This delivery system is important for two reasons: 

1. Our sites address the serendipitous and interactive nature of learning and the Web in a way that enables students to control their learning environment in the framework of a structured class; and
2. Unlike Khan Academy and other “task-oriented” sites that primarily train students for proleteriat-style work with low wages, our mechanisms are meant to foster critical thinking, logic, and creativity, three elements many say can’t be done online.

Of course what we launch in the fall will be an just-past-beta launch so we’re not expecting perfection. However, it will certainly be a vast improvement on the Learning Management Systems deployed by most major universities. 

One interesting discussion point that’s developed as we’ve worked on these classes, though, is this idea of The Big Lecture. We’ve spent a good deal of time examining compelling narrative and teaching architectures as delivered on the Web, and we all agree that it’s not enough to create a solid learning foundation, we’ve also got to develop an amazing inspirational foundation. To do that, we spend time examining Stanford’s AI course, TED-Ed Talks, television programs such as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, NPR’s Radio Lab, and a host of other places to create our own inspiration.

What this means is that we’ve got to become something more than just teachers, just storytellers, and just experts. We need to become Information Designers who can both understand a phenomenon down to the component part level and create inspirational narratives that inspire our students to think beyond our teaching.

One would rightfully argue that this is what we’re supposed to do in our traditional classrooms, and I suspect that many good professors do just that. However, the digital technologies at our disposal mean we can do so much more than just lecture in the class. We can create the Big Lectures.

For the Ball State Digital Media Minor, this means using our Teleplex and green screen rooms to build badass, high definition video. 

Of course, this takes time, energy, and effort. You can’t just walk into a room, shoot a 12-minute inspirational video, and slap on some effects. However, we think that the end result will be more than worth it.

In the next year, we’ll be experimenting with these videos, rolling them out to our enrolled students and before releasing at least some of what we’ve done to the general public.

I won’t say that our strategy is completely figured out, nor will I tell you our lectures are plotted out. They are in a place just past gestation and right before creation. But we’re moving in a direction that has everyone involved excited.

For my thesis, I’ll be exploring how we read and how that process is changing now that we have interactive environments such as touch-screen tablets and mobile phones. I’ve been working on a series of research studies on what we know about reading in these environments, and this is the latest version of my thinking: a 25-page rumination on reading, authorship, and design in interactive and transmedia environments.

It is neither peer reviewed as of yet nor submitted anywhere. There are a few studies I need to include in this; however, it’s my thinking on what authorship means today.

Thesis: We read differently in interactive environments, but we haven’t explored the idea of what interactivity means in a meaningful way.

Abstract: Digital, interactive environments have created a different “expectation literacy”from users. Unlike printed books, for instance, which have a very linear, author-driven format, interactive computer games have ceded much of the decision making to users. This idea of ceded-control and expectation literacy becomes important as society begins the transition from the printed book to the digital, interactive reading environment. This switch is making us consider three basic components of the reading experience: understanding how we read within interactive environments, determining exactly what it means to author a text in an interactive environment, and figuring out how design fits into the authorship process. Once we have answers (or at least once we are moving towards those answers), we can begin to understand how to make indigenous, interactive stories.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, though, it’s important for us to reflect on what we’ve accomplished.

On Thursday, April 27, we’ll launch TransIndy (as we call it) with:

• a fully interactive, tablet-based book that includes 45,000 words of text, and more than 100 design elements such as video, live web pages, parorama photographs, time lapse elements, interactive graphics, and podcasts (plus a series of clues that need to be solved to unlock special features)
• 3 museum websites dedicated to the history of New Harmony, the Golden Troupe, and the Working Men’s Institute
• 4 fiction websites, including Han’s Knight’s Insider’s Hour show page
• a live event that will happen in the 1,500-square foot space at the Indiana State Museum

As we near the end of this part of the project, we’ve tried to reflect back on where we’ve come. As such, Jenn and I have assembled a little fact sheet about the project. Here are some numbers (which will be designed much nicer in the coming days):

Number of words written: 155,592 (number of words in Harry Potter + the Philosopher’s Stone: 76,944)

• Number of words in our book, Avenue of Truth: 45,000
• Number of words in our textbook, Making Transmedia: 45,000
• Number of words in the Hans Knight Insider’s Hour radio show: 7,694
• Number of words in the video scripts: 3,335
• Number of words written for the museum websites: 18,824

