Create

Here’s A Cup, Go Measure

Garth Beyer

If it’s so difficult to bake a cake or make cookies from scratch, how do you expect to read results that are hard to measure? (Obviously this post is more for those like me, who can’t bake a cake or make cookies. Alas, I hope this to still be noteworthy.)

We can look at the number of cups of flour and water and chocolate chips you need just like you can keep track of the number of visitors to your website and the clicks you get on each page.

Very easy to measure.

What about a cake without a recipe? Or the personality of each individual who visits your blog and what they actually want or if they were satisfied with what they found?

Much more difficult.

Luckily, food writer Michael Ruhlman breaks down cooking into easy-to-understand ratios of ingredients, a method he says allows for more creativity in the kitchen.

“When you know a ratio, you don’t know a single recipe, you know a thousand.”

The same can be applied to your website, your product, or your own creation-without-a-recipe. All you really need to do is ask and connect to your audience. It’s hard to know a thousand audience members before you know what the single most common one is like.

 

Stay Positive & Start A Conversation

Garth E. Beyer

3 Steps To Get Better At Anything

Garth Beyer

1. Consume: Read and read often. Find idols, heroes, and infamous artists. Study them. Research what they researched. You’ll quickly discover that while tracking their footsteps, you’re leaving your own.

2. Produce: Try. Create. Make. Experiment. Fail. Produce something as often as possible. Choose not to have a choice if you construct something each day, just do it. Your goal is 10,000 hours or 10,000 lightbulbs, whichever comes first.

3. Share: Ship with style, deliver relentlessly. To share is equal amounts act of giving and feeling vulnerable. Don’t think about waiting. Tell yourself the best time to ship is now, and it will be. Whether you think you have something that matters doesn’t really matter. Someone, somewhere believes it matters. Will they find you?

 

Stay Positive & Consume Feedback Then Repeat

Garth E. Beyer

Maintenance Is Nothing New

Garth Beyer

It disturbs me to hear someone say that something (or someone!) is high maintenance. It’s the same as saying that it’s only a short matter of time until they drop whatever it is, (or who!).

Humans are naturally inclined to create, to stack blocks on top of each other – you don’t have to show a kid how to play, they just do.

But you do have to show a kid how to put those blocks away, to take care of them, to clean and nurture them.

Anything we create is not too different from the blocks to the kids, yet we decide that if the blocks are too high maintenance, we would rather not have them to begin with.

This prevents creation, prevents you from building, prevents art.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

To hell with too much maintenance – that’s the most exciting art. That’s the most thrilling challenge, the greatest emotional-sociological-psychological roller coaster ride. Those moments of high maintenance are the ones you will look back on and not need anyone to thank you for the work you did… you will thank yourself.

And that is a feeling that just can’t be beat.

 

Stay Positive & Perpetuate Your Art

Garth E. Beyer

Problem Solution

Garth Beyer

It has almost been a year since I attended Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event in Tribeca. When I was sifting through a box of my memorabilia I found a card. Not a thank you card, not a blank card, but a life changing card.

Seth gave out these life changing cards that, as you can see in bold, said, “PROBLEM.” You can guess what was on the back, but we will get to that in a moment.

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We were asked to think of the (or any) problem that we were facing that was holding us back from shipping, making the call, and in general, committing to something. Then we wrote it down on the card. We were then told to switch cards with the person next to us and they would fill out the back.

(Jumping forward real quick, this is not my card, we were supposed to keep our own but the lady I did the activity with accidentally kept mine and I kept hers. Not a problem, I’m actually thankful for it. It’s allowed me to write this post.)

The first half of the idea behind this card is that we have to face our fear. We have to think about what truly is holding us back. We had to make sure the problem was one actually worth writing down. Most importantly, we had to let someone else – who we barely even knew – see it.

As you can read, she has a real problem. It’s hard to sell anything to an audience you don’t have and even harder to an audience you have no clue where they are. Obviously, she needs a solution. That’s where I came in.

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Three solutions to her problem.

1. “Just start dedicating time to grow audience and the audience will form themselves.” When you’re just starting out. Forget the audience. Commit to revealing yourself first. No one is going to follow someone they can’t see, someone they can’t connect to, someone who is invisible or a mere shadow. Here’s a thought: Seeds flowing in the wind never land on soil that is never watered. You have to water the soil before any seeds will consider planting themselves.

2. “In order to find your audience, you have to go after everyone by testing your ideas and see the response.” Naturally, this is the second step once you begin “watering the soil.” It’s great to have an idea of what your audience is, but no one knows your audience better than your audience! – and if you’re just starting out, it’s likely you’ll be wrong a few times before you’re right. Better to make the big mistakes now than later.

I started a PR blog to show what I know when other professionals or employers checked me out. Soon I discovered that my audience was made up of students and people interested in learning about PR, not necessarily my original intention. You can have foresight, but never let yourself have a narrow mind.

