If you’re like me, you got wrapped up in the Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Letterman, Kimmel, et al fiasco. You likely laughed, you likely shook your head wondering how NBC could decide to give Jay Leno another show and you’ve likely since forgotten about it. If you didn’t follow the drama, here’s a link to Conan’s farewell speech. In it he admonishes and pleads with viewers, especially his young fans, to avoid cynicism. To me  this was the one take away worth its weight from the month long entertaining broadcast battle (aside from the Kimmel interview). I was thinking about those words the other day. And it struck me that cynicism is death.

Cynicism keeps things from happening. Cynicism sits comfortably in the bleachers and tosses jabs to people in the field working and expressing their craft. Cynicism is safe. Cynicism is guarded, no need to be vulnerable, what’s the point anyway? I’m sure we could go on and on about what causes this behavior, I instead thought about cynical behavior as a stereotype. And although most stereotypes are painfully oversimplified view of a person or thing they are generally founded in some small truth. What is the truth that would lead one, or a whole generation, to be cynical?

To me the opposite of the cynic is something I’m equally guilty of. And it’s equally destructive, just in a more friendly fashion. The dreamer. This person has started more businesses in their head than they can keep track of. They’ve written three to four screenplays, one of which actually has a title typed in an otherwise empty word document. They’re going to spend some time in Europe, next year. They also live at their parent’s house.

Now the cynic is no saint. But they sometimes have a touch more insight and realism than the dreamer. They see what it takes to get somewhere and they see that boy dreamer over here isn’t up to snuff. From one perspective they’re calling a spade a spade. On the other hand they’re not doing anything to progress their own dreams nor to help the dreamer see his to fruition. Both the cynic and the dreamer are guilty of the same crime expressed in two distinct manners.

Talk.

The dreamer talks of doing and does not. The cynic talks about failure of trying to do and does not. Recently I took some jabs at Seth Godin on my twitter. Not necessarily because of anything about him, but because of the fanfare and drooling his game changing thinking seems to elicit. Then my friend from New York shared with me Godin’s talk from 2009’s Behance Conference. Although his intro is stupid and saved by his reputation (what was I saying about cynicism?) the meat of his message took the words out of my mouth that I had been stewing over to write this blog post about. Nicely played Mr. Godin, almost a full year prior, before I even had this thought, or Conan had his speech. With that said.

Talk less. Do more. *

* – This take away may make this entire post extremely ironic. I guess that depends on how I spend the rest of my day.