Writing

The Great Discourager

The Great Discourager

Garth Beyer

Better Than You

Here’s the sitch when it comes to going down the path of your passion: you’re not the only one, and nearly all the others down the same path are much, much better than you.

Want to be a beer writer? There are so many others better than you, more experienced. Steve Hindy, Maytag, Heather Vandenengel, Robin Shepard, this list could run a thousand.

Want to be a graphic designer for fortune 500 companies? The slots are already filled by someone bigger, taller, stronger, faster, and with a better stretched and exercised imagination than you.

Even something extremely specific, like a crêpe artist. There’s someone already more artistic with crepes who others will choose over you.

Unless.

Unless you tell a better story. Your story is the leverage you can have over someone more excelled than you. Your story is how you not only get a bite out of the stranger pool, but you turn the strangers into friends. Your story is your competitive advantage.

The decision you need to realize you’re making when you start following your heart and putting your passion to practice is that there will always be someone better than you, more skilled, more talented. You can’t let that be the great discourager.

The world can never have too many stories nor too many artists.

 

Stay Positive & Those Who You Feel Discouraged Be Can Be The Most Encouraging

Photo credit
You Wouldn’t Think It Would Work, But It Does

You Wouldn’t Think It Would Work, But It Does

Garth Beyer

Beating A Dead Horse

Some of the best writing comes from challenging a cliché, turning it on its head, and getting original with something overused. Weird is original and original is often uncomfortable.

Think of this concept in terms of advertising, not just writing.

Epic ads are often about challenging stereotypes. Pantene for example. Or the famous Cherios ad, aired during the Superbowl.

If you want meaningful buzz, go creatively challenge status-quos, clichés, and stereotypes.

Spare some time this weekend to incorporate this tactic into your PR, your brand, your writing. See what happens.

 

Stay Positive & Don’t Take The Flack Personally

Related

 

The Necessity Of Being Dynamic

The Necessity Of Being Dynamic

Garth Beyer

Dynamic Personality

Even as a freelance PR strategist, I never tell anyone I work alone on assignments. I always have a team. I always reach out to friends, experts, and alike. I ask for help, I have a couple other PR folk review my press release before a send it back to my client. PR is always a team-based activity whether you go at it as a freelancer or on an agency.

There’s a personality necessity I learned very, very early on that’s benefited me endlessly. I’ve also seen the lack of this personality be the downfall for other PR folk. You won’t make it the PR industry if you lack the ability to be dynamic.

If you’re being hired or doing the hiring, your team’s personalities will never align perfectly, nor should they. I like to think of perfect examples this way:

  • She can be pretty pushy, but she’s damn good at what she does.
  • He procrastinates and most of the time turns in assignments at the end of his deadline, but he always turns in absolutely brilliant work.
  • She’s an introvert, for sure, and you’ll be nervous if she understands what you’re asking her to do, but her work always proves she knows.

Madison Magazine mentioned a freelance writer of theirs who never makes deadline, but they know she always turns out the best work. (Naturally, they just give her a deadline that’s a few days before their actual deadline. It works.) If MadMag cut this freelancer, the quality of the magazine would suffer. So it goes with many many agencies and teams alike.

Be prepared to be dynamic with others, for we all have flaws others will work to overlook.

 

Stay Positive & Make It Easier For Them By Shipping Remarkable Work

Photo credit

 

You’ll Make Very Little Impact

You’ll Make Very Little Impact

Garth Beyer

Doing Things Differently

There’s certainly a chance you’ll make a very large impact, but the chances are slim.

Slim indeed.

But this should be a motivator more than a turn off.

With nearly 100,000 public schools in America, as a teacher, you have an opportunity to do something different without negatively affecting the system of the other 99,999 schools.

With 500,000+ businesses starting up each year, you, as a now business owner, have an opportunity to do something different with your business without it negatively affecting the trend of others starting their businesses.

With 290,000+ books getting published each year, as a writer you have an opportunity to do something different without breaking down the publishing industry.

There are so many people doing what you are doing that you now have permission to do what you do in a drastically different way. And don’t forget, no one is paying much attention anyway.

I wrote you’re unlikely to make a huge impact, a real dent in the universe. It makes me wonder if knowing that, are you willing to give up your attempt? If you may only influence one other person through your trial of something new, something different, do you believe there’s no point in following through with it then?

Would you rather an aspiring teacher quit his pursuit and work at a gas station instead because he knows he may only impact one or two students in five years of teaching?

This is a call to experiment. And once you experiment, experiment more. Regardless of whether you’re making a large or small impact doing so.

If it’s any consolation, your chances of making a huge positive impact are far greater than making a huge negative one. It’s easier to redirect a current than it is to get others to stop all currents completely because of some pesky seaweed buildup.

 

Stay Positive & The Only Negative Impact You Can Make Is Not Making An Impact At All

Photo credit goes to one of these people

How To Not Burn Yourself Out (It’s Ironic)

Garth Beyer

Overworked

Spending hours on Pinterest or skipping lunch to continue working on your business plan is exhausting. To be an expert in social media, undo, marketing, guitar, writing greeting cards, anything, it takes tons of time.

Over and over I’ve watched others burn out from spending hours upon hours on something.