3. “Take 10% of your time to grow your audience.” That’s not a lot of time, for good reason.  Get good at creating first. Get good at seeking criticism. Get used to challenging your fears. Get in the habit of shipping your work. Then follow-up by connecting, by interacting, by messaging like-minded people.

(Note: The third solution can work in reverse.)

Did this solution help her, I’m positive it did, but believe it or not, that’s not the point or the goal.

The point is that whatever problem(s) you have, there is always a solution. The moment someone else sees that, you’re held accountable, you can’t lie to yourself anymore that there is no solution, and above all, you have no excuse, nothing holding you back.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Often A Move We Have To Make

Garth E. Beyer

We got tricked into this by not knowing what we were doing, why were doing it, or what we would have to do later. It takes someone bold to express what their problem. Are you up to it?

The Moment Your Work Becomes Easy

Garth Beyer

It means that you are playing it safe, that you have gotten comfortable.

Yes, you can be painting 25 portraits a week, writing 11 hours a day, starting a new business every 13 months and that is A LOT to do. But if it’s easy, if it has become habit, a routine that you know you have to do and you do it half-consciously, then it loses its meaning.

The saying goes that if you aren’t getting better, you are getting worse. There are millions of artists, writers and entrepreneurs painting one more portrait than you, writing for one more hour than you, and starting one more business than you. The experience they get from doing just a bit more trumps you considerably. 

By being “trumped”, I mean, you’re fired and they’re hired. All because you quit pushing yourself and increasing the difficulty level.

— I’ve written every day, typically winding up publishing what I write. I also have a steady writing/editing job. On the side, I write in every category of writing words will stay and force the words where they wont stay just for experience. But it’s gotten easy. It’s natural for me to type anywhere from 300 – 3,000 words a day whether they are worth a damn or not. I think I may be standing still. —

And when that happens, when you stand still, when it becomes easy, there are two choices: settle a stay comfortable or do more, work harder, experience extra, invite challenges, and not go one mile further but aim for 10, 20, 30 miles ahead.

By the way, if you aren’t willing to run/paint/write/create/etc. more than you are now, drop out and find what will never be easy for you. Being comfortable and having your routine means that you are standing still.

And if you click the link, you know what I say: People die standing still.

 

Stay Positive & Aggrandize Your Passion

Garth E. Beyer

A Writers Depression: Just Write

Garth Beyer

I’ve tried my hardest not to insert what I am about to say in a post, but I simply can’t fight it.

I feel like I’ve run out of ideas, my creative brain engine has stopped moving and I am very close to just not writing today.

This happens a lot to many people, that’s why you see articles sparingly posted on blogs, why it takes a writer (a writer!) so long to finish their book or quite simply, for an artist to finish her project. Regardless, it happens.

It may be because I am writing so much during the day on my manifesto Start Schooling Dreams or maybe it’s because I’ve already gone through all the notes I’ve ever taken since I was in high school. The point is, I’ve hit a writers depression. I’ve written so much for so many days that I must have overworked my brain and now my mind has been forced to go cold-turkey on writing. It’s depressing.

Instead of losing hope, I’ve decided to force myself to sit in bed, grab my favorite pen and an old journal I used in high school that has only about 20 blank pages and I refuse to get up until they are all taken up with ideas, doodles, mottos, life tips and art. I’m going to battle depression with my devotion to write.

This is my post for today. I’m going to force myself to write and I hope you pity me enough to force yourself to do something too.

Today, let’s be depressed but let’s still ship something: our writing, our art, our small piece of a big project or at least a story about a time the world was against us, but we were too devoted to let it conquer us.

 

Stay Positive & Devoted (Just Do It)

Garth E. Beyer

Making Old Jobs New

Garth Beyer

The unemployment rate is despicable. It’s not because more jobs aren’t being created, they are. It’s the fact that the new jobs are replicating the ones that have always been used.

If we want the unemployment rate to go down, if we want to do real, honest and passionate work, if we want to look forward to work (something that is necessary to want the unemployment rate down), then we need to make old jobs new, not make new old jobs.

Currently, a worker’s pay is based on compensation, of the hours put into work. What it needs to be based off of is creativity deliberation, not compensation. Simple terms: paid to go in and make a ruckus.

Through that ruckus, we see improvement, new development, a fresh way of thinking, creativity and above all, results that mean something, not just numbers on a financial statement.

That doesn’t mean you need a new job, a better job or a second job, it has nothing to do with making more jobs, it’s about transforming new ones out of the old ones. It’s about doing the ones we do now differently, creatively and passionately.

We’re all self-employed even if we have a job, that’s a given, but to leave it at just “self-employed” doesn’t do any good, it doesn’t call for an action, a direction to take. We’re all “self-employed artists“, capable to be original in our thought processes straight to the core of what we create in our jobs.

Through our artistry, we can change, improve and develop our jobs into something magnificent. Something worth waking up for each day. It is through this that we can discover new ways to do the job better, more efficiently, uniquely and to serve and benefit people even more.

Most importantly, this is the way we can end the idea of an unemployment rate.

 

Stay Positive & These Are The Jobs We Want In The USA

Garth E. Beyer