How to Spread Your Ideas: Write a Manifesto

Three years ago, I started Wrecked for the Ordinary, an online magazine for spiritual misfits, with some friends and colleagues.

The basic idea was this: when people have a paradigm-shifting experience, they feel “wrecked” or “ruined.” And that’s alienating. These experiences leave people feeling isolated and even a little weird.

So, we (some colleagues, friends, and I) wanted to do something about it. We wanted to use stories to change lives.

We knew that we had something to say. The question was how to do it. We figured starting a community was the way to go.

We were wrong.

We started Wrecked with the intent of conveying the following message:

1. It’s okay to be weird.
2. You’re not alone.

We launched a website where people could share stories about their personal experiences with being “wrecked.” This morphed into articles and commentaries about faith, culture, and life-change.

Three years later, I feel like there is still something left to be said.

The stories were pieces of a larger puzzle. And I kept wondering if people were getting confused when they stumbled upon a random article about orphans in Africa or AIDS in India. I thought that it might be useful to provide a 50,000-foot view of our message.

So, I wrote a manifesto. (You can read it here.)

A manifesto is a great way to condense your message into a short, all-encompassing format. People can read it, print it, email it to their friends, or feed it to their dog. By reading it (if you’ve written it well), they get a fuller understanding of your core message, which you have may have been trying to communicate (through your blog, website, Twitter profile, etc.) for years.

This is the reason why people write books instead of just publishing a series magazine articles. Sometimes, you have more to say than can be contained in short, bite-sized pieces. A community can’t do this.

When you have something powerful to say — revolutionary, even — you need a manifesto.

As a point of reference, here are a few different types of manifestos:

• Wrecked for the Ordinary: A manifesto for misfits by Jeff Goins (This was, of course, the most-recent manifesto I wrote and published on ChangeThis.com, a great site for spreading your ideas.)
• A Jesus Manifesto by Len Sweet and Frank Viola (This is a faith-based manifesto for Christians who are longing for a more revolutionary faith. The authors just use a wordpress blog to publish it.)
• Brainwashed by Seth Godin (This is a business manifesto by one of the world’s most popular bloggers, also hosted on ChangeThis.)
• Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (There’s no denying the impact that this short pamphlet had on the world. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you convert to the ideals expressed in this document, but it gives you an idea of the kind of power that a manifesto can carry).

If you’ve got something to say that can’t be contained in a simple article or blog post, maybe it’s time to write a manifesto.

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