Cameron’s uplifting book of prayers to the great creator tells us that all sense of loneliness is a forgetting. 

Forgetting that we are part of life. Forgetting that life is a part of us. Forgetting that we’re never alone in this world unless we want to be. 

And until we remember that we do belong and we are loved and we have connection and community, loneliness will continue to visit us and try to take up residence in our psyche. Our emotions will use their power to run us around in circles. 

Inside of the rock tumbler known as my head, the chilling vapor of aloneness often settles down unannounced. And sometimes, it’s not because I’m currently alone and disconnected and bereft of community, but because I flash back to various times in my life when I felt unwanted and isolated. 

And because those memories were so traumatic, they create a sort of social amnesia in the present moment. They overwhelm my sense of belonging. They cause me to forget. 

But as I learned from my therapist, loneliness, not unlike any form of anxiety, often vanishes once noticed and named. 

It’s the strangest thing. The moment we give ourselves the freedom to express our emotions, instead of trying to find another way to outwit our feelings, the vapor starts to vanish. 

And so, we announce to ourselves:

Oh, that’s interesting, I seem to be experiencing pangs of loneliness right now. Okay then. This feeling isn’t who I am, and it’s not going to last forever. 

And that’s precisely when we start to remember. 

We start to sense that we belong in this world. And our loneliness begins to leave us. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

What truth is your current emotional state causing you to forget?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

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Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs.x

Aren’t you just a little worn out from believing you have to control everything? 

Doesn’t it feel better knowing that you don’t have to save the world? 

And don’t you realize that you don’t have to do all that for people to love you? 

Our answer was a full body yes. And it was magnificent. 

Because once we’re released from the painful chore of being responsible for the world and everyone in it, we’re finally free to focus on our own needs. Once we surrender our vain attempts to control the uncontrollable, we can relax into the peace of a boundaried life. 

As the twelve steppers like to say:

We didn’t cause it, we can’t control it and we can’t cure it. No more fixing, no more saving, 

No more advising and no more correcting. People, places and things will be perfectly okay without our control and direction. 

And it’s not like we’re lonely and alienated and disengaged. Quite the opposite. Our connection to the world is still there, but our need to fix everything so the world doesn’t fall apart, isn’t. 

Sure sounds better than being the medieval knight who saves the day with his sword. 

What a horrible job we’ve given ourselves. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

Are you concentrating on the things you need to do, or looking around for people who require your help?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

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Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs.x

Watterson’s final comic strip before he retired as one of the world’s most successful and beloved cartoonists makes me cry every single time. 

Calvin says to his trusted feline friend:

Wow, it really snowed last night. Isn’t it wonderful? Everything familiar has disappeared. The world looks brand new. It’s a new season with a fresh, clean start. Like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on. A day of possibilities. It’s a magical world. Let’s go exploring. 

And then the boy and his magical tiger go sailing into the great white void. 

What a moving goddamn work of art. Because at time of the cartoon’s release, I was fifteen years old. My favorite characters would never have any new adventures again, and it broke my heart. It felt like the death of two close friends. 

What’s interesting is, twenty years later, as an adult, as an artist, and as someone who has reinvented himself multiple times, it still makes me cry. But for different reasons. 

Watterson had an idea, executed it, then moved on. And he ignored the clamor for more. 

That took a heroic amount of courage, surrender and vulnerability. It was a death. Not of an idea, but of an identity. Here’s what he told a newspaper about his retirement a few weeks before his final piece ran:

This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of ten years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now grieving for my characters would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher and livelier talent. And I would be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason my comic still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I’ve never regretted stopping when I did. 

That’s what happens when everything familiar disappears. 

The world looks brand new. Like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on.

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

What if you let go of everything you’ve tried and built and accomplished so far, except for the person you’ve become, and use that as the raw material for whatever comes next?
* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs.x

The greatest motivator for starting new habits is public embarrassment. 

The experience creates just enough guilt and fear and humiliation to positively change our behavior for good. 

When my boss chewed me out for overlooking a very obvious spelling error on an important client facing document, all of the blood drained from my face and a wave of humiliation flew threw me. 

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Excuse me while I go slam my head repeatedly into a piece of electronic equipment with small knobs and buttons. 

However, instead of spending the next three days pouring salt on that wound, I remembered something my mentor once taught me. 

Convert mistakes into lessons and lessons into habits. 

