Life Lesson

Keep A Job

Garth Beyer

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Maybe it’s not your current job, but keep a job while you follow your passion and make your art.

If you hate your current job. Find another that you can bear, that you at least like, that gives you flexibility with time. For two reasons.

1. You need the flexibility of time to work on your passion. You may even discover that you can use your job time to do the real work of your passion.

2. When your focus is to excel in your passion rather than your job, a surprise promotion, raise, bonus, or even donuts on Friday morning are ever the better.

Don’t think you need to drop everything you have to focus on your passion. That’s just dumb. And if you think that’s what it will take for you to succeed in your passion, you may want to reconsider the passion you have.

 

Stay Positive & You Can Do Both (what pays the bills + follow your heart)

Garth E. Beyer

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Popeye’s Error

Garth Beyer

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Sadly, Popeye is becoming less popular. It’s hard to come by someone younger than 20 who thinks of Popeye when I say, “I yam what I yam!”

While the fading memory of Popeye as a character is saddening, what’s worse is the decumbent understanding of Popeye’s Error.

It’s easy to figure that Spinach profit was long and prosperous after Popeye hit the television. What few ask though: why Spinach?

Why couldn’t Popeye eat nails, or grit, or gunpowder?

In 1870, the German chemist Erich von Wolf tested the amount of iron within spinach and in his reporting, he incorrectly placed a decimal point so that it read that there is 35 milligrams of iron in Spinach rather than 3.5. As a result of the high amount of iron in spinach, Popeye was given it to become strong and mighty – a true sailor.

This fact – Popeye’s Error – is one we must continue to remember. Success takes critical inquiry and the story of Popeye is the outlier, the rare case when making a measurable error leads to something remarkable.

It hurts to fail. It hurts worse to fail and have others succeed by feeding off your failure.

 

Stay Positive & Unless It’s Intentional (in that case, I think we should talk)

Garth E. Beyer

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What Size Would You Like

Garth Beyer

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I’ve had it with all the different cup size names (e.g., trenti, kid, venti, grande, sixteen, large, extra-large, power, original, regular).

Here’s a quick solution: Let people pick out their cup as they get in line.*

Sometimes being creative is a set-back. It’s fun to make different names for sizes (whether they make sense or not), but not everyone can keep up. If you had the option to appeal to all customers and lose some or appeal to all customers and keep all, it’s clear which is the better choice.

Yet, in an effort to stand out, businesses sacrifice some customers that, if time would be taken, could otherwise be kept. Note, the best kind of creativity is the uncomplicated kind.

 

Stay Positive & Have Fun But Keep It Simple

Garth E. Beyer

*The take-it-too-far part of me would insist that you could give customers markers to color their cups while they wait in line. Have them write their own name on it too. Starbucks never spells it right anyway. (But they do when I say Voldemort. -sigh-) And yes, there will be a line at a place where you don’t have to figure out what cup size to order, ending up feeling like an idiot when you order it wrong.

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Cutting Time

Garth Beyer

There’s beauty in spending an extra two minutes to make a connection. There’s beauty in ignoring your watch and making someone’s day. There’s beauty to extending a deadline to double-check your work.

Equally, there’s beauty in cutting time.

To do the painstakingly hard work of caring more than anyone else – about your work and about those closest to you. Sometimes they conflict and that’s okay so long as you’re doing one of them.

 

Stay Positive & Do The Hard Work

Garth E. Beyer

The Web Does Wonderful Things, But…

Garth Beyer

The web is like a shortcut, a way to streamline any process, a method of simplifying the complex, leaving the hard work still needing to be done.

Anyone can now do anything with the web. I can collect programmers to mimic nearly any site available which makes that site less valuable. It’s a crumbling collection of incredible infrastructure and design.

If a blog, a website, an online service is all that you have to offer, there’s a very low life expectancy for you.

Remember that the hard work can’t be accomplished online. You can get by for a time, but with how swift laypeople are at creating online content, it won’t be long until someone mimics your original idea and adds their human, offline, personal touch to it.

 

Stay Positive & The Web Gives You Freedom, But There’s Still Competition

Garth E. Beyer

The Disengaged

Garth Beyer

They are everywhere waiting for you to connect with them, give them a rubik’s cube they want (and can) figure out, and a reward for completing it.

Go start, anywhere, with anyone. Connect. Challenge. Reward.

 

Stay Positive & Note: Reward Is Not The Most Important

Garth E. Beyer

Morning Stream Of Awesome Better Than Coffee

Garth Beyer

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Checking Facebook when you first wake up can be a good thing. I’ve read articles that suggest you shouldn’t check your phone right away (FB,email, texts,etc,.), that you should wake up on your own schedule, enjoy life a bit, and deal with all the work that your phone is blinking at you at a later time. But then, ignoring these suggestions, this morning I read the following on Facebook,

“All artists should be treated with respect I always see many people getting put down at doing what they love and lose confidence to making music,making art, dancing , and whatever you do, keep your head up and chase your dreams, because every person out there has the capability to do anything in life!”

This is as livening as a cup of coffee, if not more.

Those suggesting you don’t check your phone right away are half right. I am all for staying unplugged a couple of mornings a week to take a walk down to the lake or do a workout without any distractions, but what people fail to recognize is our need to evaluate what calls our attention in the morning.

There are negative consequences to checking our phone as soon as we wake up when we read a Facebook feed filled with complaints, an RSS feed of the days most negative news, our work email instead of our personal email.

Give yourself a morning stream of awesome on your phone and I don’t see a problem with checking it before we all get out of bed.

 

Stay Positive & Combine It With Coffee, You’ll Be Set To Go All Day

Garth E. Beyer

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