I’ve seen friends spend days learning cool Twitter marketing skills just to burn out and scrap their campaign idea.  Others have exhausted themselves from writing for 4 hours straight or playing a video game for 8 hours non-stop. (Ask anyone in my family or my close friends, I’m quite notorious for burning myself out too, and it’s taken a number of years to write this post with pure confidence.)

The best way I’ve learned to not burn myself out is to do a little bit of everything. To be a social media expert, don’t spend all your hours trying to leverage Twitter. Do something with Twitter once a day and move on to doing something with all the other social media outlets. Instead of going all in, go in on all.

It’s not about knowing a little bit about everything anymore. Now it’s about learning a little bit about everything continuously over a period of time until you’re an expert on a lot of things.

This also means to go out and run in the rain, to cook yourself a damn good meal, to email a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while. Everything in moderation.

 

Stay Positive & Emphasis On The Everything

Photo credit
After Years Of Arguing It

After Years Of Arguing It

Garth Beyer

Writer Garth Beyer

I’ll finally admit it… Identifying your passion, discovering what it is you really love to do, finding your purpose is a damn difficult thing to do.

For some it seems to come so natural. That, too, I once believed. I don’t anymore. Being more forward with you, I thought I knew I always wanted to be a writer, an entrepreneur and a PR guy (even though I didn’t know the term PR at the time). “It’s  just who I am!” I would tell people.

Investigating my past, though, I can’t recall the moment when I knew. There was no epiphany, no wide-realization, no godly pronouncement of my passion.

After scrutinizing my past, I realized that it was through a series of forcing, tricking, and driving myself to love the things I did that lead me to declare I was a writer, I was an entrepreneur, I was what I now know is called a public relations strategist.

I didn’t always love writing, but I was always finding ways to love it. (Still am.) It started with poetry because I knew I couldn’t fail. It moved on to bullshitting school papers because I could mock the system when I received the same grade as someone who spent weeks on the same paper, and I, only hours. Writing became more fun when I could write love letters and make women blush. And starting this blog? Best decision of my life for reasons it would take a book to detail.

I didn’t always want to be an entrepreneur either, but I always found ways to love it. (Still do.) I started my own vending machine business with my dad because I loved eating the leftover candy. I helped run a card shop because I loved collecting pokemon cards at the time and got to watch old batman movies when no one was in the shop. Instead of a lemonade stand, I had a beanie babies stand because it connected me with more kids my age.

I didn’t always want to go into Public Relations, but it was a knack of mine finding ways to love it. (Still is.) Meeting new people and going to events alone was rough, but I made business cards for myself. They made me feel I deserved to be there even though I didn’t have an established PR business. I went to dozens of Toastmaster (public speaking org) meetings, not because I was fearless, but because I could learn from others’ failures so I didn’t make the same when I finally forced myself to the podium.

Passion isn’t really something you seek out on purpose, it’s more of something you come across. You don’t need an “aha” moment to realize what it is you’ve been put on this world to do. You get there by finding reasons to love what you’re already doing.

 

Stay Positive & You’ll Do What You Love, When You Love What You Do

A Bit On Voice

Garth Beyer

Without any legitimate training in the understanding of artistic material, you can tell good from bad.

You may not be a graphic design expert, but I trust you can look at a website and tell if it is designed really well.

You may never have touched an instrument other than the pots and pans of your mother’s cupboard, but I will bet you can tell when an orchestra is in harmony.

You may think you’re a terrible writer, but when you read something someone else has written, I just know you can tell if the writer has voice or not.

Everything in life speaks to us, but only if it’s given a voice.

A lot happens, rather, doesn’t happen when a writer fails to have voice in their writing. When there’s no voice, there’s also no humanity in the piece, no node for the reader to connect to, no electricity.

Peter Elbow refers to voice as juice. “’Juice’ combines the qualities of magic potion, mother’s milk, and electricity,” Elbow said.

By ‘magic potion’ he implies there is power in the words, power to change the reader’s emotions, power to produce an entire world in one’s imagination, power to turn someone’s worldview over in a pan and call it sunny side up.

In mother’s milk you receive the nutrients you need to grow. Voice is a way of using words to express how much you care about a subject, and, by extension, the reader. Words that nurture the reader, giving them all they need and more, those words have voice; you might even say your mother’s voice.

As for the electricity I have mentioned, it’s about conversation and establishing an experience. Do you know what I mean?

That, right there is a question I’ve posed to you through the written word. Your engagement level rose, perhaps you answered the question, perhaps not. If you did, that is because there is voice in my writing. Maybe you wanted me to explain more of what I meant or in your mind added to my side of the conversation.

Conversations have energy and develop experiences.

Voice, in a way, is energy. Words can touch a person, pat them on the back, tap them on the shoulder, and stroke fingers through their hair. If you type words the way you say them conversationally, that’s how to find your voice. Then you can proceed to clean up the flow, but not too much.

Elbow also disccusses the potential and often-occurring action of overcorrection. You may have voice in your writing and through editing, remove the voice. Making all the corrections you can, editing something so it reads and looks perfect, takes out the humanity of the writing, and humanity is what people connect with. Notice the spelling mistake at the beginning of this paragraph. It reminds you I am only human.

While removing all spelling errors doesn’t quite remove your voice, reworking sentences so they are completely grammatically accurate can. When you make writing flawless, the reader thinks a robot is talking to them. No one wants to be spoken to by a robot. Unless, of course, they are a robot.

 

Stay Positive & Everything You Do, Do With Voice