Special moment? Do anything you can to preserve it. Take a picture, scribble a note or steal a memento. Mark the occasion with celebration. Indulge in vice or break your own rules if you have to. Whatever it takes to help you hold onto the moment forever. Do not count on memory; it may fail you later. More likely than not, your recollection of the event will lapse from relevancy. Even the slightest trinket or scribble can help it all come back when you least expect it. Life is made up of poignant moments. It is important to revisit, track and learn from them. Nostalgia helps you recontextualize the things that are most important in life. If you collect anything, collect memories.
Monthly Archives: January 2012
You can do anything…
…with genuine passion as your alley. Your passion must be sincere; you will not overcome the steepest obstacles if you merely lust over the hype train. With a true fire burning at heart, nothing can stop you. The destination may look or feel different than you projected, but the passion helping you get there will not let you down.
Can’t Solve Your Problem?
More often than not, you trap yourself in a logic loop by staring at the same problem for too long. Take a break. Change your scenery. Revisit the puzzle with a fresh set of eyes. Your brain struggles to invent a different approach without new variables to experiment with. While inspiration or counseling may help, tweaks as simple as snacks or fresh air can alter your mental state enough to tackle your situation from a different angle. If you have the time, sleep on it. Trust in the change of pace and you may find the answer you are looking for.
Reputation Counts
It never hurts to have a team of people on standby to support or validate you. Recommendations, trust and loyalty go a very long way. When it comes to leadership, it does matter what other people think. You may never shake hands on a deal with someone you do not know if naysayers stand between you. Good luck even making it in the door. On the other hand, passionate introductions from a handful of reputable people will secure you meetings and may even tie the knot for you. Connections are worth their weight in gold.
Work hard, lend a hand, expect nothing, respect everyone and love what you do. Reputation will follow.
If You’re Going to Spend The Money…
Don’t regret it. Just put the money down, enjoy or learn from the investment, and move on. Cut your losses and figure out how to move forward. There’s no point at all in tarnishing a good evening by despairing about dollars and cents. Live the good life.
Early Bird Gets the Attention
If you are first in line, there will be more water in the pool to make a bigger splash. If you hit the market first, it will be much easier to make some noise. Get in people’s queues first, and you will be read before the next guy. I have seen a direct correlation to the number of people who read my blog per day and the time of day I post – the earlier, the better. The early bird gets the worm. Or in this case, the attention.
There is a flip side to being first: a responsibility to quality. While you may secure for yourself a smash hit opening weekend by launching first, sustaining that hit overtime is a completely different story. In journalism, it’s always a race to publish first. But if the accuracy of an article doesn’t check out, the premature launch could adversely effect the organization’s credibility. To build a sustainable hit, you must keep quality high and consistently beat everyone else to the punch.
While my blog has little at stake to post “first,” I doubt I could have earned your readership if I published daily nonsensical poop jokes. Without question, quality counts in the long term. But if all you want is attention and immediate gratification, you better cross the finish line in first place.
Service Beats the Hunt
We now live in a world where we can expect things to come to us directly. News, messages, deals, and ideas push their way to us instantaneously. To compete in today’s innovative world, you must play this game. You can no longer expect customers or users to come to you; you must find ways to reach them directly. In many ways, this has always been an issue for businesses. The challenge is not just getting people to come through your door, but to keep them coming back. In an era where infinite options compete for our attention, you must fight harder to stay relevant. The 24-hour news cycle is shriveling up. Windows for theatrical film releases are collapsing. Tweet trends often last less than an hour. Before long, consumers will miss you entirely.
If you want your brand or product to have a presence in your audience’s lives, you must find a way to remind them you exist. You must continuously roll out useful content to keep things fresh. And you must go out of your way to deliver it to them directly as soon as it becomes available. From here on out, most people will prefer services that bring to them what other services would expect them to hunt. If you want to stay alive in this feeding frenzy of a world, you must become your own paper boy.
Break Things
When in doubt, break things to fix them. Don’t always heed advice to the contrary.
Only when something is broken can you truly see what it is made out of.
The Single Greatest Step to Success
If you do not believe in what you are doing, you are unlikely to succeed. No level of responsibility, compensation, or flattery can change your mind. Only you can tap into the higher context of your personal values and goals. Only you can know what makes your heart tick. Figure out what you believe and you can find your place in the world. If you truly believe, nothing can stop you.
Consistently Persistent
Do you have plans to write a book? Make a film? Start a company? Do you work on them every single day?
You do not achieve goals by taking breaks here and there, chipping away when you feel like it. You achieve goals by consistently persisting forward and never taking a day off. Thirty minutes per day yields better results than three hours once per week. If you take a break, you will lose momentum. Lose momentum, and your passion project may fade to the back of your mind. You will lose.
If your mission is tied to your very core, then maybe you can survive output droughts. To intertwine your mission to your core in the first place, you need to consistently believe in it. There are feature films I have wanted to produce since I was eleven years old. I have no polished screenplays or financing to show for them, no plans to produce anytime soon. I touch these projects once every few months at best. But I wake up at night after dreaming about them every so often. They will not leave me alone. To make the films, however, I need to commit. I will need to start making daily progress to finish them. They will never get made otherwise.
Craig Ormiston 