When my wife and I relocated to a new city and didn’t know a soul, we
were deeply intentional about our social capital. 

We made finding friends a
priority. We maximized our opportunities to meet kindred spirits. And we
actively built multiple centers of belonging so that we wouldn’t feel isolated
and disconnected. 

In fact, before moving, I even designed business cards for
us. As a couple. As a team with shared values and goals and dreams. Complete
with contact information, a cute picture of us together and a legal disclaimer
that we weren’t swingers, just an awesome couple. 

Not that there’s anything
wrong with that. 

But we hand out these cards out all the time. At bars and
brunches and beaches and anywhere else we might connect with people with whom
we can build social capital. 

And the best part is, the card is a filter. It’s a
inkblot test. Because if the strangers we hand it to look at us like we have
leprosy, that’s a good indication that we’re probably not going to go camping
together. 

But if strangers respond positively to our
ridiculous merchandised relationship swag, we know there’s a possibly for a
relationship. 

Hell, we’ve met some of our best friends using those cards. And
they still talk about it to this day. Best sixty bucks we ever spent. 

Proving,
that the experience of belonging does not have to be left to chance. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

How will you prevent the chilling vapor of loneliness from settling down?

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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

How we perceive and interpret our success is more important than how
much success we actually have. 

It’s all a matter of perspective. 

On one hand,
if we define our success on other people’s terms, beating ourselves up because
we haven’t won the trophy running their race, then we’re going get
ensnared in the infinite regression of comparison and resentment. 

Which,
scientifically speaking, sucks. 

It’s like drinking the poison and waiting for
somebody else to die. 

On the other hand, if we accept that success has already
happened to us, that we’ve already made it, but we’re just a little too close
to ourselves to realize that, then maybe we could actually admit that we’re not
doing as poorly as we thought. 

There’s a great question my mentor once taught
me, as a useful mantra for reinforcing prosperity, abundance and completeness:

What if you knew that nothing was missing right now? 

Imagine that. True
enoughness. Which is a hard thing to comprehend when you’re still in the thick of
it. Truly stepping back and objectively looking at your career and what success
really means, that requires massive amounts of compassion and acceptance. 

But
it’s a worth a shot. And it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative. 

Sometimes we have to believe the truth about ourselves, no matter how
beautiful it is.

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

What measuring stick are you using to gauge your success?

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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

The worst thing about a computer freezing is, you can’t google how to fix a frozen computer. 

It’s like a modern day ouroboros. A digital snake trying to eat its own tail. 

And so, the only solution, is to take your laptop the shop and hand it over to a real person and trust that they can fix it. 

What’s fascinating is, the human brain works the same way. 

You can’t use it to fix it when it’s broken. Healing can only come from outside of you. From another human being. Somebody who introduces you to yourself and, through their imperfect humanity, becomes an agent of transformation. 

Whenever I start experiencing existential anxiety, situational sadness, psychic illnesses or any other dreadful forms of alienation of the soul, I try to make simple changes in my interpersonal environment. 

Instead of isolating at my home office, I go work at a coffee shop. 

Instead of exercising alone, I go take a class with twenty other people. 

Instead of disappearing into a podcast vortex, I make phone calls to people I haven’t talked to in a while. 

The commonality is always the same:

Healing comes from other people. A brain in pain can’t use itself to administer the medicine. 

Frankly famously wrote that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche. 

Perhaps the same principle applies to the healing process. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

Whom can you cleanse yourself with? 

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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

No matter how prolific we are, there isn’t an artist alive whose astonishing fertility of creative genius can’t be exhausted. 

It’s part and parcel of the process. Nobody can spend their entire career living in harvest season. Eventually, the land has to dry up. And there’s not much we can do about it. 

Fighting the resistance certainly doesn’t help. Because anything we throw at the monster only makes it stronger. Better to walk away and go perpendicular and work on something else and seek out experiences that bring emotional energy that enrich your work. 

I have a tendency to beat myself up when I get trapped in creative limbo. I make a giant leap to global negativity. After all, who I am without a project to work on? 

It’s off brand. It’s too much cognitive dissonance for one man to handle. 

But then I remember that frustration and discontent and even apathy are eternal wellsprings of artistic expression. They create the necessary dissatisfaction that helps ensure I find what’s next. 

