A year after I was asked to get M. C. Hammer a seat at President Obama’s “Facebook Live” town hall, I found myself on a boat on a sunny day on the San Francisco Bay, headed to Oakland with M. C. Hammer himself and one of my investors, Jody Gessow. We were on our way to Jack London Square in Oakland to check out a potential production space for my new venture: Zuckerberg Media.
When going to Oakland, who better to bring along than hometown hero M. C. Hammer? And what better way to go than by boat?
The sun glinted off the choppy waters as we sailed beneath the Bay Bridge.
Hammer turned to me. “Randi,” he said, “I’ve got an idea. We should create a production company together.”
“I love it!” I said. “What do we call it?”
We both fell to musing.
Suddenly it came to me. “Z = MC2!” I shouted.
Silence.
That was it. I had just officially out-nerded everyone on the boat. But then Hammer laughed.
As the boat sailed on to Oakland, I caught a glimpse of San Francisco behind me and had one of those terribly poignant personal moments when you sigh and remark to yourself about how strange life is and how quickly everything changes.
Not that long ago I was shoveling snow with my brother and sisters in a Dobbs Ferry cul-de-sac. It felt like just moments ago I was belting my heart out as Peggy in 42nd Street at Horace Mann and “stopping to smell the flowers” in music class. I remembered singing “Zombie Jamboree” on stage with the Harvard Opportunes at my first concert, and then, in the blink of an eye—four years later—my last. I remembered the Naked Cowboys, Midtown drinks on warm summer Fridays, and getting that BrentT instant message. I remembered the plane ticket to California to work for The Facebook, a teary good-bye with Brent, followed by an even more teary reunion, a love affair, a marriage-by-Outlook invite, and a beautiful blond boy named Asher, whose happy photos fill my Facebook Timeline.
I took my phone out of my pocket and began to flip through photos of Asher, looking for a good one to post. There weren’t any, so I started to photograph my view of San Francisco, but I stopped myself, put the phone away, and turned back to ask Hammer some more questions about Oakland, his career, and his life.
This was no time to be on the phone. There would be time for that later. The little five-ounce communication device I held in my hand was something directly out of Star Trek. Always-online smartphones and social media have completely changed the way everyone is interacting. The previously solid boundary lines between friends, lovers, families, work, society, and celebrities are all beginning to blur. Technology seems to be making things both easier and harder at the same time. We have at our disposal incredible communication devices, but we seem to forget how to communicate with one another.
For me, the way out of the mess is understanding something essential about the tools of technology, that they are exactly that: tools—meant to make life better, not worse. And by living an authentic life online, we begin to understand how to use these tools to achieve a proper tech–life balance.
And so, like most stories go, it all comes back to Hammertime.
As M. C. Hammer once said, “You either work hard or you might as well quit.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I plan to keep working hard for as long as I can.
We will all have career highs and lows, money gained and lost. We will have tremendous victories and crippling losses. We will have baby photos, graduation photos, wedding photos, and then . . . baby photos all over again. We will have close friends who disappoint and strangers who delight. But isn’t it that sharing, that vulnerability, that human connection that makes life so wonderfully worth living?
It’s easy to hide behind a screen, a text message, a photo, an e-mail. The hard part is truly getting out there and living your life, being true to yourself and connecting with others. Technology has shown us a new world. But there’s work to be done to make that world a beautiful, hospitable place for our generation and the generations to come.
Work hard. Play hard. Post hard. Tweet hard. But most important, live hard. Because we are way too legit to quit.