What You’re Avoiding

During a PR team meeting about time management, it was noted a recurring issue of meetings is they go longer than they’re supposed to, typically by five minutes or so.

I had a suggestion for how to have more productive meetings and typed up a decent email explaining my suggestion for improvement, my reasons for it, one concern about it and one overall realization. I was going to send the email to the PR director, but I called myself out on my action. Why in email? Why not in person?

The reason is that it’s less personal. It’s because I feared the idea would get rejected. After all, it’s easier for both of us. The director can email back saying thanks for the suggestion and that’s that. No feelings hurt.

It’s critical we notice the ways we avoid rejection, the ways we avoid being vulnerable, the ways we avoid failure and make the tough decision to overcome.

 

Stay Positive & Personal Is Best

Letting Things Sink In

Let Ideas Sink In

Perhaps the point of a football huddle isn’t just to set up the next strategy. What if the 20 minute period break during hockey isn’t just so the team can rest. Maybe taking a month or two off after college graduation is better than running straight into a job. Science tells us we retain, understand and think about information better by getting a good night’s sleep. I see rest as effective on a smaller scale too.

Having a brain storm session then forcing employees to get working on an idea right away isn’t as effective as letting them sit on it for a bit or congregate around the water cooler to chat about it outside the Thunderdome Of Ideas.

Too often we invest in the belief that being and staying busy is being productive, is creating value. Wrong.

A remarkable friend of mine schedules time to get away each week, not because he’s unhappy or that work is too much for him, but because he knows to give himself time for things to sink in.

When you react to a medication, that’s a bad thing. When you respond to treatment, that’s a plus. – Seth Godin

The best feedback on meetings comes the day after. When you ask for feedback right at the end of the meeting, you have a room full of people reacting, not responding. Yet, so many managers ask for feedback right away or schedule tasks one after the other, no break.

By regularly placing ourselves in an environment that isn’t pulling us this way and that, we can process situations on a deeper level of understanding, we can invest time to truly think why X happened instead of Y or maybe realize why X was a good thing to happen in the first place.

If you think all this is hard to believe, then you’re thinking right. Take however much time you need to mull it over.

 

Stay Positive & Wine Tastes Better After You Let It Breathe

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Uncomfortable Is Original

Uncomfortable Is Original

Banana Comfort, Weird Is Good

Many blogs, many books, many talks are very, very unoriginal. The reason being is they are safe, they are familiar. Ever heard someone say every business book says the same thing, but in a different way? I’ve read enough of them that I would even push back on the “different way” part of the statement. I think all the writing was rushed.

Taking time

It is amazing how well one can write when one takes the time. Think about it. When rushed to write, you use and accept your clichés. Perfect example: journalism. The tight deadlines encourage the use of clichés, of simplification, of uniformity.

When you take time while writing, you find ways to say things better than a cliché can. If you decide to use a cliché, you at least spin it on its head and make it breakdance.

To craft something original…well, it’s scary, it’s uncomfortable, and it takes time.

When you write something original. It’s weird to leave it as it is. You want to change it for fear no one will understand it or like it. It sounds weird in your head reading it over because you’ve never read anything like it before. Orange frizzled daiquiri wedding cake looked sexier than a toucan during mating season. Wasn’t reading that fun? New? An adventure? I wrote it and it feels so weird keeping it.

Alas.

Weird is original and relatable.

The thing about weird I love so much is it will never go out of style. The world will always contain compartmentalists, always produce naysayers, always attract keepers of the status quo — those who are satisfied with the comfort of everything unoriginal. There will always be those resistant to new things and those who fear anything other than what is routine, common, and banal. Yet! There are and always will be those who love and connect with the weird.

Even in light of it all, I still say do what has never been done before. Word the sentence the way you’ve never read anyone word it. If you question whether anyone will like your writing, if you think it’s too far out there, then it’s complete. Ship it. The people who matter in this world (at least who matter to you, to your art) are out there. Wayyy out there. (Think Long Tail)

Build it and they might not come. Build it weird and more will arrive than you ever expected. The freaks shall inherit the earth.

As a dear PR-wonderwoman-friend-of-mine said, “Weird is in. Weird is good. Weird is awesome. Weird is essential. Weird is where the magic is.”

 

Stay Positive & Go Bananas

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p.s. this goes for more than just writing

Doing A Lot Is A Lot To Do

When in doubt breathe it out.

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Or quit. Michelle reminds us that quitting is okay.

I want to remind you that quitting something you love is okay too. Whether you (or I) want to admit it at all, surely there is something out there that we could love even more than what we are investing our time with now.

Creating space to be filled by something else is a natural transaction.

A worthy one at that.

 

Stay Positive & Free Yourself, Just Don’t Use The Time As An Excuse To Be Lazy

Garth E. Beyer

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A Riff On Job Security And What It Means To Be A Linchpin

I didn’t know what was going on 10 years ago. I didn’t experience it. I only know what work, employment, the successful were all like because I’ve studied them. What I do know from experience is how difficult it is to grow up knowing that society is dysfunctional. That everything that my parents grew up with worked for them, but not for me. I felt pulled into an abyss because I knew that the world needed, not just someone, but some type of people. I grew up understanding factories and what it took to work there. Until I realized everything turned into a factory, that 2/3 of the jobs I ask friends what they want to do say “factory worker” without actually saying it. In the middle of everything that is no longer working but was being forced, I couldn’t become what I wanted to be until I decided to fight the world back and join the Tribe of Linchpins.

The job market got personal by giving stagnant wages, health insurance and a false illusion of job security. Job security is what everyone fights for, or rather procrastinates for. Every job began as a job where people didn’t have to think until their job was on the line. Then, instead of becoming a linchpin, an artist, a creator, they chose to make the tasks of the job last longer. Job security became self-controlled. This is what I grew up noticing. I say it in past tense because job security isn’t a result of always having stuff on your to-do list anymore. No. Job security has become something else, something better, something beneficial. 

Job security is only available to linchpins. The ones who do the jobs and all the other tasks that aren’t getting done. It may not be their job, but to a linchpin, that’s no reason not to do it. This is what job security means. Instead of being told what to do -which is repetitive and produces the same exact dull results over and over- linchpins figure out what to do. Figuring something out taps potential on the shoulder and tells her to get to work. It produces greater, more important, more human results and 95% of the time more profit than dictated results.

Linchpins produce emotional labor, not the kind of work you’re doing now where you come home frustrated and exhausted from doing what you’re told (always more exhausting than doing art). See, cogs are people who have been manipulated and brainwashed not to stop to think if what they are doing is different, human and actually productive above the average standards. Linchpins not only stop themselves, pause and find out how to be more creative, but they have the ability to stop other cogs, redirect then, and turn them into creative linchpins because being a linchpin means being leader and being a leader is about making other people leaders. Leaders are indispensable which means job security is universal. This job security doens’t mean you will stay at one job forever, it means that you will always have a job, a place where it will be your responsiblity to do what linchpins do best.

 

Stay Positive & This Job Security Is Sooo Much Better

Garth E. Beyer (secured since 1992)