Ruskin, the great architect, painter, writer, social thinker and philanthropist, famously emphasized the connections between nature, art and society. According to his biography, more than any other public figure in the nineteenth century, he convinced the public that:

Architecture was not an isolated science of compass and rule, but rather, a vital index of a nation’s values. 

That single insight, that grandiose but sincere approach to creating art, always had a profound influence on me. In fact, the night my team wrapped on our most recent music documentary, I realized why it’s so satisfying and exhilarating and exhausting to ship a major creative project like a film. 

Because it’s a clearinghouse. It’s a destination to unite all of your interesting elements, intermingling your interests and themes into a meaningful and cohesive whole. An opportunity to announce to the world, these are the cherished values that make me feel fully alive when I honor them. 

When you play the art game that way, nobody can take that victory away from you. 

A powerful reminder, that the most fundamental condition of creativity is that the locus of evaluative judgment is internal. That you’re shipping art because it’s how you make meaning in accordance with your deepest held values. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you using art to give your values a voice, or just uploading more content?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Chronic vagueness makes it hard for us to move
forward with our goals. 

Especially if we’ve enlisted other people to help us. 

Web developers and graphic designers and video editors and even tattoo artists
go through this on a daily basis. Instead of clients being specific and clear
and direct about what they want, they simply expect the service provider to
read their minds and deliver everything perfectly up to spec. 

And of course,
the moment they discover that the result isn’t exactly what they hoped, they throw
a fit. 

This isn’t what I had in mind, they complain. 

This moment
represents the simple problem of expectational clarity. Chronic vagueness. It’s
at the root of all transactional unhappiness. And if we have any intention of
making our dreams a reality, it’s something we have to anticipate. 

We have to
learn how to be better customers. 

Over the years, I’ve hired hundreds of
vendors and service providers and third party contractors to help me move
forward with my goals. And every time we start a new project, I always remind
myself: 

Asking improves your chances of receiving. 

Remember to make
their job easier. Tell them exactly what you want. Otherwise the process is
going to take longer, cost more and satisfy you less. 

Think of it as a form of
kindness. Don’t just do it to get what you want, do it to help make other
people’s lives easier. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Have you mastered the technology of making an effective request?

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For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

People who are great thinkers struggle with being in touch with their emotional life because their issues often get processed intellectually, and they bypass what they’re actually feeling. 

They would rather know why they’re having an experience, rather than experience the experience itself. They would rather step back from their feelings, analyze them and plan their reaction to them, rather than simply allowing those feelings exist. 

Freud explains that this intellectualization is a defense mechanism for avoiding anxiety. We attempt to think our way out of our feelings. We treat the situation as an interesting problem to solve, one that engages us on a cognitive basis, while the emotional aspects of the experience are completely ignored as being irrelevant. 

That couldn’t describe me more accurately. 

I’m the kind of person who always felt most at home inside his head. Someone who’d rather disappear down the mental off ramp and escape into his own mind, rather than confronting the emotional reality of the situation. 

Which isn’t always a bad thing. The process of intellectualizing is useful when it keeps us from reacting to life impulsively and irresponsibly. 

But it can’t be the only arrow in our quiver. 

Only through complete emotional development are we offered the greatest degree of leverage in attaining our full potential. 

That’s one of the benefits of practicing yoga. Turns out, when you’re sitting in a hundred degree room for ninety minutes straight, with nothing to do but stare at your naked, sweaty body in the mirror, intellectualization isn’t an option. It isn’t possible to gloss over your feelings and take the emotions out of the equation. 

Trust me, I’ve tried. 

Yoga has a tendency to surface any and all emotions you’ve been storing inside your body for the last twenty four hours. Whatever’s in there, is coming out. 

And so, if I’m ever not sure I’m feeling about something, I just go to the hot room and listen to my body. Because unlike my mind, I know it will never lie to me. 

Remember, anything that helps us create a healthier relationship with our emotional reality is a good thing. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you treating your emotions as objects of contemplation, or opportunities to feel?
LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

The secret to developing healthy habits is changing your surroundings, not yourself. 

Building in external accountabilities that knock out the excuses of doing something on your own. 

Starting a blog is a perfect example. Doing so takes an activity or hobby or interest that matters to you, say, creating gluten free recipes for a restrictive diet, and translates it into a sense of obligation. 

