LifeDev

Photo by Oncle Tom

It’s really simple: You can’t become an expert until you’ve failed at something.

Yet it’s funny how people with authoritative titles never talk about their mistakes. In fact, it’s a taboo. We want to put our trust in someone who’s more of an “expert” than us. It makes us feel safe and gives us warm fuzzies.

For example, you’d rather not be in the dentist chair and have your dentist proudly telling stories of botched root canals. And nobody wants to believe their doctor ever made a wrong diagnosis.

But they have. Many, many times.

This is where the world gets it wrong. It’s not really “failure” if we view it properly: it’s learning. You don’t know what works until you know what doesn’t work. Failure is all part of the learning process, and anyone who says differently is delusional.

I’d rather a chef tell me how many times he got the recipe wrong before he finally made the perfect pancake.

So don’t worry when you fail. It’s going to happen, and it should happen. Often.

Just don’t make the mistake of using it as an excuse to quit.

Further Reading: Here’s a post from a couple years back that I love and still reference today.

“There Is No Effort Without Error and Shortcoming”

Post by Oleg Mokhov.

Photo by alterna2

Want to unleash your creative genius? Take a lesson from a band that knows a thing or two about creating remarkable work: Radiohead.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, Radiohead are a major and remarkable band – especially their ‘97 magnum opus OK Computer, a creative, critical, and commercial success that sounded like no other rock music at the time.

You can take away a critical lesson from how Radiohead made OK Computer. One that’ll help you unleash your creative genius and create something truly remarkable.

And that lesson is (Phil Selway drumroll)…

Isolate Yourself

When you create, isolate yourself.

You can only create something remarkable when you completely believe in what you’re creating and let 100% of yourself and your ideas come out. And the easiest way to do that is to isolate yourself during creation.
Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by pseudothoughts

My brother had an interesting job over the holiday season: selling fireworks. Fireworks are incredibly popular in the South on New Years, and every year a caravan of his friends goes to work a firework tent in Alabama. It gives them a chance to get away and make some quick money over the course of a week.

Thanks to some awful weather, sales were way down in my brother’s tent, selling only around $2,000 worth of fireworks in about a week. But on New Years Eve their tent sold over $11,000 alone. Sure, that sounds pretty normal considering that lots of people buy fireworks just on New Years Eve. Yet my brother had more than doubled every other tent’s sales that day.

And he did it in a really boring way. He hustled.
Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by jared

I can’t even begin to count how many posts I jot down that I never finish. Some sit and rot in an ideas file for the rest of their life, and that’s as far as they get. Others get as far as a few paragraphs, even up to a nearly finished post before it’s crumpled and thrown in the digital trash. I typically end up writing only about 20% of the posts I start.

Yet if I published every single idea I’ve had for an article, then there’s no way you’d still be reading my drivel. (Thanks for sticking around, by the way!) There would be much, much more unfocused, sporadic and unfinished content lying around this place. You’d spend your time trying not to step in the really stanky posts while trying to find the good ones. Yuck.

So, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff and the “men from the boys”, I throw away the stuff that just doesn’t cut the mustard. Of the stuff that I don’t throw away, 9 times out of the 10 I revise the pickles out of it. I cut, scratch, peel and scour the suckers until they’re at a point that I can call good. Then, and only then, I hit publish.

I think this is a natural thing for writers to do, and an important one at that. Ask any accomplished writer how many drafts they’ve tossed in the trash, and they’ll say the same thing. When you write, you already know that every sentence you type is going to be checked over, modified and possibly even thrown away. It’s just a part of the creative writing process.

Yet I’m surprised at how people don’t use this practice for other aspects of life. Old businesses never revised or even threw the plan away when it no longer worked. Or they finished that mediocre product because management wanted to see something. The art of cutting and running is a valuable one, and businesses should study it more.

Businesses don’t value failure like they should. They don’t understand that throwing away 50% of bad ideas is a good great thing. But you and I know it’s a vital part of creating. Why, this year alone I’ve had at least one “failed” product launch, and I fully expect to have more in the next year. In fact, I’m planning on it.

Every potential post that I throw away or every idea I chuck, I’ve learned a little something struggling with it. The same with every failure in business or life. It’s just a part of the process.

But when you find that one stellar idea out of 10, then you’ve got something special…

Post by Tim Brownson.

Photo by Stephen Poff

There are any number of books, magazines and blogs out there that are happy to tell you that you must follow your passion in your work to be really and truly fulfilled.

I’m here today to tell you, they’re all wrong.

I must admit that until fairly recently I too believed in the ‘chase your passion’ school of thinking and I even say in my first book:

“I can’t guarantee that you will earn big bucks living your dream, but if you are really happy and can meet your basic needs, do you really care?”

In principal it’s fine and for a lot of people, good advice. However, in practicality it fails to deal with two aspects that should be taken into consideration if you are looking to change direction in life.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by windy sydney

Feeling a little stuck today getting started? Maybe you’re spending too much time doing one (or more) or these:

• organizing
• testing
• preparing
• collecting
• analyzing
• measuring
• thinking
• tweaking
• practicing
• assessing
• questioning
• experimenting
• even brainstorming

While all of these things have their merits (and should be done at some point), they’re usually the things that keep us from doing.

The best thing about just sitting down and doing something, anything, is that doing usually takes care of all of the little things in the list above.

Doing helps you test. Doing can be experimenting. Doing can even stimulate ideas.

So instead of focusing on the smaller stuff listed above, just start doing. You could analyze or test or brainstorm for hours, but at the end of the day you really have nothing to show for it.

It’s essentially spending all day wishing that something was happening. And there’s that old adage about wishing:

If you find yourself in a rut of doing lots of the above list, than maybe what you’re working on needs some swift action to get the ball rolling. Block out 15 minutes to an hour for straight doing on whatever you’re working on. Thinking and doing shouldn’t be isolated as two separate experiences while creating something. In fact, they go hand in hand.

If you’re stuck, odds are it’s because you’re not doing enough doing.