Number of design elements created: 223

• Number of design elements in Part 1 of the book: 82
• Number of design elements in Part 2 of the book: 23
• Number of design elements in the CafePress store: 22

Number of web pages: 100 (and counting)

Number of audio files created: 51

• Number of podcasts: 17
• Total length of podcasts: 45:00
• Number of sound files: 34
• Total length of sound effects: 10:07

Number of video files created: 19 files

• Length of fiction elements: 13:00
• Length of non-fiction elements: 14:51

Number of audience contacts: 968

• Number of Twitter followers: 188
• Number of Facebook Likes: 97
• Number of audience recruited: 683

Number of people involved: 80

• Professors: 2
• Students in the class: 26
• Faculty, staff, students, friends, and helpful strangers: 52

Most of my students probably don’t know him. They should. At the very least, they should know this.

As part of that process, it’s now time to pull everything together to make sure that we’ve created a completed project that is both consistent in nature and elegant in design.

Using some old school HCI aggregation, 30 students set about editing well over 100 pages of TransIndy websites. Here’s an example of three sites that received the Post-It Note treatment.

Next, I’ll aggregate the data and create an affinity diagram to help organize our thinking, and coordinate the next iteration of the site.

I.

The role of reading in American society is changing. We need look no further for evidence than research studies aggregated in books such as The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) and Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses that examine the Millennial generation who neither read nor understand the fundamental cognitive structures developed by reading.

It is terrifying to read studies about the negative views of both students and professors in regards to reading. It’s even more harrowing when combined with my own experience teaching writing and storytelling.

There are days, it seems, that literate Western Culture is destined for the scrap heap, replaced by a visual, interactive world that requires less cognitive interaction and creates less educated people. (I say this summarizing the research and not as an editorial statement.)

But what if the reading problem isn’t as simple as forcing students to read and write more (which we should also do)? What if the problem is that authorship has changed in the digital, interactive age and writers — the keeper of words — have failed to understand their role within this environment?

After all, we know that learning and memorabilty are enhanced when words, images, and audio are combined in very specific ways. Shouldn’t an author creating stories for digital, interactive environments (e.g. the Nook Color) have the skill set to tell a story native to that environment?

And if authors aren’t creating stories native to the reading environment, it seems disingenuous and a bit anti-intellectual to blame the reader who abandons the simplistic word for more potentially complex, interactive environments.

In other words, as a writer and a technologist I have to consider the increasingly illiterate-ness of our culture from another point of view: What does it mean to be an author in the digital age?

II.

For Prof. Jennifer George-Palilonis and me, the answer to the question of what does it mean to be an author is more than “someone who tells a story” although that’s a pretty good place to start.

It turns out that figuring out what it means to author a story in a digital, interactive environment requires writers to think about writing in a very new way.

This past November at F+W’s StoryWorld conference in San Francisco, I moderated a conversation entitled “Look What Tech Can Do! How Will Technical Innovation Change the Business and Nature of Storytelling.” It was the kind of panel that angered traditionalist writers simply because of its name.

True to form, an audience member walked to the microphone and asked one of those leading questions (conveniently disguised as a statement) that writers in particular love to deploy as a form of pseudo-intellectualism.

“The story must come before the technology,” he said defiantly. “Without story,” he continued, “the technology is irrelevant.”

“Wrong”, I replied. “Look no further than the film or television industry.”

In the visual realm, story and technology are intricately tied together. Ask any screenplay writer about the story development process and they will tell you there are three stories: the one the writer creates, the one the director shoots, and the one the editor puts together. Each story is different and each is intimately changed by the technology used to tell that story.*

For writers in the digital, interactive world, technology and authorship are intricately tied together.

Of course, in the film or television industry, the three storytellers each have very defined roles with very specific skill sets:

• Writers create the written text of the story;
• Directors create the visuals of the story; and
• Editors create the pared down version of the story.

In the digital, interactive age, it’s less clear what skills are required and what the role is for authors.

III.

It’s odd to say that it’s unclear what the role of an author is in the digital, interactive age. On the surface, in fact, that notion seems absurd. After all, somebody has to write the story and whoever that person is surely must be the author.

In many cases, the author will continue to be the single person who writes the story. But what happens when the technology becomes intertwined with the story process? What happens when constructing the story turns into collaboration between a writer and designer? And what happens when cinematic elements become primary to the story?

