A few things I’ve been reading lately:
Don’t give away free stuff.
Give away free stuff!
Mac is the new PC.
Apple is now evil, Microsoft is now good.
Blogging for money is your ticket to freedom!
You can’t make money from blogging.
It’s enough to turn the most focused person into a bobble-headed moron.
You would have to have a ninja-like focus and feel so confident in your direction every moment of every day that you won’t be swayed by all the opinions and rhetoric.
Yeah… good luck with that.
I like to think I have a solid strategy for my business and a clear direction for my art. Still, it’s hard to ignore what I read and completely avoid comparison shopping of the soul. Some of the advice I read is genius, which only fuels the doubt and feeds the monster that steals my focus.
It reminded me of a demo I used to give to people when they were going in four different directions and hyperventilating the whole way.
I was training project coordinators and art directors in the litigation services industry, working with people who had the most demanding clients in the world. Demanding as in, “I need this five minutes ago, so you better get on it – NOW.” Demanding as in, “Fred called in sick and Annie will be late, so we don’t have any artists to get that done ‘NOW’.” Some days it was literally non-stop, phones ringing off the hook, no lunch, bathroom breaks only when bladder bursting was imminent… you get the picture.
It was the same sort of reactionary insanity as trying to build a business and decide what the next step should be (or agonizing about that last step being the right one).
So I would bring a psychotic, near-to-tears project coordinator into a conference room and have them do a little experiment. Hey, Kids, you can do it, too!
Clearing your focus, plus a use for your junk mail
You know that GEICO ad you keep getting in your mailbox every month? Let’s put it to work and see a demonstration of focus in action. Here’s what you do:
1. Rip that GEICO ad into tiny bits (or any junk paper, it’s not important).
2. Throw the pieces in the air.
3. Watch them fall, keeping track of every single tiny piece of scrap paper raining down onto your floor.
4. Decide that this is stupid, because who can do that?
5. Repeat steps 1 and 2.
6. This time, just track one single piece as it floats down.
7. Think about that for a moment while someone else picks up all that damn paper.
At the very least, the demo would bring a coordinator out of their insane world for a few minutes so they could focus on one thing; what a wacko I am. Which was perfectly fine, because, you know… mission accomplished. Their focus was on just one thing.
The point (which you may have guessed by now) is that you can only focus on one thing at a time. People say they do twenty things at once because it sounds more dramatic, but in reality you can only focus on one. Multitasking is a myth.
When I find I’m going mad from all the pendulous opinions on stuff like giving away free things/not giving away free things, I rip up some paper, throw it in the air, and watch one piece float down, ignoring the rest.
Maybe I don’t have a final answer about giving away free stuff, but ripping up paper feels damn good.
And then I can focus on that one little piece I really should be, which is helping my clients make their stuff awesome.
My floor is a mess right now.
That is a fabulous technique. I love it. Expect my floor to look like the victim of a snowstorm sometime soon.