In my last post, I introduced you to my experience being an expert at the New Hope Academy’s Ask An Expert Day and how awesome it felt to pass along some knowledge and encouragement to young people just starting to consider the future. I had planned to follow that up today with a run-down of each of the topics I discussed with the students. But as I was writing, I quickly realized that I covered an awful lot of ground that day. To really do justice to each of these points, I’ve decided I’m going to break it up into FIVE posts, one for each major point. So today, I’m gonna hit you with:
#1. Cultivate Your Own Curiosity
In my senior year of undergrad, several of my classmates and I went to an elementary school classroom to teach the kids cartooning and comics. It was kind of a disaster. While we tried valiantly to get the kids to draw their own comics strips, we were instead met with a barrage of “Draw Batman!”, “Draw Pikachu!”, “Draw Random Cartoon Character You’ve Never Heard Of!” This incident came back to me the moment I agreed to be a guest speaking at an Ask The Expert Day at New Hope Academy last week in Niles.
The end of the year has arrived, disturbingly faster than I had planned for, but it’s here nonetheless. This is the time of year when everybody is into lists—the top five whatevers of 2011, your 10 best events of the year, eight things that will be awesome in 2012—and let’s not even get started about resolutions.
So it’s in this spirit that I share with you a little app that has been a lifesaver for me since becoming a freelancer and having to juggle a jumble of clients, projects, and business housekeeping tasks all at once. It’s called ToDoist.
I started innocently enough with a To Do list. In the early days, when I was still transitioning from a day job to my current lifestyle, I would keep a list of tasks and goals on a dry erase board. It was tangible, easy to update, and always just out of sight enough to forget about. Great as long as I never left my work space.
When I started visiting client offices more and more, I needed something portable. Enter the Field Notes notebook: 48 pages of grided paper small enough to fit into my pocket. I could assign each day it’s own page, make a list, add to it as the day went on, and always check back on previous days for what didn’t get done. Again, tangible and easy, and now portable too! Perfect for misplacing or forgetting at home. Plus, when you flip a few pages, those ongoing tasks from several days ago are out of sight and out of mind. Blissful ignorance!
No.
No, we don’t take clients like that.
No, that’s not part of what we offer.
No, that market is too hard for us to service properly.
No, I won’t bend on this principle.
No, I’m sorry, I won’t be able to have lunch with you.
No, that’s not good enough. Will you please do it again?
No, I’m not willing to lose my focus, and no, I’m not willing to compromise.
This is the latest blog post from uberblogger Seth Godin, who has been dropping Zen-like pearls of wisdom on his blog for years and years. I read one of his books once and rather enjoyed it. This post, however, baffles me on many levels. Perhaps it’s the complete lack of context for these comments. Perhaps it’s the outright negativity. Or maybe it’s because it goes against everything I’ve ever been taught as an artist and as an actor.
As an actor, we’re always taught to say yes to possibilities. As an improvisor, the rule is to respond to anything with “yes, and…”, thereby accepting what you’ve been given and adding to it. In this way you keep the ball rolling. You keep creativity moving and flowing. Perhaps you’re not presented with the best idea in the world, but by reflecting and shaping the energy, you keep the conversation moving in the hopes of landing on something better. To say “no” onstage means that you stop the energy without offering anything up yourself.
Similarly, as an artist with my own business, such comments are antithetical to getting more business. If someone comes to you with a request you can’t handle, don’t just shut the door in their face. Suggest one of your colleagues for the job– you’ll get goodwill from both your colleague and the client. If you can’t fulfill a request, suggest another way that you might be able to reach the same goal. If someone gives you a wildly idiotic request, you can even say “Yes, I see where you’re headed. If we do this other thing instead, we can get there faster and better.” This sort of thing is a basic customer service skill: if somebody is coming to you for something, give them something, even if it’s not exactly what they want. Give them direction, suggestions, hope. If you’re not even willing to entertain their ideas or comments, then you’ll never know if maybe they are smarter or better than your own.
Perhaps this sort of reflection is what Seth had in mind when he wrote the post. Or perhaps he was being a jerk. I have no context to know. So I say to you: read it as a warning of what NOT to do. That path will only leave you lonely, clientless, and empty of ideas.
What you see here is a common occurrence for me: I open my mailbox hoping for a fun letter or interesting magazine, only to find my mail crushed into a sad and twisted heap. It looks from my end as if the mail carrier throws some letters in the box, then crams some more, and then finishes off by stuffing a rolled up magazine down on top of all of them, ramming it all into the box until it fits and then slamming it shut. Yep.
When I worked at The UPS Store, which rents the retail equivalent of Post Office boxes, it was no different. Despite complaints from customers about expensive magazines being ripped or holiday cards with family photos being mangled and crushed, the employees would often just stuff handfuls of mail into their mailbox without a second thought for the state of the letters themselves. This always infuriated me. People are paying money to have the employees sort mail, so why aren’t we treating it with care? Often, it’s two reasons: the sorter doesn’t have the time to treat everything gently, and they also don’t really care.
