Tag Archives: Life

Mondays Should Die

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You had an amazing weekend with family and friends. Parties. Activities. Errands. Rock and roll. Guess what? Back to work! It’s Monday time!

I hate Mondays. I am willing to bet you do not like them either. A great taste in your mouth soured by the burdens of a professional life. Most people have really rough starts on Mondays. Few deals get closed. Very little work gets done. Most people spend the better part of their day trying to switch into productive mode. After a short burst of personal time over the weekend, Monday rear-ends and whiplashes the hell out of you.

I say we kill Mondays. That’s right. Kill Monday. Embrace the three-day weekend. A day to be social, a day to do personal work, and a day to rest. Start the week on Tuesday and only work four days. Think you won’t get the same amount of work done? Just try it. I guarantee that you will fill the time with the same amount of work.

Worried you’ll miss customers or clients on Monday? Most people are preoccupied with their own hellish Mondays to care about your business, so no worries. And besides, if you set the expectations of outsiders by informing them that you do not operate on Mondays, they will catch on, deal with it, and not resent you. You do not want the complaining customers anyway.

But every week needs to start, right? So won’t starting the week one day later just shift the burden of hate to Tuesday? Perhaps. But have you ever heard of the work-life balance? Splitting the week nearly in half with weekend and work week will help balance the amount of time you invest in yourself and invest in your work. By the end of the long weekend, you will feel more inclined to pick up the pen again. After you are rested, caught up, and partied out, you will feel the need to get back to work. In fact, you may even WANT to go back to work.

And why not take Friday off instead? Since most employees are procrastinators by nature, Friday is valuable real estate for last minute productivity. And since other companies you do business with are probably procrastinating as well, there will be less friction if you continue to operate on Friday. While everyone else is working on Monday, you can take the time for yourself to recover from your weekend and rest up before a new week. A healthier team and a healthier life. 

Sound utopian? Maybe. But worth the experiment. When I run a business, I plan to give it a shot.

You’ve Survived Your Week . . .

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… So what are you going to do now?

Go to Disneyland! The new Star Tours opened and we’re taking my Dad there for Father’s Day. I’ll let you know how it goes!

May the force be with you. And don’t forget to call your father tomorrow!

Buying Happiness (versus Giving Happiness)

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When we were young, people rewarded us for accomplishments. Candy for chores, toys for good grades, etc. As we got older, we came to understand rewards as a part of transactions. I do for you, you do for me. Even on birthdays, gifts have lost much of their appeal because we essentially expect them (or, at least, we’re not at all surprised). And as we start earning and spending our own money, the things we “reward” ourselves with do not satisfy the same level of appeal as, say, winning the lottery by accident.

It is extremely difficult to find joy in something you expect. If you think you deserve it, there is little room for appreciation. And if you know it should be coming, there is little room for surprise. Pure joy lies in the moments in life where fortune smiles down on us and we have no idea why. Therefore, happiness comes from giving and receiving gifts. Receive something unexpectedly or surprise another with a moment of joy, and you will feel great. Spontaneity is key. Transactions are not gifts, so taking a paycheck for work and buying a fancy new toy for yourself is not happiness. You cannot buy your own happiness in this way.

Give a gift today for no reason. Watch what happens.

Do Not Bring Your Work Home

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Hollywood is notorious for failed marriages. Why? To succeed in this town, you need to give it your all. Eat, sleep, breathe entertainment. Might sound fun on the outside, but it’s hell on the inside. In one year alone, I’ve seen families shattered, relationships severed, possessions seized, and health jeopardized. It’s the name of the game out here. When you’re working 14 hour days and competing with hundreds of extremely talented people and projects, how the hell can you do anything else with your life?

Outside the movie business, lifestyles are not nearly this extreme. Still, I hear horror stories of workaholics compromising their personal lives to submit to their jobs. Whether you are working 16 or 60 hours per week, it is important to separate your job from the rest of your life. If you do not, work can consume you. Depending on how you handle pressure, it may even destroy you.

When you come home at night, forget it. Stop thinking about your day. Leave it all behind. Worried you’ll forget where to pick up in the morning? That’s what to-do lists are for. Have a job where you are responsible for grading or reading or reports that need to be done outside of the workplace? Find another place to do them. Just do not bring them home. Do not bring your work home.

