Man up and admit you messed up before things get worse. You definitely walk a fine line between giving up too early and giving up too late. Either way, it’s imperative that you anticipate failure. Bring it up as soon as things start turning sour. Addressing your anticipation with others will hurt you less than failure itself; if anything, it may help you minimize casualties or possibly keep the train on the tracks. Identifying and debriefing failure is the key to learning from mistakes and sharing your education with others.
Category Archives: Life
Put Yourself Out There
If you’re not meeting new people in new places, you’re not testing yourself or your character. You’re sure as hell not networking. Packed bars, group outings, random parties and networking mixers are all perfect places to practice your elevator pitch about yourself or projects in a fairly consequence-free environment. Without practice, there’s really no way to know if you’re actually connecting with people. These loud and impersonal events are not great for building intimate relationships with other people, but they are great for getting to know yourself. The next time you’re invited to a gathering and have nothing to do, get out of the house and go. Mix it up, try a couple different methods for introducing yourself. Take notes afterwards on what worked and what didn’t. You might learn a thing or two about your pitch, your idea or yourself.
A Deal Is Not a Done Deal Until Money Hits the Bank
No matter how good you feel about it, do not boast, act on or go to press about a deal you just made (business, employment or otherwise) until the first check goes through. I learned this in Hollywood and continue to stand behind it as I make deals or watch deals unfold around me. You can never completely guarantee a deal will go through until it actually goes through. You can make a serious fool out of yourself by jumping the gun, making public announcements or spending money you don’t have. Better to keep your mouth shut and fingers crossed until fiction becomes fact.
Guide Your Life With Rules
Want to tackle a goal or change behavior? Start incorporating rules into your daily life. Set expectations for yourself and stick to those expectations. Create barriers that prevent you from breaking your own rules. And if it will help, enlist friends or family members to hold you accountable. In response to my concerns about information overload, I am not allowing myself to read news after I get home from work. I set up alerts to bug me if I do.
A year ago, I wanted to start writing again. I launched this blog and have had you, dear reader, holding me accountable to it ever since. I accomplished my original goal and more.
You can set rules for your diet, exercise, creativity or work. Treat rules like a game instead of a burden. Reward yourself with play, luxuries or a simple pat on the back. Make it fun and never forget that you’re doing it to make a positive difference in your own life.
Change of Scenery
Sometimes that’s all it takes. Get out of town for a few days to clear your mind, reboot or shift perspective. It does not need to be someplace exotic or an expensive vacation far away. Crashing on a local friend’s couch can do the trick. It’s important to shake your routine loose every once in a while. That kind of reorientation can do wonders for your ideas and bring fresh clarity to life’s problems. Mix it up, baby.
Sleep Can Wait Sometimes
Inspiration is rare and must be acted on as soon as it rears its beautiful head. For me, inspiration tends to come at night when my head is clear of the day. When that happens, I’ve developed a rather unhealthy habit of staying awake to see it through. While I have no intention of encouraging insomnia, I urge you not to waste one of life’s most precious resources. See your inspiration through. Never miss the opportunity – even at the cost of a night’s sleep and rough next day. More often than not, it’s worth it.
Stick Every Finger In A Different Pie
I’ve always been a proponent of keeping many doors open. By staying involved in several things at once, you maintain a diverse portfolio of opportunities that may lead you somewhere. Drew Moxon dubbed this “angel investing with time” – balancing a handful of personal energy investments on activities and projects in hopes that at least one will pay off the entire batch. No thoughtful gambler places all eggs in a single basket, right?
The risk, of course, is that you do not invest in one area of your life enough for a big win. Jack of all trades, master of none. You fail to specialize, focus and pour your heart into one great thing. I think mastery can work if you believe irrefutably in what you’re doing. If you don’t, you must continue to explore options until you find the perfect fit. Until then, stay involved. Perhaps you shouldn’t stick every finger in a different pie, but at least taste every flavor you can and give each one a fair shot.
Singing In the Shower
How many places can you sing aloud without fear or hesitation? The shower? Home alone? The car maybe? Where are you allowed to speak your mind, scream or share ideas? How many places can you truly be yourself?
Venues where you can let loose and be honest are rare and extremely important. Most environments are filled with people around whom you naturally curtail your speech and behavior to go with the flow. If nothing else, we keep quiet in consideration of others.
It is healthy – necessary, even – to control the podium on a regular basis. As much as we consume, we must create. And we must create honestly – from the heart and without censorship. To do that, nothing or no one can stand in our way. Some artists and public figures build the confidence to live honestly with little friction from the world around them. Most of us have no forum to build that confidence on our own. Nevertheless, we need that release. Audience or no audience, we must be honest with ourselves.
More than just a meditation space, we each need a cone of solitude where no one can stifle us, our voice or our ideas. Where we can express ourselves without constraint. I do my best thinking in the shower and best speaking in the car (in fact, I dictated most of my recent posts to my smartphone while driving to work).
Where can you be yourself? Where do you dream the loudest? How can you optimize that space to capture your voice – and sing louder?
Your Dreams Inspire
Most dreamers are too caught up in the pursuit to appreciate the impact their dreaming has on other people. It’s one thing to chase your dreams; it’s a whole other animal to inspire others to chase theirs. Don’t keep your dreams locked in the basement. Share them with the world. By living and sharing your dreams openly, you offer followers a cognitive and spiritual boost of confidence. If you can do it, so can they. Help everyone who listens to you understand that.
Don’t just dream for yourself. Dream for people who respect you. Dream for the world.
Don’t Ignore the Past
We have explicit memory for a reason. Where most animals only have implicit memory for motor skills, human beings have a declarative memory that helps us record autobiographical, semantic and episodic information. We can remember how to do more than just walk and eat. We developed these skills to gain a competitive advantage against other species and humans who could not share our memories and experiences past. Simply put: “I learned things through experience that you do not know and that makes me better than you.” In a gnarly world of job applications and qualifications, “experience” means everything.
Experience does not end in employment land. Street smarts come from street experiences. Book smarts come from book experiences. We consume life and literature everyday, and much of what we consume gets logged in our brains.
Individuals often resist dwelling or revisiting bad experiences or periods of shame. They block episodes from memory, drink them away or refuse to share them with others. That’s a waste. While I understand that mistakes are not necessarily glamorous things to share with the public, you have an opportunity to help close friends and family learn from your mistakes. You can contribute to a collective memory and help the species last. We have memories for a reason – do not waste them. And do not let them die with you. Do not run from the past; embrace it as a gift. Any memory, good or bad, makes you the character that you are and gives you a competitive advantage in some way. Learn to stop hiding and love the past.
Craig Ormiston 