And so, rather than trying to rid my life of tension, I give thanks for it. Because it’s a fuel source. Even if takes a few weeks to fortify.  

If we don’t accept periods of inactivity as necessary preparation for something new and important, we may never find our next big idea. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

Are you willing to incubate for a while?

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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

Nobody knows anything. 

Everybody’s just guessing. About everything. 

Even doctors and scientists and economists and lawyers. And they go to school for eight years. 

They’re all just guessing. They’re simply telling he truth as they see it. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything. 

Reuters recently released a study confirming there are way too many studies. This is not a joke. It’s called attention decay, the phenomenon where the exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. 

In short, scientists are overwhelmed by too much science. Content is snowballing, and its volume is weakening the impact and longevity of each individual piece of research. 

Yet another an absurdly ironic reminder that we all need our own truth detectors. We all need to put up our own likelihood ratio for anything we’re exposed to. 

Believe nothing. Question everything. Use curiosity to disrupt your own point of view. 

He not busy questioning himself is headed for irrelevance. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

Are you rearranging the truth to preserve your vision of the world you’d like to see?

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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

Here’s my favorite cheesy joke. 

Why did the scarecrow get promoted? Because he was outstanding in his field. 

It’s a ridiculous premise, but it actually hits home with me on a deeply personal level. Because unlike the brainless scarecrow, I get down on myself for not standing out and being special in my work. 

And not just because I’m a persistent individualist, but also because I’m used to receiving attention and applause and accolades for being remarkable. 

In the first fifteen years of my career, I received more media attention than most artists receive in their entire lives. But it was a different time. Back then, if you were talented, generous, committed, prolific, creative, remarkable, vulnerable, resilient, well connected, and maybe a little bit lucky, the sky was the limit. 

You could get noticed, get remembered and get business. Over and over again. 

But not anymore. Now the cultural landscape has shifted. We’re living in a crowded, distracted, overloaded, fragmented, evanescent world where standing out is a lot harder than it used to be. 

That old scarecrow wouldn’t stand a chance of in today’s marketplace. He’d have to set himself on fire just to get the farmer’s attention. 

And that’s why I’m so infuriated. Because I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Or if I’m doing anything wrong at all. I just feel like I’m perpetually winking in the dark. Thinking to myself:

If this is what it feels like to give my best, why would I continue? 

And there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. 
LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

What do you do when being remarkable isn’t enough? 
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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

There’s a folder on my desktop that contains every project I’ve worked on in the past fifteen years. 

Every time I scroll through it, I feel proud, prolific and professional. 

But there’s also a folder within that folder, which contains all of the unsuccessful projects and unproductive obsessions and bad ideas that I failed to bring to fruition over the years. 

And that’s important too. Because all of those projects had a few things in common. 

They didn’t serve a real purpose, they were just a response to anxiety. 

They didn’t generate energy and provoke excitement, they just soothed my scared, whirling mind for few weeks. 

They didn’t lead to my creating anything real in the world, they just converted my obsessive compulsive thoughts into pointless time sucks and money pits. 

Part of me wants to laugh, part of me wants to cry, and part of me wants to bang my head into a brick wall. 

Still, I try to be compassionate. Because regret over unfulfilled possibilities and unrealized potential is just a punishment we administer to ourselves. It’s not worth it. 

Besides, not every project is going to succeed. Not every project is even going to see the light of day. 

Adams makes a powerful point about this very concept. He explains that the bad ideas he creates might someday inspire an actual good ideas. That’s how ideas evolve, he writes. You start with bad ones then tweak them. And if you’re able to see further, it’s only because you’re standing on the pile of manure you so generously provided. Bad ideas are the raw materials for good ideas. 

The challenge, then, is learning to differentiate between the two. Listening to your body during the initial stages of a projects as an indicator of its efficacy. 

And actively divesting meaning from unwanted ideas that have the power to escalate into unproductive obsessions.

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

Are you creating something meaningful in the world, or just soothing your anxiety?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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

Frankl wrote that existence falters unless man has a strong ideal to hold onto. 

He coined the term existential vacuum, meaning, the psychological condition in which we doubt that life has any meaning and we become trapped in feelings of aimlessness, emptiness, loss of interest and lack of initiative. 

Who hasn’t been there before? 