And so, I built out a new editing workflow for client documents. One that forced me to take extra time and be more mindful of the details. This process involved printing pages out, reading them aloud, editing with a different colored pen and even cutting and copying text into different formats, just to make sure there weren’t any spelling or grammatical errors. 

It’s a little extra work, but it doesn’t eat up too much time, and it’s worth it to avoid the embarrassment of being yelled at again. 

That’s a habit. It started as a mistake, and then turned into a lesson, and now each time I practice it, I reinforces my new pattern of smarter thinking. 

Remember, failure doesn’t have to be expensive; it merely has to be embarrassing. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

What moment helped your habits get engraved so deep that they became natural and instinctual?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

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Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs.x

Olgivy’s bestselling book on advertising makes an inspiring point about successful client service. 

Fight for the kings and queens, but throw away the pawns. The habit of graceful surrender on trivial issues will make you difficult to resist when you stand and fight on a major issue. 

It’s also useful advice in any of our relationships. Because while conflict does help define what needs attention in our lives, we can also avoid turning our lives into walking battlegrounds by calmly asking ourselves:

Okay, is this really the hill I want to die on? 

Odds are, it’s not. So let it go. 

Throw away the pawns. Save your energy for the kings and queens. 

That way, when you find a battle worth fighting for, you can rally the troops and go all in. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

Is your ego still addicted to the theater of battle?
* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs.x

Beck’s influential book on spiral integration dissects something called entrepreneurial intelligence. After interviewing thousands of chief executive officers and managing directors from around the word, here’s what the characteristics were. 

Entrepreneurial intelligence is the impulse to start something new, to peer into the future, a fierce determination to succeed, a penchant for high risk, a creative resourcefulness and the ego to stand alone and cut your own pathways. 

In a word, initiation. That’s the entrepreneur’s code. 

And the exciting part is, it’s not limited to people who run their own companies. We live in the age of the entrepreneur right now, where if you have enough capital, emotional, human, financial and otherwise, you can finance your own initiatives. Whether they involving turning a profit or not. 

It’s not about owning a business; it’s about owning risk. 

Doing meaningful work that nobody asked you to do, taking the chance that you might upset someone with your initiative, and along the way, discovering aspects of your identity in the pursuit of something beyond yourself. 

Two of my best friends recently chose to start home schooling their kids. They’re not making a dime in the process, but it’s still one hell of an entrepreneurial venture. 

They even admitted that they were scared out of their minds that they’d ruin their kids forever and tank their resale value. 

But in time, they formulated their own unique approach to home based education. One that facilitates the growth of entrepreneurship intelligence. As their charter philosophy states, school should be a self directed, adult facilitated life learning in the context of the child’s own unique interests. 

Imagine graduating from a school like that. 

Imagine the trajectory that kind of education could create for you. 

All initiative, no permission. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

Whose approval are you still waiting for?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs.x

The scariest part about getting married is the prospect of sharing. 

Because that’s what happens when couples change their pronouns. They share. Their whole lives, in fact. 

Everything from information to experiences to sorrows to joys to finances to the plate of brussell sprouts. And it’s hard. Sharing is counterintuitive to the very way our species is wired. 

Csikszentmihalyi’s brilliant book about the evolving self explained it best:

Humans are bundles of energy programmed to pursue selfish ends. Ninety percent of our genetic material overlaps with the chimpanzees, so it’s a wonder how some of us have ever built cathedrals, or computers, or spaceships. That there are even a few individuals who try to help others should come as a marvelous surprise. 

And so, when the time comes to couple up, each individual quickly realizes that they have dense, calcified layers of selfishness to dissolve. And that takes time. Sometime years. 

My layers are still a mile deep. Because I’m still locked into many of my old ways of being selfish. Splitting that plate of brussell spouts still feels like torture to me.

But the lesson learned every time we do it is, there’s a profound sense of belonging that comes from creating a shared experience with another. 

Our happiness widens. Or trust deepens. Our joy reciprocates. And our meaning multiplies. Whatever conquering of selfish habits it may necessitate, it’s worth it. 

There’s an adorable old joke about this very issue:

An elderly couple walks into a fast food restaurant. They order one hamburger, one order of fries and one drink. The old man unwraps the plain hamburger and carefully cuts it in half. 

He places one half in front of his wife. He then carefully counts out the fries, dividing them into two piles and neatly placing one pile in front of his wife. He takes a sip of the drink and his wife takes a sip and then sets the cup down between them. 

