Humans are Built to Create Meaning

At a workshop, I slowly wrote the following letters on the whiteboard: O-M-A-H-A. With a room full of motivated leaders, I asked them a simple question:

What does this mean? 

Hoping there would be some diversity in the answers, the first hand went up. “Payton Manning!,” a guy in the back shouted. Hmm.. I hadn’t heard that one before, but I chuckled because it’s funny (and true). Quarterback Peyton Manning, used to yell “OMAHA! OMAHA!” at the line of scrimmage as a part of his communication to his offensive teammates. 

Another hand went up: “It’s the capital of Nebraska!” True, now we’re cooking. A quiet history buff in the front row offered, “Omaha Beach is one of the most important sites of heroism for the Americans who stormed the beaches of Normandy to fight the Nazis.” Huge meaning there! 

I offered that the room was making my point. For me, it’s a completely different meaning. If you ask any college baseball player what Omaha means to them, they will likely have tears welling up in their eyes as they tell you about the mecca of the College World Series. It’s the pinnacle of the sport. 

Fundamentally we have this five letter word that we assign meaning to as it occurs to us. While it’s an oddly specific example, it is a reminder that humans are constantly assigning meaning to the world around them to make sense of it. 

The beauty in knowing this fact is that if you know you’re making meaning, you have some agency over this process. Are you creating meaning that is helpful to you? Are your stories that create meaning putting you in position to relate to the world around you in an upward spiral way or a downward spiral way? 

It’s how you choose to see it. It’s about the meaning you choose to make.