What is the role of the author when the story, the technology, and the design are intertwined?

Last week, and I spent three hours locked in a conference room discussing two ideas for our book Making Transmedia:

• What would the design framework and the interface look like for our interactive book, which included prototyping navigation, fly-ins, and a handful of other elements; and
• How would we create a functional index for a “book environment” that contains no pages, no particular linearity, and no simple way to display multiple forms of media without removing the reader from a particular point in the book?

In the analog, printed world, these two questions wouldn’t even warrant a face-to-face meeting. Any photographs would be given a label within the written text by an author (e.g. Picture1) and then digital copies would be labeled, zipped, and sent along to a designer who may never speak to the author; and the index would be auto-generated and then checked by the author and copy editor.

In the digital, interactive world, we spent hours developing design metaphors for understanding how the book’s layout might work and creating low-fi paper prototypes of the display screen and interactivity in the book.

We tweaked the narrative elements of our story, we replaced large chunks of written text with graphics or video, and we developed a series of interactive frameworks that have profoundly changed the way the story will be told.

In a traditional world, I would be called the writer and Jenn would be the designer. This, however, seems antiquated. My storytelling and media creation is profoundly influenced by her design, and her design and graphics are intricately tied to how I am telling the story.

In this world, we can’t operate without a functional knowledge of both interaction design and multi-media storytelling. The more we explore each other’s world, the better we get at understanding how the story should be told and how the story should be delivered.

And the less we understand arbitrary distinctions of authorship because neither the content nor the design can exist alone.

IV.

When writers start talking about writing it’s easy to get lost in academic-think, falling down the intellectual rabbit hole and never quite finding the way back. With that in mind, I want to circle back to questions I posed at the beginning of this essay: What does it mean to be an author, and how might that change the way we read?

As for the first question, what does it mean to be an author, the answer is that we’re not quite sure just yet.

In the world Jenn and I have constructed, technology and authorship are intricately tied together. Each of our processes contributes, changes, and shapes both the story we are telling and the way we are telling it.

(You can see our description of the Making Transmedia book here.)

But we aren’t just spending our time learning how to work together. We’re also exploring what the technology palette allows us to do because we will never be master authors if we don’t understand the tools of the trade. For us that means getting our hands dirty with prototypes and testing. It means creating really bad work so that we can create really good work.

To be an author in the digital, interactive age means more than simply understanding words. It means understanding story, design, and technology. When we do that, authors — however they are defined — will have the opportunity to create grand narratives delivered in ways never before available (a phrase I am normally loathe to throw around).

Once we begin to create grand narratives, then, we may start to address our second question: How that may change the way we read?

For now, we don’t have an answer. What we do know is that younger people read less these days (in some measure because of interactive environments), and as I wrote in my first post “How We May Read,” we know when people do read in digital, interactive environments engage more with content but don’t necessarily remember the content with which they engaged.

It’s much easier to lay the blame on the lazy reader whose attention span we can no longer keep because it’s very hard to master the trade skills necessary to become an author in a digital, interactive world.

Once we do master those skills, however, we will see just how profound the digital, interactive environment can be for both authors and readers.

That future is up to us.

* I excluded in my argument the Game Studies’ blood sport between narratologists and ludologists (Murray, 2005), who can’t even agree if stories exist within game environments even though companies now routinely hire writers to create stories.

Works Cited

Arum, R., & Roksa, J. (2011). Academically Adrift: Limited learning on College Campuses. University of Chicago Press.

Bauerlein, M. (2008). The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Murray, J. H. (2005). The last word on ludology v narratology in game studies. DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing views of worlds in play.

I promise very soon Jane that I will return to that endeavor. There’s more to say and my research has been parsed now. Until then, I’m re-posting my work.

I.

In August 2010, I sat down with my friend and colleague Prof. Jennifer George-Palilonis, the head of the graphics sequence at Ball State University’s Department of Journalism, and asked her if she’d collaborate with me on a book project.

However, this wasn’t just a simple book project. This year long project, dubbed Transmedia Indiana, would have multiple layers:

• We would gather a group of 40-50 students from different majors (journalism, creative writing, public relations, history, theater) to plan, build, finish, and launch the book;
• The book would be something more than just an interactive, multi-media story — it would extend outside its digital pages and leak into the real world — but the actual book itself would only exist on tablets and eReaders; and
• This book would use real life artifacts from the Indiana State Museum in a manner similar to the book The DaVinci Code or the movie National Treasure.