Because even if your readership is small, the process of blogging still forces you to tell yourself and the world something true, in public, every day. 

It’s a promise. A social contract. The ritual manipulates you into doing what you want to do anyway, but within a more structured framework. Simply by virtue of having blog creates the added pressure and accountability of an audience who’s interested in what you have to say. 

I have colleague whose daily blog has accumulated a significant following over the years. When I asked him what the secret was to sustaining his publishing schedule, he made a comment I’ll never forget:

You’d be surprised how quickly you can learn something when five thousand people are waiting for you to learn it. 

Proving, that when you change your surroundings instead changing yourself, sticking to new habits isn’t as intimidating as it sounds. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What topic do you have enough to say about that people would love to read daily insights about? 
LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Baumeister pioneered the concept
of negativity bias, which refers to the notion that, even when of equal
intensity, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on our psychological
state than do neutral or positive things. 

In his groundbreaking study, his team
found that the innate predisposition of the psyche was to focus on bad, not
good. It’s evolutionarily adaptive. Organisms that are better attuned to bad
things are more likely to survive threats and pass along their genes. 

However, the psychologists ultimately concluded that even though bad
events may have a stronger impact than a comparable good one, many lives can be
happier by virtue of having far mood good than bad. 

And that’s what gave me
hope. Because my default response, especially during the creative process, is
to pull the whip out and start beating myself up. 

Like many sensitive and
critical artsy fartsy types, I have a habit of being too hard on myself. And
yet, despite the pull of my negativity bias, I’m learning to err on the side of
affirmation. Instead of waving a scornful finger at every misstep, I’m giving
myself the recognition I deserve for my efforts. 

Because it’s not about right
or wrong, good or bad, winning or losing. Binaries like that chew your guts
into knots. 

What matters is that you demonstrate to yourself that you are
determined to move forward. What matters is that you appreciate each execution
that comes along, not as proof of worth, but as the next installment of your
continuing saga. T

That’s the mindset guaranteed to turn your dreams into
realities.


LET ME ASK YA THIS…

When was the last time you congratulated yourself? LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Cook’s groundbreaking book on the curves of life explains: 

The spiral is always growing, yet never covering the same ground. It’s not merely an explanation of the past, but it’s also a prophecy of the future. And while it defines and illuminates what has already happened, it is also leading constantly to new discoveries. 

That’s the beauty of the spiral. It’s an open ended curve. It gives the sensation of continuous motion. And it’s fundamental to the structure of growth in everything in nature, from plants to shells to the human body to atomic elements to genetic molecules. 

And of course, the creative process. That’s the most fascinating application. Because creativity is a regenerative spiral. Each new creation leads to new possibilities of new places to go. 

And the more places you go, the more places there are to go. Which, in turn, leads to more creations. 

That’s the spiral. Your past creations were necessary in order to bring the new one into being. Anything new that you do is movement. Every project you execute helps to move the story forward and keep the spiral growing. Even the creations that blow up in your face. Those failures are okay when you know that you’re on a long, upward curve. 

The point is, you can’t help but grow through your production. Every experience contributes to the expansion of the spiral, making you a little different from what you were before.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you governing your creative growth by insisting that you never diversify?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

When we avoid the unknown regions of ourselves, carefully staying within our known range of confidence, chronically concerned with remaining the way we are, we’re condemned to live in the boxes that we make for ourselves. 

And it will never occur to us to take any actions beyond that. 

But if we have any intention of forging new frontiers of originality, we are obliged to venture outside of the accustomed territory. We are called to try something scary and hard and new. Something that stretches us beyond what we have done before. 

When I first start making music films, I was terrified. The medium made me feel intimidated, the collaboration made me feel out of control, the budget made me feel pressured, the content made me feel vulnerable. 

But a friend of mine gave me some advice that I’ll never forget:

You will lose more than you would ever sign up for, but you will gain more than you could ever hope for. 

That’s the price of originality. We have to end something to get to the next level. 

Altucher said it best in his book on choosing yourself. When you give up searching for frontiers, inevitable you end up stuck in a swamp, sinking deeper into the mud the more you struggle to get out. Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction. 

