Art

Becoming A Linchpin In A Cubicle

Garth Beyer

The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, ironically spends the majority of the time discussing the 80/20 rule, or Pareto’s principle. Essentially it states that 80% of the best results come from 20% of the work.

If you want to become indispensable, you don’t have to necessarily leave your cubicle. First let’s look at the three types of cubicle workers.

There are the cogs that know what they need to do, their orders and instructions, and make sure to extend the tasks to take up the entire day. They do the same thing every day and are always working, but not getting anywhere.

Then there are the LOL cogs that know what they need to do, and get it done quickly. They then resume surfing the web and entertaining themselves with hundreds of pictures of LOL cats and chain emails.

Lastly, there are the linchpins in a cog position, that know what they need to do and do it quickly and efficiently. Then they proceed to do more than is asked and because they used the Pareto’s principle, have 80% of their time left over to work on maximizing their art, their creativeness. They use the extra time to be more of a linchpin.

Tim Ferriss shared a way to do all the work necessary for a factory job with minimal time in the office and other time to work on starting up a business. I’m suggesting that the same time can be used at home or in a cubicle.

Everyone has the same 24 hours, but only linchpins risk using their cubicle hours to create something remarkable.

 

Stay Positive & Of Course You Don’t Look Busy, You Did It Right The First Time

Garth E. Beyer

 

The Type Of Business That Profits

Garth Beyer

If you make your business possible to replicate, others will replicate it.

To create a business that can be replicated is to base it off the collection of “ordinary” people, with ordinary means that contain the lowest level of skill required for the job because they cost less than someone remarkable.

You will profit, but only until the business is replicated by another, faster cheaper one. It will be. Someone is always willing to go cheaper.

Creating even five businesses that can be replicated is exhausting and still won’t make you enough profit to take an extended vacation. You couldn’t anyway because you are the only one with real managerial skills.

Creating one business, one that can’t be replicated, one filled with extraordinary people, with the highest skill level, self-motivation and passion, even though they may cost more to employ, will be able to pay for 5+ vacations a year for yourself.

In addition, this allows you to pay for the indispensible people to work for you. Basically these people pay themselves and then pay you because their work is so full of art and is irreplacable.

In a world where someone is always willing to work for less, the only way to make more is to run a business like no other.

 

Stay Positive & Start An Unreplicatable Business

Garth E. Beyer

Pick Yourself (Seth Godin Live)

Garth Beyer
w/ Seth Godin

Give Yourself Authority

It’s been over a month and a half since I attended Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event in Tribeca (NY). There’s a specific reason I waited so long to reflect on the event. I wanted to prove a point, not just about Seth Godin, but what any business must produce, whether in product or experience.

Simply put, it must be astonishingly remarkable, something so memorable it is still thought of and excites a person’s senses a month, five months or a year after the product is purchased or the service is used. Essentially, that is what Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event manifested, so it is with easy honor that I will hit some points from it again along with my own curves and twists of ideas.

I had no inclination to write this so soon. I decided to after I created a new motto the other day, tweeted it and it got retweeted by a few people. It was just another tweet, another 140 characters that my mind spit out and that I needed to share.

My motto: Give yourself authority.

It was only after I expressed the motto on twitter that I was tapped by the memory of Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event, which it’s theme was to not wait for someone to pick you, not wait for an authority to notice you, to get lucky; but to pick yourself, solve the problems yourself, find the opportunity yourself, to lead yourself and quite plainly, as my motto states, give yourself authority.

72 Steps To Starbucks Coffee

While in New York City every 72 steps, either if I turned left or right, I would be facing a Starbucks. In Manhattan alone, there are approximately 300 Starbucks stores. That means that out of all the registered Coffee Shops in New York, Starbucks consists of about 60% of them. In a city dominated by the outlier of the Coffee Industry, how can any other coffee shops even make it?

That’s a simple answer that you can come up with. The better question is how Starbucks was able to take a symbol from Moby Dick, use it as it’s logo, and create a brand – an understanding of when you see the symbol, you are going to smell the richest Coffee in town and get free Wi-Fi along with the absolute best customer service.

It’s A Revolution

The dictionary says that a revolution is a single turn of event. Our revolution, the one we don’t quite understand, the one we thought could be easily understood, the one that is making us question nearly everything, is not a single turn of event, it’s a million turns. This revolution is something that is a collective change in one sense, but deep down to it, it’s about the turn each one of us makes, a turn that may be different than the person next to us. While putting it in the most simple form, the revolution is about giving yourself authority, ridding yourself of the chains of tradition and following your passion to create art. Yet, to do each of these things is not something that we can do collectively, being collective is what got us in this grave. No. This must be done individually; each person must make the choice, must give themselves authority and use it. In its entirety, this revolution will turn Perfect into impossible

Instead Of Giving It Our All

Seth gave a long description about the industrial age and this new age of connection. The one take I want to share with you from the event is this.

“So one quick example, just to show you how deeply ingrained this is. If you don’t mind, raise your right hand just as high as you can. Okay, now raise it just a little higher.”

Instead of giving it our all the first time, we give enough and then a bit more when told to. Some people raised their hands 20% higher, others 5% higher when told to raise it a bit higher. In a room of about 200 people there was about 4,000% of potential not being used until told to. The way I see it, even if you gave 100% and raised your hand as high as possible the first time, you would still find a way to raise it higher.

I No Longer Market To You

I had no clue what real type of marketing I was doing on my website until I heard Seth Godin say this, “Because marketing has shifted from me marketing at you, to you marketing to each other.” So, when creating a product, running a business or writing a blog, you can provide all the strong content you would like, but unless you know what you want to do with your audience, your tribe, unless you know how to give them strategies to market to each other and other people that will join your tribe, you have nothing.