The level of stress work carries can hurt you, hurt your families, and hurt your friends. No one likes spending time with a wreck. And most people get bored with a wreck that drones on about his or her job. There’s more to life and the world than your job. You become really one-dimensional when that’s all you care about.

Real People, Real Conversations

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The two most common icebreaker questions in Los Angeles are “where are you from” and “what do you do (for a living)?” Understandable, because few people actually grew up here and most relocated for their industry. A quick, cordial method to find common ground (if any) or extract details enough to build a full conversation.

The problem? These questions assume that work or geographical heritage define a person’s individuality. While some levels of personality and culture can be inferred, there is so much more to a person than his or her job or hometown. Furthermore, with jobs being the core topic (because jobs are more current and relevant than where you grew up), conversations tend to become networking events. Work sneaks out of the office and slips into your Saturday night cocktail.

I cannot argue the value of building professional relationships, but oftentimes adults forget that it is important to have other types of relationships as well. I find it extremely difficult to meet new people in Los Angeles. Worse, I find it impossible to develop relationships with people outside the film industry. I blame a lot of it on these icebreaker questions. “Oh, we’re not in the same industry? We cannot work together, so, I guess … have a good night!? Nevermind that there are so many other levels we can connect on!”

My best friends here can carry on conversations about things other than work and the movies. Makes a big difference when you’ve been on film sets all day and need a mental break. And it makes a big difference when you need to feel like a human being, rather than a workaholic robot. Science, discovery, politics, love, perspective, health, the world, philosophy … the list is endless.

Every conversation does not need to be a networking event. Try to steer your meet and greets away from conventional topics. Pay close attention to people who bring more to the table than their resume.

The Official Craig Ormiston Update

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This entry marks my 100th blog post on www.craigormiston.com. Three months, 22,845 words, 10,295 readers, all 50 states, 116 countries, and 164 hours of writing later (according to Google Docs), I am well on my way to posting every day until the end of the year. But, as good friend David Fox pointed out in an email, I have penciled very little on the topic to which my blog is actually named: myself. Craig Ormiston.

On the whole, web analytics have suggested that the majority of my audience cares less about personal posts than posts with general interest or advice. Therefore, I have written little about me and instead use my life only for appropriate context and examples. That said, I forget sometimes that many of you are close friends and family. And I also forget that some of you know next to nothing about me. So here it is. To celebrate this milestone for my blog, here is an update on my life:

Enter Craig Ormiston:

First, my background. My name is Craig Ormiston, and I grew up in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. I was born and raised in the same house where I lived until I left for college. With a fierce determination to direct and produce motion pictures, I pursued the film industry in Hollywood by first attending the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. I milked my education for all it was worth: I attended inspiring classes, produced a dozen films, built long-lasting friendships, networked with countless professionals, and helped engineer the future of the movie business. While it was extremely expensive, I am thankful for my days at USC. I learned a lot and met great people. To save money and get a head start, I graduated one semester early in the Fall of 2009.

I never wanted a normal day job. I spent six months after graduation trying to package feature films, engineer products, start businesses, and avoid employment. I’ve always wanted to do my own thing and change the world. But after six months with little progress, I resolved to meet with a few people and expand my options. One of my USC directing teachers, Tripp Reed, tabled for me an opportunity I could not refuse: helping him launch the New Media division of Alloy Entertainment (producers of Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and more in the teenage girl niche). Charged with producing television-quality pilots for the web, we have successfully launched four original shows and are well on our way to making several more. It has been one year this week since I started working with Tripp for Alloy. I have learned a lot about producing, the Internet, leadership, and about myself. While it may be the day job I promised myself I would never have, I count my blessings for the opportunity and experience. I have interviewed for and been offered a handful of jobs since, and none of them could rival the freedom, responsibility, respect, and pay I have been awarded here. I share a spacious apartment with two USC friends three blocks away from my office in Hollywood on Sunset & Highland and walk to work almost everyday (unheard of in Southern California). As much as I despise the Los Angeles urban space, I enjoy the pedestrian nature of the Hollywood area and walk almost everywhere I need to go.

