How’s “X” Going?

Garth Beyer

Good? Alright? Okay?

Nothing meaningful is going alright.

Success is complicated.

Making people happy isn’t easy.

Changing your business plan, developing an outreach program, and moving forward all require a lot of effort, mindfulness, and hard work. Lines don’t just go up, they shake up, they dance up, or they fall short and bounce up.

You don’t want to make it so things are going good, alright or okay. Not to mention, it’s difficult to create a straight line and the time an effort it takes to smooth things out, you miss the opportunities to shake things up, to try, to fail, and to create something meaningful.

In my eyes, a wrinkled shirt has always been the sign of someone who is too busy doing things that matter to worry about how smooth his shirt is. Equivalently, that’s what I like to see when a business shows me their charts.

Which of the two graphs do you fall under.

1377104_723119971035176_922880621_n

Stay Positive & Beauty Of The Right Is That You Never Know How Far Up You Can Spike

Garth E. Beyer

Just Tell Me How Much

Garth Beyer

1378473_724120424268464_264967151_nSeeing this was bittersweet. Bravo for the beverage companies that have such an established brand that all they have to compete with is price. But what an unfair advantage over beverage companies looking to introduce new tastes, for the beverage companies having fun with their products, and for those beverage companies looking to build themselves up by donating a majority of their profits to a charity.

This is when not only beverage businesses, but we, as their consumers, need to understand what the definition of success in business is.

Do we want to buy into what is cheapest? Isn’t a cheap price a sign of a cheap product? Does the cheapness mean they care about the consumer less? By setting a low price, are they closing the market to what consumers might prefer?

We have to think wisely of what we consume because what we buy isn’t just a product, we buy into the idea, motivation, and feeling the business puts behind it.

I say this is also a bitter concept because when all we care about is price, we lose track of the real human interests that many other beverage companies sell.

 

Stay Positive & There’s Always More To What You Buy

Garth E. Beyer

A Subtle Reminder That Experts Will Still Fail

Garth Beyer

So I get in the elevator with the mail carrier today. We’re both excited it’s Friday, but I mention that it’s raining (which doesn’t suck, but I’d prefer sunny weather. Who wouldn’t, right?) And he says to me, “It’s better than snow.”

“That’s true,” I respond.

Then he said, “Gotta think positive.”

He said that to a man (me) whose motto is Stay Positive. It was a subtle reminder that while we can be experts on anything, even experts fail. And that’s a good thing.

The Faults Of Overtime

Garth Beyer

5011477848_84669d30ff_z

The fault is all on you.

Quite recently in my career as a journalist, I decided that I would not do an interview that goes over an hour. Collectively, the interview may take more than an hour, but the total would not be one continuous effort to get all that I could out of it. I also hold this rule for team meetings or anything one does in groups.

When the hour is up. It’s up. Not a minute over. Sometimes – and preferably – it ends a few minutes short of an hour.

People are exhausting. So is caring, listening, and interacting with other people. I’ve come to the conclusion that speaking for an extra three minutes or asking people to stay late or staying on one topic when it was scheduled to change 10 minutes ago does more harm than good. Why does this matter?

Think about your work. What do you do? There are very (very!) few jobs that don’t require you to interact with another person or group of people. (For those few jobs that don’t, I guarantee they would only benefit by having human to human interaction.) The thought behind this is that while an extra two minutes may mean nothing to you, those you interact with may view their time as more valuable. (Not to mention, your inability to recognize this leaves those who you interact with with the impression that you don’t care about them, which is exactly what you set out not to do.)

To stay parallel with my recent writing on consumerism and positive emotionalism (that people buy products that make them feel certain ways and sacrifice leisure time to do so), overtime needs mentioning.

The concept behind normal working hours and being paid a larger amount if you worked over those hours (overtime) was introduced in 1937 by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The development overtime has taken in the workplace is outstanding, both in terms of higher pay for working overtime and pushing employers to heavily restrict the ability for workers to work overtime. In turn, offering workers more leisure time.

