What’s Important To Know: People

Garth Beyer

City Wide Open

If you want to know how much bubble gum is spit out on the planet, you can Google it. If you want to know about all of Oscar Wilde’s affairs or Houdini’s tricks, you can Google them.

I argue the ease of finding an answer on the digital devices we carry everywhere with us has not lead to an increase in knowledge. After all, you’re more prone to forget something you Googled early in the morning than you are to forget something you read in the newspaper that morning (so long as they were unrelated).

The real question of what’s important to know doesn’t have a Googleable answer. The fact is, if we can get the answer to nearly any question in .6983 seconds, do we really need to know anything?

I’m not going the direction you think I am with this post. Obviously there’s a lot of fundamental knowledge that’s necessary to know for daily tasks and unpredictable events. This knowledge is called common sense. Common sense isn’t important to know, it’s important to survive – a key distinction.

Nor are historical facts, trivia answers or the square root of 64 important to know. What’s important to know is people. Particularly, the people who are in your area (both vocational and geographical location). In this connection economy, your status is dependent on the number of positive connections you have. How do you get those positive connections? It’s not about knowing a little about a lot, it’s about knowing a lot about the people in your area.

Think of all the people who you see regularly but can’t spark a conversation with because you don’t know what to say. Or the people you run into and are forced to greet, but then can’t carry on with small talk. (The worst is when you’re walking in the same direction as the person and you’re both silent. It’s awkward. I write from experience.)

It’s a natural reaction of people to not want to connect with you if you don’t know much about them. The most vital LinkedIn connections are made when those looking to make a connection change the text of the standard connection request, making it personal. “Hey, I want to connect with you because I see that you…and I hold that same work value.” Job offers are readily made when candidates can relate to the employer. Donors largely donate to those they feel have been in a similar situation.

Marlowe, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin requested that I connect with her on LinkedIn. She used the standard prompt. I declined. Then by chance, we saw each other on campus while I was on my way to work. Instead of putting ear buds in and walking away, she greeted me and picked up conversation. Needless to say, I’ve gone back and accepted her request.

Just the other day while walking to work, I happened to cross paths with Jack Craver, journalist for The Cap Times. I knew enough about him to pick up a conversation right away and set an impression. Needless to say, we’ll be connecting more often.

The possible connections you can make day-to-day are much more likely to happen than the number of times you’ll be quizzed on trivial facts. Perhaps try to learn more about those around you and make those connections. No quiz-bowl trophy can compare to making a connection that rewards you with a job, a pair of free tickets or a friend. Trust me.

 

Stay Positive & It All Starts With A Hello

Photo credit

Shout out to Ellie, Maureen, Breann, Michelle, KP, Yehuda, Krista, John, and so many others both in and out of Madison, Wis. for all the connections you’ve helped me make.

Editors

Garth Beyer

The best work out there is edited. Over and over again. I actually just got out of a meeting that involved six people (including myself) editing one editorial column. I’m always surprised to see how excellent a column can turn out when it goes through more edits.

There’s a point when you need to just ship what you’ve written, but never without it being edited at least once. (Your own edit does not count.) Shout out to Jen for editing my novel and other professional content. We both have a lot to learn.

 

Stay Positive & All Errors On This Blog Are My Own. I Like Them.

Good, Great, And The Best PR Stunts

Garth Beyer

Good PR stunts are often the ones that leave people questioning whether it’s real or if it was planned by the PR department.

Great PR stunts actually have nothing to do with any strategy created by the PR team. Great PR stunts happen when you create the ability for people to share their story with others, when the product exceeds expectations, when nothing feels forced.

The Best PR stunt is when the PR is worked into the product or service and not reliant on the interaction after it’s purchased.

 

Stay Positive & The Bestest Is When You Have All Three

Don’t Change, Run With It

Garth Beyer

Complicated ColorsI love painting. I’m super optimistic. And a lot more weird than you. I run with it.

Instead of being less weird/more normal, I justify my weirdness. I profess we’re all weird, I write that the weird is what sells most and the weird (the vulnerability being weird requires) makes us a more successful society.

Instead of lowering expectations, letting go of my confidence and settling on someone else’s “reality,” I defy the naysayer. I isolate the Debbie-downer. I raise the bar even higher to create a new reality and I’m happy to bring .

My SO can vouch for me that I have a problem with putting too many colors into my paintings. Instead of learning how to paint with just a couple of colors, I’m learning how to paint with them all.

You don’t need to change, what you need to do is run with it. Run with your odd way of thinking, run with your risk-taking, run with what the critics hate on. If you’re looking to stand out, looking for success, looking for something that’s very rewarding, you can’t just walk with it, you’ve got to run with it.

 

Stay Positive & Please Don’t Change

Photo and art by myself $500, free shipping thegarthbox@gmail.com

Go Ahead, Steal My Ideas

Garth Beyer 
The following content was written for the Badger Herald. I felt a need 
to share it here since many readers of this blog are academically 
involved. Worth a read if you're not. After all, we are all students.

If you asked any of my friends, family or blog readers what I do, they would say that I’m a writer. Not an exceptional one. Not a poor one. But a writer, nonetheless. With that, I can confidently say that the source of much of my writing comes from many other’s ideas. I stole them, and I’m not ashamed.

I’m not ashamed of the A’s I get on my writing assignments because I take someone’s idea. I’m not ashamed of my blog readership because I steal other bloggers’ ideas. I’m not ashamed of all the ideas I’ve taken by observation throughout the day and written down in my journal at night. I’m not ashamed because I’ve built off every idea.

