Safety

Where The Friendly People Are

Garth Beyer

I love the city, don’t get me wrong as you read. Downtown Madison, New York, Boston, Chicago, they are perfect. But I also love the country. Actually, some might not even consider it the country, it’s more the edges of town. That’s where I really love to be.

You don’t need to go too far from the heart of something to find people happy to see you venturing out on your own.

It’s the same story if you were on a motorcycle traveling from downtown Madison to the edges of it as it is if you were traveling from the safety of your current workspace to the just-a-bit-uncomfortable edges of it.

It’s ironic, really. We’re fed the idea we need to be in the heart of something to get the most out of it. Yet, no one waves to you as you pass by; no one pays you any attention; no one takes a moment to chat about your day or offer you something strictly out of selflessness and gratitude. It’s the people already at the edges that are there for you. The edges of your work, the edges of innovation, attitude, education.

They’re waiting for you.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Make Them Wait Any Longer (this is what happens)

Here’s A Quarter

Garth Beyer

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Now here’s a story about a quarter and his quarter friends.

A local art museum requires you to put your jacket and bags in a locker before you can begin browsing the gallery. You need a quarter to use the locker. (You put the quarter into a slot in the locker and then you’re able to turn and take the key. When you return the key and close the locker, you get the quarter back.) Fortunately the guards at the front desk have a lot of spare quarters for people to use and return before they leave.

This is fascinating to me for a few reasons.

1. It’s a reminder of how important everyone is – even museum guards. The interaction with the guards (the simple transaction of “you need to do ‘this’,” “here’s a quarter to do it,” and “just be sure to return it when you’re done.”) is paramount to the gallery viewers experience. There’s very little human to human interaction at an art museum, so any interaction that does occur will influence the experience of the gallery viewer.

2. If you’re going to promote safety, you might as well do it through human interaction. Signs telling customers what to do work, but they don’t add anything to the customers experience.

Lastly, the experience reminded me that “extra steps” are opportunities, not meant to be a hassle for customers, rather a chance to turn customers into friends.

 

Stay Positive & Quarter For Your Thoughts

Garth E. Beyer

Catch Yourself

Garth Beyer

When you fall, fall hard. Learn from it and get back up.

But before you fall, try to catch yourself.

Too many artists get the two confused and try to catch themselves falling or rely on some other safety net to prevent getting hurt, to prevent failure. Don’t.

safety-net

What you want to do is to catch yourself losing track of your goals, or your motivation, or swaying into oncoming traffic. To do so, you have to develop three elements to your psyche.

1. Cautiousness

2. Observation

3. Mental Risk Taking

If you’ve read any of my content before, you’re likely wondering why I am advising cautiousness. I am all for a gamble, but you need to know the consequences going into it. To be cautious is to acknowledge the potential negative consequences.

To understand a decision, you have to observe everything about it. Have other people made a similar decision? What factors may affect your choice later that are not now? What are all the pieces that need to be in place before a decision can be made effectively? Essentially, what’s changing, in constant motion and how does it affect you?

Mental risk taking means to think through the unthinkable, the impossible, to explore every avenue available. Have you ever heard someone say there are only X number of ways to do something? The obstacle of mental risk taking is to think of one more way then what has already been thought of. Better yet, think of Parkour. Ask a regular pedestrian what is the fastest route to get from A to B and they will give you directions. Ask a tracuer and they will tell you to jump over this fence, run through that lot, leap over this creek and race across the rusted bridge. Something a layperson wouldn’t.

 

Stay Positive & Try Not To Fall, But When You Do, Fall Hard

Garth E. Beyer

Run With Scissors… Just No Cutting.

Garth Beyer

I love boxes. There’s something magical about them. Something truly unique about them. Theres so much to take from them, conceptionaly speaking. Think about it. Everyone living their passion has a box with everything they need in it, they just have different names for it: Toolbox, Thinktank, Craftbox, Time Capsule, Computer, Jack-In-The-Box… (maybe not that last one)

We all have our own box, that’s a given. It basically contains everything in our life. I may even go so far as to say for some of us that our box is our life.

So I have to ask you, what happens if you cut corners within your box?

It kinda quits being a box, doesn’t it?

 

Stay Positive & Running With Scissors Is Actually Less Hazardous

Garth E. Beyer

The Imagination Generation

Garth Beyer

Previous generations had it easy didn’t they? Much easier than us anyway.

They didn’t have electronics to take them to a new world. They didn’t have the ability to Google all the things they love, the items they didn’t have or even focus on working hard to get them. They had a simple life. Hard, yes. But simple.

Our generation and any hereafter can Google more and further than our imaginations could previously take us. We Google surreal images, pictures representative of predictive futuristic consumerism. We now Google thinking it will help, yet we do very little or nothing that blogs suggest, that articles advise, that pictures inspire, that the world needs. We waste our time Googling for two reasons.

1. We seek safety, security and the knowledge that “everything is alright”. The same reason, in fact, as why you check Twitter and Facebook 20 times a day to see that everything is okay, nothing serious has happened. We never think that maybe, if something serious were to happen, if our security was breached, if we felt unsafe, that we may just feel it and know? Do we really think Googling, checking News, Twitter feed and Facebook will really be the primary acknowledgment that we are in trouble? No.

(It does good to take a moment to realize that this process is what has put us in trouble)

2. Our imaginations have been released, but not far enough. We search and stretch our minds as far as the web will let us extend them and then we feel like we got there ourselves, accomplished. We feel that since we imagined it, that it is real, attainable and easily reached. The ability to see and understand that which would not be attainable without the web is creating a surge of jobs not filled, inventions not made, and ideas not created. It is as though whatever is on the web is as far as the mind can reach, but this is false.

What you can Google, discover on Twitter, view and share on Facebook can well be used as a bridge to a further discovery. They are not your destinations, they are someone else’s and this means that there is a calling upon you to take what you view and learn to improve it, make it better, and most importantly add your imagination to it.

Or you can simply avoid this roadblock and let your imagination run as wild as possible. Of course, by doing this you will only find out that you can actually go further than what is proposed on the web, what can be dreamt of, created and achieved by another.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Sort Of A Win-Win

Garth E. Beyer