Human beings, after all, are constantly reaching out for meanings to fulfill. Our hearts are restless unless we have found and fulfilled it. It’s our modus operandi as a species. 

And so, even if our language feels too small to contain those feelings at the time, we still know, intuitively, that something needs to change. Otherwise we might suffocate under the weight of our own perceived meaninglessness. 

Frankl’s theory suggested that the existential vacuum phenomenon was the product of industrialization. That at the turn of the century, when conformity and technology and mass production replaced instinct and tradition and craftsmanship, people became externally direct toward what they ought to do. 

They assumed meaning was given arbitrarily, not created responsibility.’

But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

We are the sole arbiters of meaning in our lives. It’s not something we search and find, it’s something we create and preserve. 

And so, when the existential vacuum starts to suck the life force right out of us, we have to respond quickly and intelligently. 

Because into every void rushes something. And we’re either going to fill that hole with something that tranquilizes us, or something that galvanizes us. 

Personally, I like to be strategic about confronting the void. Aggressive pondering, as a friend of mine likes to say. Being intentional about meeting my meaning needs. 

Even if I have create my own software app for doing so. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

How do you handle your existential vacuums?

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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

The benefit of hitting bottom is, it causes us to hold a new type of conversation with ourselves. 

It forces us to recognize the festering of our own emotions. 

The disgust with whom we’ve become is what makes us say, okay we’re ready. This isn’t funny anymore. It’s time for a wholesale cleanup. 

Rushdie once joked that one of the great benefits of hitting bottom is, now you know where the bottom is. 

Anyone struggling with addiction can relate to this moment. When life gives us the gift of a low, we finally realize just how far off course we’ve gotten. There’s no more guessing about where or how we went wrong, and so, all we can do is accept it, own it, forgive ourselves for it and start taking action to heal it. 

The fascinating part is, this bottom out moment not only happens to people, but also to communities. Cultures. Sometimes entire countries. 

There’s some catastrophic event that rocks the tribe to their core. It creates a seismic shift in their collective conviction. And people shout out loud, first inside of their heads and then outside in the world, okay, this is bullshit. We can’t live like this anymore. 

And then, just like the alcoholic who wakes up naked and bleeding the side of the road in a pool of his own vomit, the culture, too, wakes up. Maybe for the first time in a long time. And the subterranean forces just below the surface of their collective psyche start steering the ship of their actions. 

They start making plans, asking for help, donating money, volunteering their talents and doing whatever work is required to heal. In the hopes that accepting their brokenness might crack them opens to a new kind of wholeness. 

It’s one of our greatest human endowments. The ability to catalyze the energy of disgust into an agent of change. 

And so, before you start chiming the armageddon bell, consider the gift of hitting bottom. 

Use it to help yourself to a big humility sandwich. 

And then use that energy to go out there and make things better. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

What if things were meant to get bad in order to mobilize you to take a step in the direction of your wholeness? 

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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!

When you’re the kind of person who thinks
differently and carves their own path and opts out of the mainstream culture
and makes personal choices that fly in the face of conventional wisdom, it’s
important to create spaces to remind yourself that you’re not insane. 

To
surround yourself with other likeminded and like hearted weirdos who don’t make
you feel like an outcast for being who you are. 

Home, after all, isn’t where
you live, it’s where you’re understood. 

It’s where you feel seen and heard and
felt and got. 

It’s where you walk in the door and they know what to do with
you. 

It’s where people embrace all the little quirks that the rest of the world
makes you feel insecure about. 

It’s where you never have to think to yourself,
I would be better off somewhere else. 

Portland was the first city to make me
feel this way. I relocated there after I graduated college to start my
publishing company. 

And it was the strangest sensation. Because although I
didn’t have the language for those emotions at the time, something about that
place just made me feel, well, normal. 

For the first time in my life. I
looked around and thought to myself, I found my people. 

And not because of a
demographic, but because of a disposition. That’s the thing about belonging. If
you’re willing to search for it, you can find it everywhere. 

Because it has
nothing to do with geography and everything to do with biography. 

If reminds
you that you’re not insane, it’s home. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS… 

Do you remember the first time you found the place where you could finally let out a deep breath that you had no idea you were holding?

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 2017-2018.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of 

The Nametag Guy in action here!