Time Isn’t Everything

Garth Beyer

I could blog everyday for 5 years and still not get anywhere. You could spend 10 years on artwork and never get a chance to showcase it in a gallery. Your friend can spend his 20s fixing cars, but never get a tip. Gladwell’s idea you must spend at least 10,000 hours on something before you become a professional is incomplete. It’s not really the time the matters. It’s the bravery, the risk, the new things you try during that time.

Turns out 10,000 hours is enough time to try as many options, take as many risks and show as much bravery as it takes to truly get noticed, recognized and respected for your effort.

Time isn’t everything. Grit is.

 

Stay Positive & Start Impressing Yourself With The Work You Do

Is Your Promise Real

Garth Beyer

Do you know what you’re promising?

Second question: does everyone else know what you’re promising?

It’s easy to give yourself leeway or change your promise week to week if you answer yes to the first question and no to the second. It’s powerful, it’s real when you answer yes to both questions.

The only time to change your promise is when you make it bigger. When you do that, definitely don’t keep it to yourself.

 

Stay Positive & Make Bigger Promises, Proceed To Keep Them

Measuring And Permission

Garth Beyer

Netflix can measure how many episodes of a season you’ve watched. Say you watch three seasons of a show. Netflix certainly has permission to send you an email when season four is available, right? But they don’t.

Measuring and permission go hand in hand. You measure to discover what you’ve been given permission to do. It’s pointless to reach out to someone with an update on something you think they care about, but have no data, no measurements to prove it.

There’s a point when you don’t need to try something to see if it works. There’s a point when you’ve got enough measurements to try what’s permitted and proceed to try new tactics with that.

Test, measure, permission then test permission and measure. Repeat.

 

Stay Positive & Have Fun With What You Know Works

It’s Not The Answer You Want

It’s Not The Answer You Want

Garth Beyer

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How do you tell someone who feels like you’ve done them wrong, that you can’t do anything about it? How do you get people to talk about politics when they don’t want to? How do you get a hardcore punk-rocker to buy your classical music? How do you get a math major to write a fiction novel that’s not sci-fi?

The answer is you don’t. Not only do you spend their time and energy on something they don’t care about or are uncomfortable talking about or working on, you also waste your own hour and effort appealing to someone who doesn’t want to hear the message you have to offer.

As much as the world seems like it’s a discourse in manipulation and persuasion, it’s not. The game isn’t the game you think it is. It’s not who can please the most, who can convert the most, who can get the others out of their bubble into their own. The game is finding and connecting those with the same bubble as you; color, shape, goal and all.

Campaigns don’t move forward logically, that’s why so many people are frustrated with politics. Campaigns move forward emotionally, through connections of people who trust one another. The lesson here is not to preach to those who don’t trust you and you don’t earn trust with those who don’t agree with you.

Run social media for business’s who believe in it. Talk politics with those who enjoy talking about politics. Please those willing to be please. Don’t aim for the masses, the market that’s not listening or anyone who you haven’t fist earned the trust of.

 

Stay Positive & Your Message Is Only As Strong As The Peoples’ Trust In Hearing It

(not how convinced you are that you’re right)

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Start Your Way

Start Your Way

Garth Beyer

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I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts lately. One in particular Debbie Millman’s. It seems every interviewee, every professional creative, every communicator began with one weird thing.

Think of a sculpture made from all the staples in wooden posts within a city. Imagine fake moss saran wrapped on a rock and sold. Consider a ridiculous feat. It can even be something that anyone can do, but no one is willing to commit to (basically half the art pieces in an art museum).

Once you become a success, people will want to hear your story. They will ask you how you started or where you started or when you knew exactly what you wanted to do with your career.

You have an opportunity when starting on the path to your own success to start in a remarkable, more specifically, weird, way.

If your serious about becoming successful, then you need to be the opposite about starting down that path. You never heard a successful person’s story start out “Well, I planned for four years figuring out everything I needed to do to get here and I worked my way very slowly here, pleasing everyone I could and trying to appeal to the masses and doing what everyone told me to blah blah blah.”

No.

You hear about people doing something crazy and weird and something worth talking about.

 

Stay Positive & The Most Important Part Of Any Story Is The Opening Paragraph

(What’s Yours?)

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It’s Not For Everyone

Garth Beyer

Are you okay with that?

Your family might not like it. Your boss might not like it. Your closest friends might not like it.

It’s a good thing, really. Since you’re not trying to please the people who it’s not for, you have more time to please the ones it is for.

Artists please art lovers. Typography designers please typography lovers. You get the idea. Don’t you?

 

Stay Positive & Appeal To The Lovers, Not The Fighters

If You’re Realllly Not Ready

Garth Beyer

If you’re truly not ready for something, the world, your body, your mind will let you know, will stop you, will put the brakes on without you moving your foot.

I think back to last year when I signed up to do the Tough Mudder. I wasn’t prepared for it, but I told myself I was going to do it anyway. (Hell, I spent over a hundred bucks on it!) Fortunately I ended up getting sick a day before it. My mind said I was ready, my body said no.*

I think back to when I was going to send a stupid text to a past friend. Moments before I was to hit send, my phone rang. My best friend was on the other line and we talked my situation through. I never sent the text.

I think of all the times I’ve told myself I can bite off more than I can chew, only to get a migraine that prevented me from following through with my outrageous endeavors.

Go ahead and take all the risks you want, the world and your body will never let you take a risk that you can’t handle. Your world and your body work for you.

 

Stay Positive & Trust Yourself

*3 days after the Tough Mudder I went for a test run. Didn’t make it past 3 miles. Tough Mudder for those who don’t know is 10-12 miles.