What little free time I have after a hard day’s work is spent doing four key things. First (and most important), I eat. For those of you who know me, I am obsessed with food. Cooking, dining out, experimenting, sampling, you name it. I spend far too much money on nice restaurants, fancy cocktails, and crazy dishes. Eating out with friends is my favorite pastime. Fortunately, I do not yet have the pounds to show for it. The best part of Los Angeles for me is the range of authentic cuisines. With Thai Town, Koreatown, and Little Tokyo less than 10 minutes away, I am never far from the best. And as crazy as it can be, living blocks away from downtown Hollywood helps keep me young with swanky tasty spots open until wee hours of the night. My gluttony knows no bounds here.

Beyond eating, I have rediscovered two very important things: reading and sleep. I never read growing up (probably because I had to for class and hated it). Now, I can’t go a day without scraping the news, catching every blog post, and putting big dents in books on my Kindle. I read between 90 and 180 minutes per day and cannot stop. Mostly nonfiction. I am constantly studying the Internet, technology, marketing, business, politics, and science. In the past year, I feel like I have thoroughly covered the first chapters of an MBA and Computer Science degree alone. I continue to learn crazy new things every single day and cannot stop. I’m obsessed. The third pastime (and perhaps my healthiest) is sleep. I was notorious in high school and college for not sleeping at all. I’ve gone four days without a single wink of sleep before. Not healthy at all. And I pay for it to this day, suffering noticeable signs of memory retention loss. Without question, I get my eight hours per night now and even track it to make improvements.

My final pastime is much more broad and complex. Readers of this blog know I am not happy with the current state of the movie industry. As Sunday’s post alludes to, I am becoming impatient with movie studios recycling old crap and idling by as consumers rip the whole charade apart the way of the music business. My sights have realigned toward technology and the web. Therein lie companies that need to stay one step ahead to compete and that cannot survive by recycling ideas. I am in awe by daily news from the tech sector and am very interested in making a career shift that direction. I spend a great deal of free time designing and collaborating on web-based projects with hopes to launch them as legitimate businesses. With little background in computer science, it has been extremely difficult to land interviews with these companies. It seems I will need to build my way in from scratch. A challenge? Yes please!

I have no intention of living in Los Angeles much longer. Be it to Denver, the Bay Area, or New York, I need to make a big change sometime soon. I have been saving up to buy myself the time to build things and aim to be gainfully unemployed in no more than two years’ time. Feasible goal? We’ll see. Here’s to the future!

Newton’s Three Laws of Parenting

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Isaac Newton

While the rules of physics define the physical relationship between objects, I find them particularly relevant when studying the psychological relationship between human beings. Take Newton in regards to parenting:

Law 1: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Every child on a chosen path with remain on that path unless an external force intervenes. Watching your son or daughter turn to the dark side? Do not trust in time to cure all evils; you may need to step in. Watching your son or daughter struggle to meet their goals? Friends, laws, cash flow, distractions, and many other “external forces” will slow your child down. Be involved and give him or her an extra push when necessary. Obvious, no?

Law 2: Acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass of the object being accelerated, the greater the amount of force needed to accelerate the object.

The greater the pressure exerted on a child, the more likely he or she will “accelerate.” Having trouble waking your child for school in the morning? Getting him or her to do homework? Stop playing video games? Avoid hard drugs? Come home before curfew? You can push harder and harder on your child to get the results you expect, but the hounding may have consequences we will explore in Law #3.

How about peer pressure? The more friends goad or tempt your child, the more likely your child will go along with it. Or what about motivation? Some children need a brighter spark to inspire them. Why would some children need a bigger nudge? Physics would tell us it’s because they have greater “mass.” Nothing to do with obesity, I think the “mass” in this equation has a lot to do with your child’s individuality. If he or she is true to him or herself – a defined individual with defined interests and characteristics – then he or she will be much less swayed by you or others. Some children may be stubborn and defiant, others down to earth and cultured. In either case, children with richer individuality are much more difficult to sell.

