When In Doubt, Move In With Your Parents

After I graduated college, published my first book and ran out of money, I made a crucial career decision.

Time to move back in with my parents.
For two years, eight months and twenty-nine days, to be exact.
Not that I was counting.

But they were cool about it. They even charged me rent, which I thought was solid parenting move. Every month, I paid them the amount of never getting dates.

Seriously. As if wearing a nametag wasn’t bad enough. Ever tried seducing a woman while your mom is yelling from upstairs to ask if you want asparagus with your salmon?

Dial tone.I used to tell girls, “Yeah I have these two roommates. Older married couple. Super nice. Kind of look like me.”

Fail.

But apparently there’s name for this trend, we’re called boomeragers. After a period of living on our own, young people choose to cohabitate with their parents to save money, cope with economic downturns and eliminate any possibility of a social life whatsoever.

It wasn’t always good for business. I remember one particular speech I gave to a large financial company. When I finished, the audience gave me the first standing ovation of my career.

It was a beautiful moment that I’ll never forget.

Until my client walked up to me, shook my hand and said, “Good thing you’re not still living with your parents, huh?”

Right.

So there was always an asterisk with every win. This subtle undercurrent of not-enough-ness that kept me from feeling completely successful. And I knew that until I moved out on my own, until I let go of that security blanket, I would never be okay with myself.

But I’m not complaining. I never regret a single day living at home. I was grateful to have parents that loved me and who were willing to disrupt their empty nest lifestyle to support me as I started my career.

They’re not good parents, they’re heroic.

And when I started earning enough to move out, they lovingly helped me pack my bags.

What more can a kid ask for?

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author, Speaker, Publisher, Artist, Mentor
[email protected]

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Creativity Isn’t About What We Create

I’ve been playing, composing and performing original music since I was twelve.

And yet, despite natural talent, despite evolving confidence, despite explosive creativity and despite flowing support, it wasn’t until last week that I finally found the courage to release my music publicly.

That’s twenty years.

Twenty years of winking in the dark. Twenty years of being selfish with my art. Twenty years of dodging any form of feedback, believing that the theater of the mind is better. Twenty years of hiding my history behind a vault, keeping my feelings to myself, singing in corner, hoping to God nobody would walk in on me.

Until I couldn’t take it any more. I realized that had I lost touch with a part of myself. A part that was too essential to my makeup to ignore. A part that had a voice that couldn’t go unheard.

By not sharing my music, it didn’t really exist. By refusing to make my pain public, the scars could never fully heal. By not giving myself permission to express that side of my heart, there would always be a part of me that was still hiding from the world.

So I finally got over myself and shipped.

I released four different albums, recorded at four different stages of my life.

I took a stab into the unknown, threw myself blindly into the impossible and braved the gaze of the whole world, with teeth poised to bite into the fruits of my courage.

And it paid off instantly.

Not because people noticed. Not because fans downloaded. Not because I plan to go on forty city tour. But because the moment I saw those songs live, naked to the world in all their imperfect splendor, there was a piece of me, a piece that waited in the wings patiently for twenty years, that finally exhaled.

Creativity isn’t about what we create.

It’s about who we become by sharing what we create.

We did not come here to bury our music. And if we get our strength from hiding it from the world, nobody is every going to hear it.

Save the shovels for the gravedggers.

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What art are you hiding from the world?

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Writing, Publishing, Performing, Consulting
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

The Treehouse And The Skyscraper

I had an idea for a treehouse and ended up building a skyscraper.

Never saw it coming. Never saw myself as much of an architect. But as I lean over the ledge and let my eyes tumble down the side of the glass, all the pieces fit.

This edifice, this thing that I have built with gallons of blood and sweat and whatever bodily fluid was required at the time, isn’t just some project, some arbitrary eruption.It’s a public index of my values.
It’s a tree on which the fruit of my bravery hangs.

What’s strange is – and I never thought I’d say this, but – twelve years later, I think I would be okay letting the city crumble to the ground.

As long as we come home together.

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What are you afraid to let go of?

