Projects

20 Places Where You Can Start Your Project

Garth Beyer

1) Where you are now

2) Where you are now

3) Where you are now

4) Where you are now

5) Where you are now

6) Where you are now

7) Where you are now

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10) Where you are now

11) Where you are now

12) Where you are now

13) Where you are now

14) Where you are now

15) Where you are now

16) Where you are now

17) Where you are now

18) Where you are now

19) Where you are now

20) Where you are now.

 

 

Don’t just say you want to do something.

 

Stay Positive & Do It

Lessons And Reflections From Krypton Course #001

Garth Beyer

If you didn’t know, Seth Godin and his team created the Krypton Community College over the summer of 2013. The gist: get together with people to discuss, learn and create together. (Here’s the link to the first course Krypton Course #001 Go: How to Overcome Fear, Pick Yourself, & Start a Project that Matters)

The following are lessons and reflections I thought it was necessary to share.

Week one

1. You don’t need a huge group. My team started with a total of two students and one organizer. Then it dwindled to one student and one organizer. It only takes two to tango.

2. Everyone has similar fears. But they won’t believe that statement until someone speaks up and shares their fears.

3. Fear can be narrowed down to either fear of embarrassment or fear of injury. Surprisingly, people would rather risk injury than risk embarrassment. Wow.

4. Fear – the 20 second rule

Week two

1. You can plan (not set) a path for creating projects that add up to a valuable portfolio of experiences. There’s a middle ground between setting something up and allowing for complete spontaneity. Find that sweet spot.

2. Finding your edge is crucial for success. You can’t find it alone, though.

3. Feel free to read Start Schooling Dreams.

Week three

1. Committment means something different for everyone.

2. Not everything you create should be shared. Not everything you create should be kept secret. Make time for what you keep private, make more time for what you share.

3. As the famous Hugh MacLeod said, “Ignore everybody.”

4. Let what you create and share go. You’re better off creating something else, something new. Once you deliver something, detach yourself from it and go make something else remarkable.

5. Success is not a straight line. (obvious, but worth mentioning again)

Week four

1. If you’re going to share your project idea with someone, make sure they have a project idea to share with you too. Sharing your idea with someone who doesn’t have one leaves you with everything to lose. Sharing your project idea with someone who has a project idea too leaves both of you with everything to gain. (I can’t fully explain the dynamic. You will have to trust me on this one without a long explanation.)

2. You’re going to talk about your project idea and get excited. Make a conscious decision beforehand that you will use that excitement for action and not settle at just talking about it. This is the most difficult part of the entire course.

 

Stay Positive & I Hope You Will Give It A Shot*

Garth E. Beyer

*if you live in Madison, Wisconsin, let me know. I will be holding course #002 at the start of 2014.

 

Turn Your Beat Into A Book (summary: writers)

Garth Beyer

I attended a conference that hosted a panel of writers and publishers. Happy to share what I took from the writers panel with you.

  • 10 tips that one writer gave
  • Think about writing before reporting. Reporting will be natural and more apparent the deeper you get into the story.
  • He or she who hesitates “gets scooped.”
  • What you need:
    • To be gregarious
    • To prepare
    • To know when to cut bait (get out of a situation)
    • To have faith in the project
    • To make something new
  • When writing a book, always try to find more time. Time that is constructed for the sole purpose of writing.
  • “Most important picture is the next one, not the last one,” said a the photojournalist.

Lastly, and worth not having in a bullet point, always try to keep a project going.

The Lizard Brain, Again?

Garth Beyer

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Yes, because it never really goes away. The lizard brain is everywhere, but the best time to catch it is right at the beginning. The beginning of a project, anyway. Why? So that when it comes knocking again (it always will), you will be ready to dance with it.

Daily I meet people who have things they want to do, dreams, wishes, goals, but don’t start. They are waiting for the right moment, they are waiting for more experience (when starting is the experience they are waiting for), they are waiting to get picked, they are waiting to meet and learn from this person or be referred by that person, they are waiting until the weather is better, or they have more contacts.

They say excuses are endless and reasons are few, but I’m not saying these are excuses. They are very valid reasons. Convincing. Logical. It just makes sense to wait.

What no one focuses on are all the reasons to not wait. This is how you begin to challenge the lizard brain.

The earlier you start the further ahead you are to others. Everyone else is letting their lizard brain win. The experience you want is actually the experience you will get from trying, whether you end up failing or not. The best way to get picked is to pick yourself. The greatest referral you will ever get is the one from someone who never saw you coming. The right moment is now.

It’s not about working your way up a ladder, it’s about doing what you love. And to do that, you have to acknowledge the lizard brain. After that, the rest handles itself.

 

Stay Positive & Come On Now, Let’s See What You Got

Garth E. Beyer

This post was inspired by someone who is truly going places. Start now.

