The value you bring is more important than your portfolio

The value we bring is the most important element that we can take to a new job or a new project.

The client wants to see your portfolio or your degree before they hire you, but both of those things are relics of the past. Tomorrow is a new day and there is no guarantee that your best work is still ahead of you.

However, both the degree and the portfolio give prospective clients (or bosses) some sense of security in hiring you for the job.

For the artist, it is important to use the portfolio as a tool to gain more work, not as something that gives a sense of entitlement. That was yesterday’s work. The best and most valuable people don’t rest on the laurels of what they’ve done in the past.

The important thing is the value you bring today and the success you foster for tomorrow. Work hard on important things.

You should laugh at my joke (because I laughed at my joke?)

Laughter is contagious, but when you laugh at your own jokes, it makes them less funny and causes you to appear self-conscious.

So the quote by French novelist, Honoré de Balzac rings true. “To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.”

You only need to have the confidence that the audience will see that your joke is funny.

Introducing novel ideas and shifting the Overton Window

The Overton Window has to do with what policies are acceptable to the mainstream at any given time. There is a sort of Overton Window effect with all creative ideas.

You might approach your boss, or a client, with a brilliant idea. However, even the boss who loves creative solutions might not understand the idea if it’s “too unique.”

There is a sweet spot with introducing new ideas. Not so normal that it’s boring, but not so creative that it’s confusing.

Introducing brilliant or new ideas is like blowing a soap bubble. Be gentle and shift the window of acceptable ideas. If you push too hard, the bubble will burst.

Familiarity helps explain stuff

One of the most difficult things about creative work is convincing other people that your idea is a good one.

We, too often, fall into the trap of assuming that everybody sees the breadth and depth of our “ingenious” idea exactly as we do. After all, we know our idea inside and out.

However, selling an abstract idea is difficult. Selling a novel solution you’ve come up with is even more difficult.

The solution is familiarity. Connect your solution to commonly known items, processes, and ideas to quickly explain (and generate a level of comfort about) your idea.

Find commonalities in books, history, technology, behavior, sports, etc… and explain your ideas and solutions that way to help bridge the gap from an abstract idea to something concrete in the mind of the person listening to your idea.

Critics

A critic is a legless man who expects to teach you how to run.

Start small. Start now.

Make small changes. It’s all you can do today anyway. Big changes happen because you’ve spent weeks, months, and years making small improvements every day.

Small bad habits each day also compound over time. So focus on doing one small thing today and you have 365 drips of water in your bucket after one year.

Start small. Start now.

Contempt for authority

Shaking your fist in the face of (lawful and good) authority is popular, but humility (even when you’re sure you are right) is far more beneficial.

“To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself,” –Albert Einstein

It’s a hard life to be a leader when you have never been willing to be led.

The to-do list is stressing us out

We all think to-do lists are essential. But they may also prevent us from maximizing our effectiveness.

It’s comfortable to see all our work laid out on a list in front of us. However, I have found that I am much more effective and open to changes throughout the workday if I only keep a loose collection of general projects I want to make some progress on each day.

The goal is to get started with work right away, not dream about work to be done. Once I am started with work, I am more open to the reality of the day and what I can handle. It is at that point that I lock in a to-do list.

This keeps me open to the flexibility that I need throughout the workday. It also helps eliminate the stress of being an hour behind schedule by lunchtime on my to-do list.

Note: The same holds true for time blocking a day of work. Instead of scheduling tasks into rigid 15-30 minute blocks, I instead reserve hour-at-a-time blocks for either “deep” or “shallow” work and just fill those hours with productive work on whatever projects I choose.

One trait I try to avoid

There is one trait that I try to avoid in myself and when I hire people to work for me. This is the demeaning of other people or organizations that they’ve previously worked for.

We show our own character when we describe others. Whether they’re people or companies.

When a man has had problems with all of his previous employees or all six companies he’s worked for in the past, the problem might not be the company or the other people. It’s probably the guy.

If we speak well of those who aren’t around to defend themselves, we show confidence, competence, and responsibility.

Also, people will take your complaint more seriously when you’re not complaining all the time.

Hold back less, do more.

The mistakes we regret are the things we didn’t do, not the things we did.

Inaction, when we’re afraid, is easy at the moment, but it’s what we regret most later on.

Action now is difficult, but we regret that much less later on.

If we could do the past over, most of us would hold back less and do more.

The stress of success

It’s easy to miss the difficult parts of success. Success seems great to all of us. If you have that success, you have nothing to be upset about anymore… right? Wrong!

When you start becoming successful, you have more to lose when you fail than if you have no success at all. This becomes a major stressor.

Falling from failure to total failure is bad, but it’s much worse to fall from semi-successful to failure. Hence we see why some people can’t handle the pressure that comes with success.

We're usually more fixated on the potential for a small failure and we completely ignore the potential for the same action having incredible success.

We must develop the courage to continue operating freely and recklessly even when we wear the heavy jacket of success.

Risk and mistakes

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually afraid to make one. The greatest risk you can make in life is being afraid to take risks.

Exposure breeds comfort

If you’re going to create content, how much content can you create before you over-expose yourself to the world and people start to hate you/your work?

Over the past ten years, I have always assumed that if I create too much, people will get sick of watching my videos. This is true, however, we need to understand how much is “too much?”