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Writing, Publishing, Performing, Consulting
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

Own your breath, nobody can steal your peace

Success morphs into failure when it comes too fast, too early and too abundantly.

I learned this the hard way when I was twenty-six and my left lung collapsed.

It’s called a pneumothorax, which is a fairly common incident among young, tall men in their late twenties. And although the doctor said it was sporadic, I chose to tell myself a different story. A story that would teach me a lesson I’d never forget:

When you own your breath, nobody can steal your peace.

Develop a healthy relationship with your breath. While money loves speed, velocity creates stress, and stress kills people.

You have to honor what stops you. And if nothing stops you, stop yourself.Otherwise, you’ll never get over yourself.
Otherwise, you’ll become a victim of your own conviction.

It’s amazing how quickly humility shows up when you’re incapacitated in a hospital bed for six days with a tube in your chest whacked out on morphine experiencing multiple anxiety attacks.

Interestingly, it was my left lung that collapsed.

Directly underneath my nametag.

Who knew a sticker could be so heavy?

Maybe it’s not a nametag — it’s an anvil.

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How’s your breathing?

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Writing, Publishing, Performing, Consulting
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

The Nametag Manifesto — Chapter 6: The End of Dishonesty

[ View the infographic! ]

“Everyone should wear nametags, all the time, everywhere, forever.”

That’s my thesis, philosophy, dangerous idea and theory of the universe.

My name is Scott, and I’ve been wearing a nametag for past four thousand days.

And after traveling to hundreds of cities, a dozen countries, four continents, meeting tens of thousands of people, constant experimentation and observation, building a enterprise and writing a dozen books in the process, I believe, with all my heart, that the societal implications of wearing nametags could change everything.

This is my manifesto:

6. The End of Dishonesty

If everybody wears nametags, untruthfulness becomes extremely difficult.

We’re all lie detectors. Instead of manipulating the way other people see us, now, what we see is what we get, despite our best efforts to obscure the truth.

We’ve returned to a world without a backstage. We’re always going to be known for what we’re about to do. And as such, we start choosing smarter.
Now we can stop racking our brains trying to remember what we told and to whom. Now we can use our brains for more creative and valuable functions. Like listening and sharing and connecting and feeling.

If everybody wears nametags, no more dishonorable action, no more lying and no more aliases.

# # #

You are now ready for chapter seven.

You can read The Nametag Manifesto, in full, for free, right now, here.

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author, Speaker, Publisher, Artist, Mentor
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

The Gift that Costs Nothing, But Changes Everything

It costs nothing to encourage.

It’s gift we can give to anyone, anytime, anywhere, and change them forever. And it’s our responsibility to be dispensaries of encouragement to everyone we meet.

Let us give people permission to do something great. Let us throw people over the other side of the wall. Let us provide the spark that grows into an inferno. Let us take people’s hands and push them into the fire.

Let us give people a front row seat to their own genius. Let us believe in them more than they believe in themselves. Let us help people fall in love with themselves all over again. Let us leave people altered, refusing to let them stay where they are. That’s encouragement.

A gift that costs nothing, but changes everything.

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Who did you encourage last week?

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Writing, Publishing, Performing, Consulting
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

What happens when we make a decision?

There’s nothing harder than making a decision.

Decisions mean commitment, and every commitment has consequences.

But even though we’d rather dwindle indecisively for an eternity, artfully creating excuses why something won’t work, persistently telling ourselves stories about why we wouldn’t deserve it if it did work, eventually, we have to decide. We have to set a drop-dead date, cut the ropes and run.

Otherwise we waste our time trying to figure out whether the move is right. When the reality is, if we don’t commit, we’re always wrong.On the other hand, what happens when we make a decision?

Everything.

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What are you waiting for?

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Writing, Publishing, Performing, Consulting
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

Portrait of a Modern Career

It’s tempting to covet other people’s careers.

Especially when we see them doing things we’d like to be doing.

But the reality is, we can’t have another person’s career any more that we can have another person’s hair. Their history, their trajectory and their motivations are theirs and theirs alone.

