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As a technology pastor, I am constantly working to make the mission of the church compatible with the technology that is used in the church. One of the blogs that I read regularly posted this article and I’m just buzzing about how to use these concepts in reaching the lost! Here’s the link to the article – I’d recommend reading it! I’ll probably work through this a bit later and try to make it relevant to to the work that I do.

A couple of quotes from the article that I want to remember for later!

The reality is that people are passionate about some things, and not at all about others. They love some activities and don’t care about others. The activity is what they’re passionate about (not the technology) and when they’re passionate enough they’ll learn the necessary technology as they find appropriate. Passion depends upon the activity in question.

It simply means that technology came along to help them practice their passion better, and so they adopted it because the value proposition made sense to them.

The activity is the thing to focus on, not the technology. Technology enables the activity, and people will get excited about the technology if they’re excited about the activity first and the benefits of the technology has been explained to them. But you don’t make passionate photographers by showing them lenses, you make passionate photographers by showing them pictures that rip your heart out.

A much larger population (although much more fractured) are those people who are already passionate about some activity or other, and can become passionate about new technology as it relates to that activity, but they just haven’t been introduced properly.

In other words, the task is not always to make people passionate about something, it’s to show them how technology (or your product, etc) can make them even better at what they’re passionate about.

Technology is merely the enabler of that activity.

So while yes, you should take advantage of early adopters, learning from them and focusing some of your effort on them, you can’t assume that just because people aren’t early adopters they’re not passionate. Passion is more about doing an activity well than it is about using the latest technology to do it.

I hope Joshua won’t mind me posting these quotes – they are just way too good to not share and I don’t want to miss them later!