It’s worth it. Even if you can count on some agonizing moments of uncertainty.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How many frontiers you crossed today?

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For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Success doesn’t have a line. 

There’s no democracy, there’s no rational system of advancement and there’s no standard set of rules that determines when it’s our time to shine. 

That’s why it can be so infuriating to watch somebody else having their moment. We see their dream getting more attention than ours, and we feel diminished. Like our chances for success are being all used up. Like our work is going unsung, unseen and unsupported. 

And so, instead of responding with wonder, we react with bitterness and resentment. Instead of asking ourselves what we can learn from their success, we get trapped in our own personal soap operas, preoccupied with the drama of winning and losing. Instead treating their moment as a glowing source of inspiration for our own ideas, we get hostile and territorial and envious. 

A healthier approach is to ask ourselves the following question. 

How can I find a way to translate all these feelings that are exploding inside of me into something else? 

I have a cartoonist friend who invented a fabulous exercise for this very issue. Anytime we get together for a brainstorming session, we spend ten minutes apiece complaining about other people in our industry that we irrationally hate. No judgments. No justifications. No interruptions. Just an all out bitch fest. 

It’s not only hilarious, but it’s also profoundly cleansing. Releasing those feelings in safe space of mutual trust is a cathartic, connected experience. What’s more, irrationally hating people never fails to inspire us to reflect on our work and how we can execute it more effectively. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How do you cope with other people’s dreams getting more attention than yours?
LET ME SUGGEST THIS…For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Anybody can meditate in the mountains. 

Reaching enlightenment while the world around you is serene and inspiring and clean isn’t much of a challenge. The real test of inner peace is whether you can transform yourself into a force of calm in a time of turmoil. Whether you can attain mental stillness and physical relaxation in the face of impending chaos or, worse yet, overwhelming monotony. 

I recently spent two weeks sitting on jury duty. The courtroom was cold, ugly and harsh; and the deliberation room was stuffy, cramped and boring. Not exactly an inspiring environment to stimulate my creative juices. 

But I didn’t let that stop me from doing my work. After all, meaning is made, not found. And it’s our responsibility to take control of our lives and make the most out of our environment, instead of allowing circumstances to dictate our happiness. 

And so, I brought a briefcase full of work to do, books to read, projects to start, upbeat music to listen to and other tools to maximize an otherwise dreary experience. During our many recesses, I setup my portable creative environment and found a way to thrive while the rest of the jurors whined and fumed and napped and bemoaned their fate and allowed the situation to gnaw away at the foundation of their serenity. 

And during those two weeks, my days were filled with joy and meaning and energy and productivity. I even learned a thing or two about the judicial system. 

But only because I was intentional. Only because I tapped into my reserves to create inspiration where none existed. 

It’s like my yoga instructor always says during class. This is just practice. The real work is taking this yoga out into the world. It’s one thing to relax in a studio, it’s another thing to relax in the middle of rush hour traffic. 

Whether you’re trying to meditate, or whether you’re just trying to create, don’t expect the environment to do the work for you. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How quickly can you tap into your reserves when meaningless comes crashing in?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Cosby was famous for telling his comedian protégés, accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Silence is the sign of the professional. 

It’s true on stage, and it’s true in life. Music is the space between the notes. 

And yet, few of us have been trained to appreciate empty spaces, silence, formlessness and voids. It’s too uncomfortable for us. We hate silence because our anxieties get very loud in our head. 

Instead, our natural inclination is to fill any blank space with speculation, theory or conjecture. To drown out the silence with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. 

The only problem is, because of this tendency, we obscure the valuable tension crucial to the creative process. We rob ourselves and the audience of the chance to make magic happen. 

Fritz’s research on creativity reminds us that this very tension is the force that moves forward resolution and generates energy that is useful in creating. He calls it a discrepancy, which is the space between current reality and desired vision. 

And so, whether that discrepancy exists on stage at a comedy club, in the air at your painting studio, or during a conversation with a client, it’s something that should be welcomed, appreciated and leveraged. 

Don’t be so quick to rush into the silence. Relax into it without urgency. Allow it to hold you a little while longer. 

You might be surprised what the discrepancy produces. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How are you making use of the space between the notes?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…For the list called, “99 Ways to Think Like an Entrepreneur, Even If You Aren’t One,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!