Law 3: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

My favorite rule of the three, and the one I think baby boomers overlooked the most: if you act on your child, expect a reaction. Discipline is difficult for every parent. Depending on how you do it, you can make things much worse. Without justifying your demands in terms your child can appreciate, be prepared for him or her to fight back or deviate further. The more force you exert on the situation (screaming, violence, etc.), the greater the reaction you should expect. Explicitly forbidding your children from doing things may be a recipe for disaster.

I have seen it a handful of times: alocoholic parents punishing their children for drinking underage. The result? The children lose respect for their parents and drink harder. For punishment to be effective, you need to hold credibility with your child. Personal experiences, stories, and statistics all help your case better than “go to your room” or “give me your car keys.”

Children usually know when they make mistakes and punishment is usually superfluous. Teaching consequence is important, but make sure consequences are related to the infraction. Eating a cookie before dinner has nothing to do with watching television. When children do not believe they did anything wrong, it is senseless to yell and accuse them of it – they will just villainize you for it and refuse to see your point of view. Find a more clever way to make your point. Or expect an equal and opposite reaction. Physics, baby.

Rules Destroy Imagination

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Disney's adaptation of Stephen Slesinger, Inc....

As children, sky was the limit. The word “impossible” never slipped our lips. I vowed to build a spaceship in my backyard. I knew, without question, that I would be the first six-year-old in orbit. With scrap cardboard and colored pencils in hand, I set to work.

As we grew up, we were taught rules: the laws of physics, etiquette, mathematics, morality, sexuality, language, health, justice, economics, politics, and responsibilities. We were told what to do and how to do it. Worse, we were told what NOT to do and threatened with consequences. Sure, we were being educated. But that education undermined the innumerable liberated conceptions we had as children. I’m sorry, child, you cannot defy gravity. You cannot live forever. You cannot leave the house without wearing pants. 1 + 1 never equals 3. Things cost money you cannot afford. No this. No that. No, no, no. The endless list of constraints continues to grow everyday of our aging lives.

I realized how tragically detrimental these rules could be to your imagination as I nostalgically revisited a Winnie the Pooh cartoon on YouTube. When I was young, this scene terrified me to the bone. I feared falling prey to the beasts and maligned physics Pooh suffers throughout his dream. Watching it for the first time in 15 years, I felt some of those visceral reactions come back:

But then, reality sunk in and this video was not terrifying anymore. I now know that hovering and transforming on this level are not feasible in the physical world, and that such creatures do not exist in nature. The boundless scope of my childhood imagination enabled these possibilities in my mind and allowed me to fear the things I did not understand. But my adult mind, constrained by rules of the natural world, can dismiss this scene as psychedelic fiction.

Would our lives be better without rules? No, of course not. Rules will always exist whether we want them to or not. I do not think anarchy or ignorance make the world a better place. But I do think it would liberate mankind’s imagination a little more if we understand rules as surmountable obstacles to our dreams, instead of barriers we cannot pass.

The best thing my parents never did was tell me “no.” They let me play in the backyard until my heart’s content. I figured out on my own that I could not build a spaceship. But because no one I respected ever tried to stop me, I never gave up. I signed up for the movie business to get me closer to orbit, closer to building that spaceship, and closer to the stars – if only through models and effects. I fight the rules every day and refuse to let anything stand in the way of my dreams.

Go out and fight the rules. Never say never. Dream big.

Imagine the possibilities.

Life Goals

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Photo of an open fortune cookieBring people together.

Build a home.

Separate culture from money.

Raise children.

End the culture wars.

Spend time well.

What in life is most important to you? What are your values? Can you spin them into goals that drive your life?

Self worth stems from purpose. Purpose stems from goals. Goals stem from values.

Wrap your goals into fortune cookie-sized mission statements. If you are not willing to tattoo these statements to your body, your goals are not developed well enough.

Live the change you want to see in the world. Live the change you want to see in your own life.

But first, know thyself.

I Would Die For You

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But only if you stand to impact the world better than I can.

Some people throw the phrase around lightly. “I would die for you.” Really? Would you?

Sacrifice is a big deal. Think really hard. Are you honestly willing to surrender your life for someone else?

Only say it if you mean it.