Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Opportunity, go, job, strife, success, thrash, goal, results, guarantee, safety, new, change, acceptance, stress, cheers, struggle, beautiful…
These are all words that have as much meaning as you’ve put into them. For some reading this, they are empty words. For others, they need more letters to hold all the meaning. Luck, experience, chance, love, work… they are all just words, that is, until you give them meaning.
Stay Positive & How Will People Feel Flipping Through Your Dictionary?
Elusive graffiti artist, Banksy set up a stand in NYC selling his signature work for $60. Normally his work goes for about $40,000, to $200 thousand and up.
This says less about what art is worth and more about what we perceive as art. Reporters are not doing Banksy any justice by not reporting on why he is establishing residency in NYC one day at a time through the movement he dubs “Better Out Than In.”
This has two positive, but counterintuitive results.
Banksy’s spray art has always been to communicate a message. That message is up to each individual to decode and then act on. Since news reporters are failing to report on the messages of the work, it is completely left to the individual who sees it to make their interpretation and the mass are failing at it. This is why Banksy only made $420 from selling his work the other day.
Many would blame Banksy for not creating work that convinces people to analyze it. To that I would ask what art work does do that?
The other result is if the media did begin to analyze his efforts and voice their interpretation of his artwork, that closes the value of those who interpret Banksy’s art different from how the media says to interpret it. 
For example, the media could pawn this piece off as being purely humorous, when, in fact, it could have hundreds of different purposes beyond simply invoking a chuckle.
It does not matter that Banksy sold his work for $60 a piece. What matters is why he did.
All the same, it does not matter that Banksy sprays his art work around NYC. What matters is why he is.
It doesn’t seem like the media is going to give us any answers on that. However, by the end of the month, I imagine Banksy will.
Stay Positive & Perhaps It’s Better That The Media Doesn’t(?)
Garth E. Beyer
Our world is plastered with statistics. Some good. Some bad. But all, relative, subjective, and never quite capturing the whole picture.
That’s a statistic though.
What we want is that bittersweet spot between the alphabet and the number system, between a statistic and the reality of it all. (The reality being that one can never simplify their lives down to fulfill one statistic.) What we want is trends.
Discovering trends creates a yin-yang vibe to creativity. Fifty percent of your mind thinks, “hey, similar ideas to this have worked in the past,” or “these numbers look offly familiar to the numbers in 1980, 1964, and 1952.” The other 50 percent of your mind is asking “what does this mean?”
You have a field covered with geese. The geese then take flight and you have a flock. The flock flies in a V formation, and now you have meaning.
Statistics alone make you think of all the goose poop on the ground. Put the statistics together and give them a kick, and you have a trend – something that works consistently and collectively. Then it is to each his own to derive meaning from it.
The meaning you come up with is what becomes invaluable to your readers and listeners.
Note though, that detailing the meaning alone in a book though, is pointless.
There’s a famous philosopher called Kierkegaard. He wrote an insanely long volume about the existence of God. In the end, he notes that all of what you have read is pointless, that nothing of it matters, but the journey was an important one for you to take to make that realization. This is the result of only writing about meaning. It’s a journey, yes, and maybe entertaining, but in the end, pointless.
It is the statistics and the trends that you put before the meaning which induce action. Without them there are no stepping-stones, only preaching to an audience who has no reason to believe you are credible enough to be preaching. Meaning alone is simply interesting.
Stay Positive & Use Statistics and Trends. Don’t Pull A Kierkegaard.
Garth E. Beyer