For some, Transmedia Indiana may sound more like a game than a book. Others may see it nothing more than a glorified multimedia story.

For us, we saw this as a grand opportunity to study and learn how we may soon read and examine what that means for authors in the tablet age. Since the book would require readers to interact with our content and (possibly) the real world, we thought it might be interesting to study not only how people read within an interactive environment, but also how people are motivated to act in virtual and real spaces.

That was the real fun.

II.

The first time I heard the word “transmedia” was in early 2005. I had just taken a job at MIT’s Technology Review, the nation’s oldest technology magazine. I was in charge of creating its online operation, which meant amongst other elements I needed a plan to build out the editorial operation. One writer we had access to was Dr. Henry Jenkins, the man who founded the university’s Comparative Media Studies program. I’d met Henry in 2002 when John Borland and I were working on Dungeons & Dreamers, a book about game culture, and I was excited about the possibility of having his work on my site.

We went to lunch in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss his interests. He was working on a book about the convergence of media, he told me, and he wanted to explore some of that at Technology Review.

I agreed to his terms as soon as I possibly could. When I returned to work that day, I e-mailed John to tell him that I knew my days in journalism were coming to an end. This transmedia storytelling sounded way too interesting.

III.

The tablet and eReader environment create an interesting paradox for writers.

Dale Sheppard (2011) found that while students were more engaged in texts delivered in an interactive environment, they didn’t necessarily learn more. In fact, some became more passive as they anticipated the device delivering information, thus reducing the likelihood the human would be proactive in terms of information gathering.

That disturbing thought is offset by the reality that digital reading environments offer the potential to create complex, interconnected relationships that are easily navigate-able by readers, allowing us to reconceptualize what the experience of reading may look like (Kostic 2011). And we are starting to get a sense of what readers expect within this environment: searchability, access to companion information alongside the primary information, and shareability. (Lam 2009)

The interactivity engages readers, although it’s unclear how much they take away from the experience because of selective attention. Yet this device creates a framework for which we might tell increasingly complicated and networked stories.

The problem for authors (or writers? or storytellers?) is that nobody is quite sure what tools to use to tell stories within this environment, and there are no ubiquitous tools like WordPress that enable building stories within that environment.

As an academic and a writer, that means it’s time to research and prototype so we can develop the skills — and the tools — to tell rich stories that resonate with readers.

IV.

Ask the wrong person to define transmedia storytelling and you’ll end up on the business end of a rant. Jenkins (2006) initially defined the term loosely as a story that takes place either across multiple delivery mediums or as a story world in which multiple stories take place (e.g. Star Wars and its companion comic books, games, books, ect.) For many, his second definition — which sounds more like an entertainment franchise and less like a story — became his de facto position on the subject.

Brooke Thompson (2010) built upon that definition, focusing her efforts on the interactive elements within a story. Multiple media stories are those with no interaction (e.g. a story with a picture and video that sit separate); cross-media stories are those with one-way or limited interaction (e.g. you read a story, then click a video, then listen to audio); transmedia stories are those with complex, spider-web-like interactions that encourage exploration across mediums.

Jenkins, Thompson, and countless others are helping the framework to tell these stories even if we haven’t quite yet figured out how those stories will “look” and “feel” within the tablet and eReader environment.

V.

What’s missing is something beyond frameworks, software tools, and storytelling. We’re missing pleasure, which is part of a strand of research called Human Factors that blends traditional usability (e.g. how many seconds does it take you to click that button?) with psychology, cognitive science, and pleasure in order to understand how the people within a system affect that system.

For instance: There is an “ideo-pleasure” associated with purchasing environmentally sound products that may override a device that is less functional or that costs more. Our pleasure centers impact our relationship with the objects we use.

In the case of reading printed books, there is a “social pleasure” associated with pulling out your favorite novel on the subway. People can see you reading, and the book says something to those around you about the kind of person you are in a very general way. Remove that social pleasure, and the act of reading is changed. (I’ll address the pleasure people often express with books — “but I just love the feel of the paper” — in a few weeks.)

This tablet-based environment removes some of that particular social pleasure. What’s in its place? We don’t yet know. Maybe transmedia narratives will create an agency within real space that replicates that type of “social pleasure” that has been lost. Or maybe authors who understand how to create that within a tablet-based environment will have a leg up on those who don’t.