I argue that with this additional leisure time, people still participate in overtime. With “overtime” being defined as our pursuit of that which makes us feel the way we want to feel through working more than is reasonable and beyond meaningful. (Work, by my definition, is anything that we put effort into doing without passion.) One does not need to have a full-time cubicle job with benefits for one to be considered working. Many times, just doing dishes and vacuuming is work.

The pivotal point here is that overtime is an average object covered with a cloak of hope. Hope that if one works hard enough, that what is under the cloak will turn into something that makes them feel better; be it a bigger car, a better type of coffee brew, or just new dishes.

What puzzles me most is that we work overtime to perform this cloak-covered magic when we are better off performing the real magic of working with passion (making art).

The wand is in your hand.

 

Stay Positive & You Don’t Need An Object Just To Wave It

Garth E. Beyer

Ironically, Seth Godin touched on part of this post this morning. Full disclosure, I had the idea and began writing about this prior to my viewing of his blog.

Photo credit

Wait, That Was Leisure Time?

Garth Beyer

1128788988_4b4f6cf52e_z

Recently I’ve written a lot about materialism and how uninformed we are of our own real desires and intentions.

We the people do not want more things. What we want is to feel. We don’t buy energy drinks because they are full of sugar, taste good, or because other people buy them. We buy energy drinks because they make us feel energized. They make us feel productive. You and I both know how great of a feeling that is.

This is positive emotionalism at its finest.

And positive emotionalism (seeking out and leveraging what makes us feel good) is expensive. Our desires are manipulated by marketing, but what’s more important is that we do seek out items that make us feel one way or another, regardless of being marketed to. In more simple terms, if we were never marketed to, we would still find energy drinks that make us feel productive because the feeling is what we really want.

How does this affect you and me?

Research has shown that we don’t necessarily work more each week. If anything, we work less and have more leisure time. On the other hand, I would argue that during the hours we do work, that we work harder. Furthermore, the hours that we don’t clock in, we find ourselves still working. For what?

We’ve exchanged leisure time with our pursuit of how we want to feel. The defining principle here is that our pursuit has lead us to consume rather than enjoy, to buy instead of play, and to fall into instantly crippling debt when we could be doing something remarkable with our leisure time.

Marketers don’t control us. Materialism doesn’t control us.

But our ignorance of “how” we can feel the way we want to feel – that’ll be the death of us. After all, it already is the cause of our “non-existent” leisure time.

We have to search for less consuming ways to feel the way we want to feel if we ever want our leisure time back. Problem is, true leisure is the most likely place we’ll find it.

 

Stay Positive & Oh, The Irony. Sensitivity Has Left Us Senseless.

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit

The Simple Explanation For The Decline In Newspaper Readership

Garth Beyer

If you looked at why we consume, you would discover that nowadays we buy into how things make us feel.

As far as I can remember, reading a newspaper has never left me feeling too good.

Common sense…

Sources Of Emulation, Inspiration, And Self-Dissatisfaction

Garth Beyer

In a world that defines the importance of everything by placing it in a list, one more list won’t hurt, right?

1. Seth Godin

2. Malcolm Gladwell (also find his writing in the New Yorker)

3. Paul Krugman

Breaking them down

Seth Godin: You may wonder why I have “self-dissatisfaction” in the title. Godin is the reason why. I work to emulate Godin on a daily basis, to write in a way that equally encourages people to challenge the status quo (by creating a ruckus) and inspires them to be creative about it. Godin writes in the way that says “you can do better, here is how you can be better – go and combine the two.”

Malcolm Gladwell: Ah, Gladwell. No person can say “you’re an idiot, start asking why things are the way they are so you quit buying into the status quo and being manipulated” like Gladwell. His way of writing answers the question of why with grace, common sense, and resolve. He inspires me to not only question everything, but actually seek out the answer – the full answer (and share it!).

Paul Krugman: He has attitude. Actually, a firefull combination of expertness and bias. I read his wonkish writing to understand how to state facts in a direct, “duh!” kind of way. While I don’t care to know all of the facts of economics he has to share, I adorn the way he shares them. Additionally, I admire everything that he writes that is non-wonkish, such as why he doesn’t use Twitter, or his reflections on family and life. He reminds me that although you can be one of the top-most professionals in your niche, that you’re human and people love reading the works of people who are human.