Photo credit

Taking Inventory

Garth Beyer

I’ve written a bunch about starting fresh this new year. This post is by far my favorite

Ship or Delete

Taking Inventory

Nah. It’s more like getting rid of your inventory. Very cut and dry.

Go through all of your lists right now: your projects, your folders, your notes, your journals, your goals, and either ship or delete them.

Simple right?

Well you’re going to come across a project and think to yourself, “Well this is something that I can’t ship right now because it’s unfinished and it’ll take time to be finished.”

Decide right now whether you will actually finish it within the next two months. If yes, then do it. If no, then either delete it or ship a short version of it. Put it out there for someone else to work on.

There are a couple of concepts at play here.

The first is that if your idea was remarkable enough, you would be working on it constantly or would be passionate enough to complete it within two months.

The second is that if you can withhold one of your ideas, one of your projects, then you are saying it’s not important enough to be delivered right away. (If it is, then now I’m mad that you’ve made me wait so long and won’t buy into it when you finally deliver it.)

The new year is about starting fresh. You have 21 days to go through all you have and either ship or delete. Ship or delete. Ship or delete.

In order for a door to open, you must close one. Actually, the cool thing about life is that when one door closes, a million open for you. How many will you have opened for the new year?

 

Stay Positive & Make Room For New Inventory

Garth E. Beyer

 

Start Flailing

Garth Beyer

Yesterday I wrote a post about making your 2013 new years resolution list now and trying to complete it by the end of this year.

The day before that, I published my book of poetry Sleeping Above Your Dreams.

Today is the day I encourage you to start flailing, thrashing, pushing, egging, thwacking, and a bit of swaggering to get your goals completed.

So often we wait until the last-minute for things and we flail to get them done. New years sucks because we have this idea that we can just set the goal to finish something next year. We have nothing to really trigger us to flail, no deadline, no one riding our backs.

In fact, everyone is supporting your effort to prolong yours. No one ever says to you, “No. I want to see that finished before the end of this year, not next year. You have better things to move on to and focus on for next year.”

Well. No one has ever said that to you until now.

This month of December has always been the month that the most items have been shipped. Let’s really stretch that list and ship our projects, our ideas, our writings, our muse.

I’m not sure about you, but I’m keeping tally of all the things I ship this year. I have a folder on my computer titled “Projects” and it will be empty by the end of this year. Clear, cleaned out, and ready for new ones to enter it for next year.

 

Stay Positive & What Do You Say To That?

Garth E. Beyer

Figuring It Out On Your Own

Garth Beyer

Sorry Tim Ferriss. Sorry Michael Ellsberg. Sorry to countless of thousands of other people who made a map to success. Sorry to everyone who made a strategy, a game-plan, a step by step process to reach any goal.

Flipping through a folder of all my projects, I came across a printed out version of Tim Ferriss’s/Michael Ellsberg’s blog post 8 Steps to Getting What You Want… Without Formal Credentials. Basically Ellsberg covers the present circumstances of degree required positions and how to get them without a degree; basically referrals. Knowing people who know people.

He communicates that employers require skills, not degrees and it’s up to you to show you have the skills by “creating your own damn credentials”. After giving all the background information and the reality of becoming successful without a degree, he challenges you to follow his 8 step process. Here they are. (View the full post here)

Step 1: Choose Your New Field of Learning

Step 2: Showcase Your Learning

Step 3: Learn the Basics of Good Networking

Step 4: Within Your Budding Social Economy, Start Working for Free

Step 5: Develop Case Studies of Your Work

Step 6: Develop Relationships With Mentors

Step 7: Learn Sales

Step 8: Sell and Deliver your Services Within Your Social Economy

Reading through all of his steps, they will definitely work. I’ve experienced each one of his steps, in my own way of course, and the results are tried and true. The thing is I read this blog post over a year ago. I read it a few times actually, and never implemented it directly. I didn’t sit down and take it step by step to get where I am today. Maybe if I had then I would be much more successful. I’m not. I’m happy though and I have a lot more real experience and attachment to the journey I’ve taken to get where I am.

See, these 8 steps are just one game-plan in a billion. Think of all the different phrases you can search in Google to find step-by-step procedures on how to become successful, how to get noticed, how to monetize something, how to reach a goal, how to become a real artist in your trade. There are billions of proven plans.

Yet, we don’t take them.
Some part of me thinks that Ellsberg even knows this but still puts out a book of how to become successful without a formal education. We desire to know and that makes him and countless others a profit. However, and what I find most fascinating, is that we desire to figure it out on our own much more. We simply learn and practice certain segments of all these game-plans until we create one ourselves and it’s successful. Then we write a book about it, preach it, and sell it to others. In turn, they do the same thing.

Following the plan doesn’t make progress, creating an entirely new one does.

 

Stay Positive & Do What Works … For You

Garth E. Beyer