VI.

We’re nearly 3 months into our Transmedia Indiana project, and we’re about to launch our first research study as we try to suss out what makes a good reading experience within the interactive, tablet environment.

I’ve also launched a companion project, a two-year research study, in which I’ll be building personas of readers by crunching data taken from surveys and interviews in order to better understand how, where, and why we read. (That’s my not to subtle pitch for you to take my survey and pass it along to your friends!)

Along the way, Jenn and I will be prototyping, testing, and writing about our research both in peer-reviewed journals and in places like Jane’s blog, where we can bridge the gap between research and the real world.

Expect dispatches from me two Mondays each month (mostly), and feel free to follow my research at my teaching site or my informal writing about my work on my personal site.

Works Cited

Jenkins, H. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. NYU Press.

Jordan, P.W. 1998. “Human factors for pleasure in product use.” Applied ergonomics 29 (1): 25–33.

Kostick, A. 2011. “The Digital Reading Experience: Learning from Interaction Design and UX-Usability Experts.” Publishing Research Quarterly 27 (2) (June): 135-140.

Lam, P., S.L. Lam, J. Lam, and C. McNaught. 2009. “Usability and usefulness of eBooks on PPCs: How students’ opinions vary over time.” Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 25 (1): 30–44.

Sheppard, D. 2011. “Reading with iPads–the difference makes a difference.” Education Today (11) (August): 12-15.

Thompson, Brooke. 2010. Towards a definition of transmedia…: Brooke Thompson: GiantMice.com. Giant Mice. April 16. http://www.giantmice.com/archives/2010/04/towards-a-definition-of-transmedia/.

I’m working on a two-year research project that will examine how people read, extract what makes the experience pleasurable, and prototype how that experience can be re-created in a digital environment.

There two reasons I’m doing this:

• I’ve returned to graduate school, both to update my current skill set and to learn new frameworks for thinking, and this project will be the eventual final project for my schooling; and
• I believe reading — and storytelling — is at the heart of humanity, and as we move into the digital reading age, I want to explore what that means for us.

If you have some time, please take a few minutes to help me understand how you read today.

My hope is to reach 250 people so that I can create a series of personas related to reading. While I will be publishing this work academically, I will be releasing the results of the survey publicly. (Information wants to be free.)

But I’ll also be sharing this journey with my students (and you) in hopes that they begin to see science, creativity, and school in a different way.

**

In 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush — the man who founded the National Science Foundation and revolutionized how Americans perceived science — wrote an amazing think piece in The Atlantic called “As We May Think.”

I make many of my students read this essay because I believe it’s important for them to understand ideas such a long-term planning, practical futurist thinking, and aspirational development.

I also want them to understand that Bush — and thousand of other scientists — had a vision for the world we live in today, one permeated by “thinking” devices that enable us to communicate, connect, and network in real-time environments. (J.C.R. Licklider would dub this phenomenon, “Man-Computer Symbiosis” in his equally prescient paper.)

The take-away: the world we live in today was created by people who did serious research that led to creative thinking about how the world may look after they were dead.

That way of thinking is the best of who we are a humans, which is always a positive message to send to people. However, it’s also a powerful reminder that we cannot build that which we cannot conceive.

Creativity is born from science, from observation, from measurement, from analysis. It may not always be formalized, but all creativity springs from that well.

**

As I describe my project to people, I sense a palpable excitement as if we have started to tap into an idea that has existed unspoken.

The goal of the study — and the prototypes — isn’t to define interactivity, or understand game mechanics, or find out how large buttons should be on eReaders. Instead, the goal is to understand what people find pleasurable about paper books and then imagine how that might be replicated — not exactly, but metaphorically — in a digital environment.

We don’t want to recreate the paper reading experience on a tablet; we want to port the pleasures of reading paper books to the digital environment.

We are thinking less about tools, and more about emotions. We are trying to understand the affective tools required by the 21st century author so they can write (or maybe better, create) a modern digital book.

Much of this will be designed by hardware manufacturers in the coming years, something over which we have no control; however, we live in a time where software tools do enable us to explore, experiment, evaluate, and publish into the world while doing the kind of science that will help generations of storytellers that arrive long after my time here has passed.

**

I feel the need to inject this thought at this point: I am not yet schooled in the art of hard science.

The work I am conducting now is part of Interactive Design, which uses soft scientific methods to gather initial data sets in order to extract requirement information for a project and to develop working personas that will aid in prototype development.