As he begins to eat his few bites of hamburger, the people around them keep looking over and whispering, that poor old couple, all they can afford is one meal for the two of them. As the old man begins to eat his fries a young man comes to the table. He politely offers to buy another meal for the old couple. 

The old man replies that they’re just fine, they’re just used to sharing everything. The surrounding people noticed the little old lady hadn’t eaten a bite. She sits there watching her husband eat and occasionally taking turns sipping the drink. Again the young man comes over and begs them to let him buy another meal for them. 

This time the old woman says, no, thank you, we are used to sharing everything. As the old man finishes and was wipes his face neatly with the napkin, the young man again comes over to the little old lady who had yet to eat a single bite of food and asks, may I ask what you are waiting for? 

And the old woman answers, the teeth! 

That’s what love begs of us. To share agency and go into something having no idea what the finished product will look like. 

It’s scary and vulnerable, trusting that the pie is big enough for both of us. But then again, once upon a time, the human race shared everything. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

What if you built a relationship that didn’t work when you didn’t share?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs.x

What if we publicly shamed inconsiderate parkers? 

What if your face could convince coworkers that you’re actually healthy? 

What if we fried fresh fruit for breakfast? 

What if you took a supplement that brings out your dinosaur tendencies? 

What if rich people shoveled cow shit as a meditation?

In this episode of Steal Scott’s Ideas, Brittany, Jennifer and Katie gather in Brooklyn for some execution in public.

**Sponsored by Punchly 

---

Execution Lesson 112: Creating the company that houses your own art.

We get work when we decide to work whether we are working or not.

That’s how working works. It’s not whether we are good, although talent certainly helps, it’s whether we are moving.

Because while opportunity is attracted to talent, it’s also mesmerized by momentum. And the best entrepreneurs have both.

Instead of patiently suckling the pink teat of institutional permission, they hire themselves and get to work. Whether or not their work is even going to work.

Howard Roark, the mythological architect who refused to compromise with an architectural establishment unwilling to accept innovation, once said that the question is not who’s going to let us, but who’s going to stop us?

Nobody, that’s who. Not a goddamn person. It’s actually quite surprising the first time we taste this flavor of freedom. We start working and realize, oh damn, not only are people not stopping me, they’re actually supporting me.

That’s momentum. It works.

Lesson learned, new work opportunities find us through the attraction of working, not the arrogance of waiting.

If you are hoping to get more work, just remember this. Not working is not working. It’s not enough to making work, we also have to create the opportunity to make it.

Master than, and you will soon learn that you are much freer than you allow yourself to imagine.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How could you build the house where your freedom resides?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs. 

We can’t retrofit intuition. 

It certainly makes for a romantic and compelling story, telling people that we knew it all along and had no doubt from day one that our business, project or relationship was something that we just felt in our gut and followed and everything worked out. 

But the reality is, in the bewildering chaos of human experience, most of us are shitty predictors of pretty much anything. We’re all just guessing. 

Think back to your first love or your first job. 

Did that journey rarely wrap itself in a nice, clean, tight, dramatic narrative arc? Were your intuitions spot on all along? Or were your precious little predictions cock blocked by mystery known as life? 

Probably the latter. Because it’s all a risk. A gamble. A bet with unknown odds. 

Look, I believe intuition is a very real and reliable source of insight. I believe each of us has a tremendous range of intuitive powers that are potentially available. And I believe that training ourselves to take action on our intuitive leads is a worthwhile endeavor. 

But looking back on our lives and pretending that our origin story had some grandiose slow clap crescendo and worked out according to plan, probably isn’t serving us. 

Watterson made this point in his famous comic strip:

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That’s why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices. 

Besides, part of the joy of life is in not being able to control or predict every circumstance we will meet. Leaning into the risk of accidentally embracing something that would make things turn out the way they shouldn’t. 

Accepting more experiences as mysteries that don’t conveniently fit into any specific categories. Not looking back to retrofit intuition, as if we had a copy of the blueprints all along. 

It makes me think of a brilliant monologue from my favorite comedy. Cusack reveals:

I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains. 

And so, trust your intuition, but make sure it doesn’t keep you locked up in your small little room, nose against the exit, afraid to try turning the knob. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS...

Are you trying to predict the future or invent it? 
* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs.x