Even if we did try to copy their path and plug our variables into their equations, we’d still come out with a different result. Like taking Pemberton’s recipe for Coke and mixing it ourselves, we’d always produce our own unique flavor of soda. Every time.

But that’s the beauty of the modern career: It’s the river we can’t step in twice.

With global shifts in economics, technology, culture and population, there are as many career paths as there are people to take them. No two are exactly alike. And if we want to support each other in our mutual endeavors, we need to greet each other’s careers with affirmation, not envy. We need to treat each other’s careers as a source of inspiration, not frustration.

That way, instead of bastardizing our life into a cover song of another person’s music, we craft our careers into the limited editions that they were meant to be.

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Whose career do you covet?

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Writing, Publishing, Performing, Consulting
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

What’s Your Relationship Bandwidth?

People come in and out of our lives everyday.

Some stick around a few minutes, some stick around forever.

And what’s amazing is how much they can impact our life, even if they’re only part of it for a short while. Strangers on the bus, neighbors down the street, roommates for a semester, lovers over the summer, guests at a hotel – when we meet someone we like, someone who brings us to life and makes us feel better about ourselves, part of us is frustrated that they can’t be in our lives for a longer period of time.

If only we’d met one year earlier, we think.
If only we’d done a better job staying in touch, we think.

But that’s the wrong attitude. That’s the scarcity mentality that doesn’t serve us.Instead of fantasizing about what life might have been if that person was still living down the street from us, instead of kicking ourselves for not being better friends, let’s be thankful we were lucky enough to have had a relationship in the first place. Let’s honor the place that person had in our history instead of apologizing for not being better at returning phone calls.

Because despite our best efforts – even despite our hyper-connected society – it’s hard to stay friends with everybody. There’s only so much social bandwidth available. Some relationships have an expiration date, and we have to learn to be okay with that.

It doesn’t mean we’re insincere people.
It doesn’t mean we’re bad at relationships.
It doesn’t negate the good times we had together.

It just means that life happens. People get busy.

With the population nearing seven billion, this minor transgression is certainly forgivable.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Who do you need to thank for being in your life?

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* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Writing, Publishing, Performing, Consulting
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

The Nametag Manifesto — Chapter 5: The End of Social Conflict

[ View the infographic! ]

“Everyone should wear nametags, all the time, everywhere, forever.”

That’s my thesis, philosophy, dangerous idea and theory of the universe.

My name is Scott, and I’ve been wearing a nametag for past four thousand days.

This is my manifesto:

5. The End of Social Conflict

If everybody wears nametag, the awkwardness goes away.

The cost of interaction approaches zero. We feel more comfortable engaging because we have nothing to lose. Never again do we have to work down the hall or live down the street from people – for years at a time – without knowing their name.

It’s simple: Conflict leads to uncertainty, which leads to anxiety, which leads to avoidance.
But with nametags, the ice is never not broken. Guesswork is a thing of the past.

Now, all first impressions are good impressions. We’ve sidestepped the entire spectrum of social awkwardness that stems from not knowing people’s names. And this frees us to focus on the conversation at hand – instead of the silent dialogue of self-consciousness.

We never have to wonder who anybody is. We can connect faster, better and truer.

If everybody wears nametags, no more shyness, no more avoidance behavior and no more social blunders.

# # #

You are now ready for chapter six.

You can read The Nametag Manifesto, in full, for free, right now, here.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What’s your manifesto?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…
For the list called, “10 Ways to Help Your Customers Know You,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *
Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author, Speaker, Publisher, Artist, Mentor
[email protected]

Never the same speech twice.

Now booking for 2012!

Watch The Nametag Guy in action here!

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Month: January 2012

When In Doubt, Move In With Your Parents

Creativity Isn’t About What We Create

The Treehouse And The Skyscraper

Own your breath, nobody can steal your peace

The Nametag Manifesto — Chapter 6: The End of Dishonesty

The Gift that Costs Nothing, But Changes Everything

What happens when we make a decision?

Portrait of a Modern Career

What’s Your Relationship Bandwidth?

The Nametag Manifesto — Chapter 5: The End of Social Conflict