This mindset has caused me to pull punches and hold back from creating as much as I should.

We probably only create about 5% of what we would need to before people get sick of our content. Most people don’t create enough because we all see the people who create way too much and we assume that everybody does that.

Spoiler: Most people don’t. Most people hold back.

We should be creating 10-20x what we are if we want to create an impact.

In fact, the more you create and the more familiar people become with your work, the more they like it. People enjoy your artwork, content, or videos more, the more they see it. That is unless you over-share.

Share more, not less. You probably won’t over-share if you’re a person who has concerns about over-sharing.

Earned respect and better influence

It was Albert Einstein who stated, “Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.” So how can I get people to listen to my ideas when they aren’t status quo?

I believe the answer to be that we must build respect by doing the quiet work that delivers value.

When we try to influence the room but lack the respect of those in it, we are viewed as difficult, self-serving, and generally annoying.

That respect, that status, cannot be given. It is earned. Like all real respect, you can have to merit it.

Work hard, over-deliver, and the rest comes with it. Influence, respect, and a certain amount of power to change systems and voice opinions that otherwise would have been ridiculed or fallen on deaf ears.

Sadly, too often, we skip the hard work part and demand respect, preferment, and influence. Your idea is probably good, but if you don't have the respect of the room, it simply doesn’t work.

The armor is heavy

In the mid-1150s Emperor Frederick I conducted a military campaign to subdue much of northern Italy. He laid siege to one of the wealthy cities. In this city was a young nobleman known to be boastful and full of himself. The young man gathered his arms and armor and rushed out the gate to fight.

As he did this, he yelled at the other young men to hurry up and suggested that their “slow pace indicated that they were afraid to fight.” He boasted that he would go and confront the enemy himself.

He raced along with his horse the miles toward the enemy. While riding, he encountered some fellow soldiers who had been wounded and were retreating. After seeing them, he slowed the horse's pace considerably.

A few moments later, he could hear the noise of the battle and saw it from afar the fighting. At this, he brought his horse to a complete stop.

People afterward asked him why he did not participate in the battle after so much talk. He responded that he did not feel so stout or courageous when he wore the armor. The weight of the armor prevented him from engaging.

We can all talk the talk, but the armor is heavy when you get out there to do it.

From where we came

I wonder if people who grow up in Mississippi think that everyone uses the name of their own state to count seconds?

Stop worrying about greatness

We judge the greatness of a person by their peaks, not their averages.

Kobe Bryant averaged over 35 points per game in one year of his career, but also 13 points per game a few seasons later. However, he scored 81 points one night against Toronto and had 4 other games in which he scored 60+ points. He also captured five NBA titles over his career.

The peaks define him as a top-5 NBA player of all time. If he never got through moments of average play, greatness would not have been achieved. But I don’t think he was worried about being average or being great in those moments. He just went out and did the work.

The peaks came and the peaks defined the level of greatness.

Slave to the moment

The future is tricky. We are so quick to put off work from today onto a future date, but then we regret it when the future arrives. Credit cards get maxed out and it pinches to pay them back. We knew the future would come, but we almost didn’t believe it.

We also can look back on things we regret deeply. Many of those things we knew at the moment were not good or useful things, but we thought that the future would sort it out. The problem is, the future doesn’t sort it out, it just eventually places us in a bad way where we have no options remaining.

Imagine if we all had the respect for the future that we have for the moment. We wouldn’t write checks today that we can’t cash tomorrow. We would be more ruthless in our endeavors, but also more upright.

I think, also, we wouldn’t suffer as much.

Respect the future by taking care not to become a slave to the moment. The moment is never as big as you feel it is.

Why the experts are so inflexible (and why they get it wrong so often)

The more expertise we gain in our field of work, the less flexible we become. Experts tend to struggle when the rules change more than a beginner who has more recently entered the field.

When there is no historical precedent of something working, an expert will reject it far sooner than an open-minded novice will.

Novel ideas get rejected because of the discomfort associated with a new thing. It could fail, so why would I give up something that seems to work just fine now?

There are plenty of reasons to give up the good and reach for the great, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Expertise gives us blinders when we don’t temper our expertise with humility. Our humility enables us to strip away our assumptions and adopt a beginner’s mindset once again.

When we approach problems that require creative solutions, the unbounded mind is the one that is more able to think outside of the problem and find the best solution. Only after our child-like approach to the problem, ought we to put on our expert’s cap and apply our wealth of knowledge and experience to put that creative solution into action.

“Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish a reputation as an expert.”

— Laurence Peter

The unknown side of perfectionism

Many of my posts have been about my own battle with perfectionism–the fear of creating new work that I think might not be as good as it could or should be.

One of the most tragic side effects of perfectionism is that it slows down your ability to create lots of pieces of artwork. You get stuck with a few ideas and spend years trying to “perfect” them. You end up getting nothing done.

We need to make lots of stuff to run into the good ideas, so when we slow that flow of ideas, we harm our potential.

Edison had more than 1,000 patents, yet most people only know him for the lightbulb. Einstein had more than 200 scientific papers published, yet people know him for relativity, being a symbol of intelligence, and his crazy hair.

To have good ideas, we must have lots of ideas. Do what it takes to allow your body to generate lots of ideas without allowing perfectionism to hold you back.