hold of those, so we're going to talk to them about how it's like owning a pet: You've got to feed it (post content), or it will die, and you've got to pay attention to it, or it will get bitter.

It's been hard to find a balance, but we're trying. Also, this week Elder Bennett is going to meet us remotely for 5 or 6 90-minute meetings in the mornings starting tomorrow.

But... yeah. That's really basically it. Sorry. This is probably the shortest one I've ever written. Hopefully I'll have more to talk about next week.

Now that I'm looking at photos, I'm remembering a thing or two. I gave a talk for online church yesterday. That was cool. But that's the last thing I have to report.

Elder Davis

We visited a member on Sunday, and I saw a GT-R. That was neat.