This isn’t to suggest that I’m not using scientific methods; I am. As my distinguished colleague Dr. Michael Holmes has pointed out, though, this is not strictly the hard science approach to design. That will come later as I become more steeped in that process. (He’s also prone to pointing out that much of what we see in Humanities these days is called hard science even when it’s clearly not. You can imagine, I enjoy his company quite a bit.)

I share this tidbit of information because I believe we live in a time and place where the word science has lost its meaning. People no longer understand the process of the scientific method, confusing it with opinion and theoretical frameworks that manifest as stories (e.g. Creationism).

Science relies upon hypothesis, objective measurement and testing, evaluation, peer review, and analysis. It is a long, slow process that does not operate in the same time construct of the 24-hour news cycle or the always-on Interent.

Science is a journey to knowledge, not a story to dogma.

**

This little two-year study we are conducting falls well short of Bush’s view of the modern, digitized, networked world. This is just a small cog in the wheel of that machine. It is, in that sense, what science is all about: hyphothesizing, building, testing, measuring, and evaluating in hopes of creating a new bit of knowledge.

Ultimately, I hope my work will be used by publishing companies, universities, writers, and teachers developing digital books, but I have no expectations about that.

We are following his vision, deconstructing the book (which, ironically, he said would likely never go away in his article) in hopes of helping all of us think better, a foundational idea of Licklider’s in “Computer as a Communication Device.”

This is the joy of science, of research, of creativity, of storytelling. We are part of a long vision of what we can be a humans, a vision that is constantly under re-evaluation and re-architecture.

I hope that you will join us along the way.

But it’s important, I think, to also let my kids know that not every situation works out in your favor. Despite your best efforts, the world may conspire against you and very bad things may happen. A bright outlook does not lead to a bright outcome.

This particular point does not absolve you from the righteousness of the Tigger Talk; however, it does mean to fully prepare you, you must know the other side of Tigger: that sometimes very bad things will happen.

I bring this up because a student called me last night. This student is in a bad spot, and they were looking for something although I suspect they weren’t sure what.

I know that place, the emptiness that comes as you prepare to face consequences. It wasn’t so very long ago I stood in front of a judge and pled guilty to a D.U.I after spending a very long day in jail. I went before the judge without hiring a lawyer or contesting the facts. I had done the crime, I said, and I couldn’t very well be a teacher who demanded students be accountable for their actions if I wasn’t accountable for mine.

I was terrified as I stood there. (“I would very much like to not go to jail,” I said when the judge asked me if I had anything else to say before sentencing.) I know that dark place my student resided, and I knew there was nothing I could tell them to make it better.

Yesterday — as I am more often than I care to admit — I was a lone voice in a dark hole.

Just a few minutes ago, I sent this email to the student at the end of what was likely the worst day of their life. As I wrote it, I realized what I wanted to say to one, I wanted to say to all.

[Coincidentally, it's 1 year and a day from this Open Letter to My Students. There must be something about December 11.]

The Only Advice I Have That Really Matters

I’ve been thinking about you since our conversation. I came downstairs and told my fiance that I expected you were going to have one of the worst sleeps of your life. I do not wish that kind of night upon anyone, but as you are finding in life, these kinds of things happen upon us all.

In your case, it was self-inflicted, which in some sense makes it worse. You will re-live those moments repeatedly for the rest of your life. That’s the vicious part of memory: it’s capability to rewind and play in the quiet moments.

There is nothing you can do to erase it. I wish I could tell you there was. What I can tell you is this: regardless of what happened today, your future will be determined not by what’s on the memory tape, but by the actions you take in the coming days, weeks, and months. We are not defined by our mistakes, we are defined by how we deal with those mistakes. The measure of you as a man will be taken then.

And don’t be mistaken: you are not a child anymore. People will take notice of what you do going forward, and these things will follow you. They will become the yardstick by which you are measured.

That should give you some comfort because the one thing you control is your actions. You can determine how you grow from this, how you act from this, and the kind of man you become from this.

There is no way for anyone else to guide you on this path, but we can — and we will — offer you guidance.

Here is my best piece of advice: you will know you are doing the right things when you can lay your head on the pillow at night, and the committee inside your head is silent and your heart is light.

That’s the best lighthouse in the universe.

We all make mistakes, the question for you now is: what’s next?