All ideas you read in your textbooks, catch online or hear from your friends and colleagues can be traced back to a single stolen idea. That is, until those who took the idea thought to themselves, “This could be better if … ” Great ideas aren’t just made up out of thin air. Great ideas are nothing like epiphanies. Great ideas are made when people steal an idea and make it better.

Recently the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation sued Apple Inc. for allegedly infringing on a U.S. patent on computer technology. I’m far from empathetic about the situation, but there’s a logical explanation for WARF’s pursuit.

If you create something and then someone steals your idea — replicating it for profit and refusing to attribute the ideas origin — then, yes. Sue them. (My only concern is that by the time the lawsuit is concluded, the idea for the computer technology will have been improved upon tenfold by others who stole the idea).

Passionately stated by Seth Godin, “The essential thing to remember, though, is that every project is the work of a thousand generations, of decisions leading to decisions, of the unpredictable outcomes that come from human interactions.”

I’m shocked at how adamant the University of Wisconsin is regarding patents and plagiarism. As a research-based institution, you would think to hear professors propagate to students something along the lines of “Don’t take any other author’s words unless you plan on expanding on them in a way that was not originally done.”

Instead, students are excessively reminded (and for those GPA-dependent students who over-think professors’ instructions, scared shitless) to not take anyone’s ideas. That is stealing.

How hard is it to tell students to take any author’s work, attribute what is word-for-word and develop the work into something better than what it was. That is how progress is made. Are we not teaching students to strive for progress on campus?

The answer is that we say we are striving for progress, but we find ourselves boxed into guidelines and filled with fear of crossing any one of them. It’s a grave mistake how we are thinking about ideas in an industrialist way (mine, mine, mine).

If you stole my wallet or my ego or my books, you would cause real harm and stress to me. But my ideas? Please, take them. The more you take the stronger we all become.

Oh, and by the way, I stole this idea from a blog post on www.blog.ted.com. All I can hope for is that I made it better. And if I didn’t, at least I tried. Something we might all want to take more risks to do, whether academically or not.

 

Stay Positive & Ideas, The Best Thing You Can Steal

A Chance For Change

Garth Beyer
Just one activity at the DreamBank. Drop the disc and it flips a card at the bottom, then you read the card. Ironically when I dropped my chip down the "Perspective" column, my chip got stuck.
Just one activity at the DreamBank. Drop the disc and it flips a card at the bottom, then you read the card. Ironically when I dropped my chip down the “Perspective” column, my chip got stuck.

With every event, PR strategy and celebration, you have a chance to create real change, not just make a profit, not just get new customers, not just have more people subscribe to your newsletter.

During the Madison Winter Festival, American Family Insurance opened their DreamBank office on the square to divvy out free inspiration and hot chocolate. I would bet 90 percent of folks who went inside the DreamBank had no clue what it was and won’t remember that it was American Family Insurance. If I didn’t have the goal to share stories like this, I doubt I would have saw or remembered that it was American Family Insurance either.

If the majority of people won’t remember the brand, then what’s the point of contributing to the Madison Winter Festival? Surely the 10 percent are meaningful (heck, I’m blogging about it). But that’s an added benefit, not the intention.

The intention of the DreamBank is to get people thinking about their dreams. That’s what all the activities inside were about. Pulling from DreamBank’s (American Family Insurance) website, “Dreams. They are the most valuable things we will ever own. They are the embodiment of our hopes, goals and aspirations. They empower us, drive us and define us – as individuals and a nation – and the pursuit of our dreams is a part of what makes life rich and meaningful.”

As freelancers, as business owners, as crafters, as “insert passion/occupation here,” we all have a chance to create real change. I don’t know a lot about American Family Insurance’s history, but I know enough that I can confidently say they didn’t get to becoming the success they are now by just selling insurance.

They sold the most valuable currency there is. Dreams.

 

Stay Positive & What Are You Selling?

Photo taken by myself

The Pickier You Are

Garth Beyer

Pick the Gold

Here’s a piece of advice you won’t buy (until you finish reading the post): don’t be the agency with the most accounts, don’t be the client service team with the most clients, don’t be the business that tries to appeal to the masses.

If you’re shooting for success, whether it’s in entrepreneurship or freelance, you have two options. You can be the best in terms of producing a select few outstanding accounts/clients/products or you can be the best in terms of producing the most accounts/clients/products.

With the latter, you sacrifice a lot. You take on clients who don’t have high expectations of themselves. You end up running client services for clients you don’t care about. You create products without any heart, without a story worth buying.

With the former, quite plainly, you get to practice your best. Now, I can’t express enough how important it is to define success for yourself. Even if it’s an assorted list of things, feelings or goals. You don’t need some four paragraph structured mission statement. Life isn’t cut and dry enough for that to work anyway. To define success is to understand what being the best really means.

Success – or growth of that matter – are not always by the numbers. Think of yourself as a publisher. Do you take on 5,000 novels a year, pushing them out the door as quickly as possible? Or do you get picky and cater to the 100 novels that are sure bestsellers?

This example is about to get interesting, so keep up.

Perhaps you’re going into PR. Are PR agencies looking to hire as many aspiring specialists as possible to build the agency up? Or are they going to seek the few specialists who actually represent their title of “special”its? Let’s flip this around now.

You’re looking for a job in PR. Are you going to shotgun your résumé to all the big agencies that run through new interns like a laundry list? Or are you going to seek the small agency that pours every drop of their heart into the work they do (after all, they have the time since they aren’t trying to baby an intern a week)?

You have an option to be remarkable, to be picky.

 

Stay Positive & Why Waste It?

Photo credit