What You Put Into It

Put energy into it

“I put love in it!”

It’s a bit difficult to explain, but when you create something, you also put emotion into it. It’s not that you can choose to make something with love or make it with nothing at all. Nothing isn’t an option.

Everything you do, everything you create has emotion transferred into it.

A noteworthy quote from anyone who views remarkable art: “I can just feel the stress he must have felt creating this piece.”

This is why we must not do the things which make us incredibly frustrated. In the end, that’s the vibe of what you create gives off. Similarly, it’s important we always take a moment to actively seek out how we feel while we do things. Emotion carries energy with it and all things are made of energy.

 

Stay Positive & Careful What You Create

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Go Ahead, Steal My Ideas

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

People first.

Work second.

Why is this so complicated for professionals, marketers and other artists to understand?

People first not only in the sense of what you create for them, but in being an idol, a teacher and a respected professional.

Work for the sake of work or money will only get one so far. Work for the sake of doing what you’re passionate about and inspiring/teaching others who share that same passion – now that is remarkable.

There will always be people in your work life that seek what you have for free that will ask for free lessons or to shadow you. The easy move is to  charge them and give nothing for free. The much harder move is to be human and take each request on a case-by-case basis.

You’ll make more people happy and keep your profession alive that way.

By the way, being the only one in your profession really doesn’t make you that special. And if you’re going to have competition, it might be better to have close ties with them to begin with.

 

Stay Positive & So, Are You A Mentor Or Not?

A Matter Of Free

Free

Don’t give your honest hard work away for free.

Know what your art is and then make sure you receive respectable payment for it.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give anything for free. No matter what your art is, there are trillions of other things that you can give for free other than your art.*

I’ve always been satisfied with buying a book and getting additional content for free. Or buying an appliance and getting a discount on a future purchase.

I’ve never been happy buying a book and getting another one from the same author for free. Or paying for a cupcake and getting a toaster oven for free. Is it the cupcake that’s valuable or the toaster oven?

Stick to what you deserve to be paid for. What that is, of course, you get to decide on.

 

Stay Positive & Free Should Not Come At A Price

Garth E. Beyer

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*as it goes, there are exceptions. Keurig can give away free Keurig machines because they know consumers can answer the question, “how does this benefit Keurig?” Consumers know instinctively that Keurig’s main profit comes from people purchasing K-cups, not Keurig machines. Thus, no one wonders why in the world Keurig would give Keurig machines away for free.

Pick Your Costume, Path, Hat…

Halloween is over but I still see people trying to find the perfect costume, path, hat…

(This post is choppy with a purpose. Bare with me.)

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Not everyone is cut for a traditional education, not everyone can look good putting on a hair-net and flipping burgers, not everyone can be the all-star jock. Simple fact is that different people are looking for different costumes.

My favorite part about Halloween is seeing people who think they are wearing the same costume as someone else. Two people can dress up as a cat, but the makeup is different, the ears are different, the tail is different. We all have something special to offer even if we wear the same costume, walk the same path or put on the same hat each morning.

There’s a reason most agencies need multiple coders, PR people with different personalities, and a variety of people answering phones.

My SO gets me to watch Cupcake Wars and while the bakers are all professional cupcake makers, their finished cupcake products are different from one another.

Starbucks can hire five people who can make a perfect brew, but they all make it their way. The speed they complete an order is different, what they write on the cup is different,  how they hand it to a customer is different.

And when it comes to designers, I have never seen two designers that design the same. Not even when one designer tries mimicking another.

Doing It Right

You’re getting a lot of variety thrown at you here and I appreciate you reading through the choppiness of it all. But there is a point to it.

No matter what you do, you get to invest yourself in it, add your style, put part of you into it. Unfortunately, so many people give up following their interests because what they create is so different.

I still remember one day a few years ago that I thought of melting crayons on a canvas to make art. I never did it because I thought people would say it was stupid, no one would like it, and it was just too different.

A few months after my decision not to do it, a classmate did it and her piece got showed in a glass case in the school. Then I was surfing the web and saw that she wasn’t even the first one to make something by melting crayons on a canvas.

Turns out what I thought people would think was just too different to like, they actually loved.

Doing It Wrong

You’re going to have a lot of people tell you that you’re doing something wrong because it’s different. Worse yet, you’re often going to tell yourself that you’re doing it wrong because you have never seen anything like it before.

The harsh truth is that you (and they) might be right. But it’s better to be wrong and learn from it than not do it at all and never know.

 

Stay Positive & Remember, It’s About How You Deliver

Garth E. Beyer

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Is It This Or Is It That

Hanksy

It’s frustrating that everyone wants to categorize, compartmentalize, and label everything that enters their life. It seems as though our brain was designed as a sorting structure. I can just picture little minions analyzing each thought and deciding what folder to place it in. That may be how it works, but that’s not how we grow.

Reading up on street fartist, Hanksy, I came across this interview gem.

EA:  Speaking of serious, it seems like the moment you try and talk about art that is on the streets, you immediately run into these competing definitions—street art vs. tags vs. graffiti. Do you think the insistence on different categories has a place in the conversation about art, or is that boring?

Hanksy:  You run into all the time. It’s frustrating. It’s like asking “What is art? What isn’t art?” I feel like the terms mean different things to different people. One person’s vandalism can be seen as another’s artistic expression. It is what it is. The internet, and people in general, will always attempt to lump things into categories. And they’ll always argue over it. When I first moved NYC, I’d go on these long runs, all throughout lower Manhattan. And I’d see Muffin Milk everywhere. Different versions. And I’m like, “Wow this guy sure loves cursive.” Turns out it’s a t-shirt company or something. Is that street art? I considered it to be, despite the end goal of selling merchandise.

It’s one thing to be objective, it’s another to be subjective. But that categorization of either is exactly my point. Everyone has their own view. We grow by understanding how others categorize and label their experiences, not by doing so to ourselves.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Just Read, Read Others

Garth E. Beyer

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As promised from yesterday, here are five new sources I read from.

TED talks are lying to you – I don’t usually read Salon, but this was cool.

Arts & Letters Daily – always a good place to find variety

Dreamscape – images and music speak as loud, if not louder than words

It’s Nice That – it’s nice that this is so nice…just awesome

Neotorama – nothing more than neat stuff (not really something to read, but a swell way to break between reads)

Bonus: Here’s a test to discover if someone sees your point of view (HT to David Pink.)