Juggling

Seth Godin also inspired me to write this post: The Juggler’s Perfection. On the note of Juggling, of doing what you love, of taking that risk…

“Is it worth getting arrested for?” – Seth Godin

Bluffs, Excuses and The Promise

You think you have a hundred reasons not do something, not to take  leap, not to go out on your own or start your business or take a risk to achieve what you really want. Actually, you probably only have 15 to 20 excuses, or rather, they are bluffs. When you sit down, write the list of the 15 to 20 bluffs, and work through it, you will find that either you don’t have anything holding you back, or you just need to work out a way to get around one or two excuses (a lot easier than working around 20). What it comes down to, what it really comes down to is that you want a promise it will work. You want the paper to say, after you have crossed all your bluffs out, that it will work indefinitely.

There will never be a promise that it’s going to work. Once you realize that, you realize there’s no point in making a list, not because there’s no point in achieving your goal anymore, but because you realize that you are going to have to take a risk and that there isn’t a promise, you will say “something is better than nothing” and get on with it, ship the product or start the business. As humans, if we are not promised lobster (perfection), we would rather have crawfish (anything) than nothing at all. Once you realize there is no promise of perfection, no lobster, it makes doing the thing you made a list of bluffs for, all the more easy. You may even find that you like crawfish more than lobster.

A couple of sayings to use/share

Money is a weight you can run much faster without

You will be wrong a lot, but you will be right a lot too

All you need to care about is being human

The Two Achievements I Made After The Event

Seth made a simple, yet such an extremely interesting point about entrepreneurship and freelance. A freelancer gets paid when she ships, delivers the product, finishes. The entrepreneur gets paid while she sleeps. I am happy to say that, while I still do freelance writing, I have crafted a segment of it into a businesses in which I have hired two employees already! I now sleep easier (because I know I’m getting paid for it) and I have more time to do $100 an hour work that makes a much larger impact on the world – which leads me to…

The second achievement is nearly ready to be shipped. My 30,000 word manifest on what school is for: a view from an 18-year-old graduate who received his associates degree and plans to go back for a master’s degree. Not for the diploma, but for the information and experience being within the system will produce, in order to write a 90,000 word sequel upon graduation. The eBook, Start Schooling Dreams will be released at the beginning of August, 2012, completely free. More background information to come soon.

 

Stay Positive & Take The Authority, Make A Badge Even

Garth E. Beyer

“The World Still Moves On”

Garth Beyer

It’s a common saying, a statement that gets the average worker to not bring home frustrations and sobs from mistakes that took place during the day. It’s a motivator to those who think that since the world still moves on, that they better move on too. (You caught the post earlier about what happens when you stand still.) But what you may not know, is that the saying is used by the dispensable cog, the mediocre, the “average” Joe, the common worker.

See, a Linchpin, someone who brings the best to their work, brings passion, motivation, self-determination and so much more; when they stop working, when they take a break or leave for the day, the world doesn’t move on. Linchpins make the world stop when they stop being creative. The world can’t function without them doing what they do best.

Sure, the mediocre can move on, but the Linchpin moves up.

 

Stay Positive & Keep The World Turning

Garth E. Beyer

People Die Standing Still

Garth Beyer

You may be on standby, but death isn’t.

Nor are opportunities or priceless moments to demonstrate your talents or your art.

 

If a rock is left in a strong stream of water unmoving, naturally the stream will grind down the rock into a pebble. Ultimately defeated it will either be piled on with more rocks meeting the same fate or get taken by the stream and tossed out.

Like the pebble, standing still in life will lead you to be grinded down to non-existence, except it occurs much quicker. When a person creates a stream of their own success, by starting to move, starting to push, starting to lean forward, their stream continues to gain momentum and power. They (their stream) strong with creativity, toils anything standing still. (you?)

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Stop Improving

Garth E. Beyer

You’re Grounded!

Garth Beyer

Don’t just ground your kids, ground yourself too.

Ground yourself so you can learn to be alone, inquisitive, have time to think, to use your imagination and to add to the flame of creativity.

Being alone is vitally important. It gives you the time to shut everything down, let your mind be free and for you to produce ideas and solutions that you would have never thought of before because you are constantly enabling an overload of information to transition into your mind. Day by day, the mind is twitchy, hyper and working too fast for too long. It is in this action that much of life, of creativity, of a purpose is lost.

I remember the couple of times I was grounded as a kid and the multiple times I grounded myself as an adult. I locked the door, laid on the floor and sometimes listened to light music, read a magazine or just sat there contemplating the world outside my room. I would also write. Other times, I would destroy things and try to put them back together. There were plenty of times I sat on top of my dresser, looked out the window and watched birds fly, watched clouds in the sky and questioned life. The more special times were when I thought of incredible life changing ideas – something that is guaranteed to happen once the mind is quiet. The most important lessons in life are the ones which are learned when alone, when one has a relaxed mind and can work out an understanding without any predescending variables.

It was during these periods of grounding that I would meditate. Not on purpose. Not based off of a video or internet advice on how to meditate. Meditation simply is, it’s not something that can be forced because in that very purpose, in that very goal, there is a working mind and a sense of strife to achieve. That is not meditation. The meditation I am speaking of is the one that does not seek calmness, relaxation or solitude. The one I speak of is that which will revitalize your energy, your motivation and resilience. The one which unlocks the treasure chest of creativity in your brain and releases it into all of you which then transfers to all that you touch. The one that makes art, art.

 

Stay Positive & Getting Grounded Doesn’t Seem Like A Threat Now Does It

Garth E. Beyer