Batman noted that some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They cannot be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn. 

This personality is the exception, not the rule. 

All nihilistic face painting criminal masterminds aside, the majority of human beings are natural hackers and fixers and improvers. It’s one of the central ways that we rail against the seeming injustice of this random, chaotic and unfair world. 

By trying to put it back together again. Whatever it takes to regain our sense of control and avoid death and preserve our narrative of the happy ending. 

Let’s see here, all we need to do is repair the world and it will match the way it should be once again, and then everything will be okay and everybody will be happy and whole until the end of time. Perfect. 

The business world has dutifully promoted this mindset since the rise of the industrial revolution. As workers, our mantra has always been as follows:

React quickly when a problem arises. 

Make fast decisions to keep organization moving ahead. 

Jump in and rescue the project to avert failure and focus on success.

In short, there’s chaos, and we better fix it. How else are we going to stay competitive in a dynamic and unpredictable marketplace? 

It’s smart business strategy. With enough grit, it will work. 

For a while. 

But let us remember, everything has a lifecycle. There is nothing in this world does not break. 

Things we once imagined to be so solid, from corporations to glaciers to promises to dreams to heroes to relationships, they all break. Everything breaks. And they can’t be fixed, only mourned. 

Therefore, while we might not enjoy watching the world burn, it might be time to allow it to be broken. It’s a lonely and scary and helpless feeling when we realize that we can do nothing to resolve a situation. 

But sometimes what the world needs and what the world deserves are two very different things. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How is your tendency to fix alienating you from reality? 

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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It’s easy to get discouraged when we get so many rejections. 

Each time we hear no, it chips away another chunk of our confidence, making us feel just a little more insecure than the time before. 

And so, because rejection can take such an emotional toll us on, it’s our responsibility to restore the balance. To double down on rebuilding our spirits and buoying our faith during threatening times. 

Without such compensatory effort, we will allow other people to be responsible for giving us doubts about our sanity. We will allow the world to back us into an old definition of ourselves that no longer holds true. And we will wind up living as weakened versions of ourselves. 

Throughout various job and career transitions in my work life, rejection has become a necessary function within my professional mainframe. I have accepted it as the cost of doing business. 

But I have also refused to allow it to embed itself so deeply in my psyche that it becomes impossible to move forward. Because at the end of the day, no matter how glamorous or interesting or well paying the gig is, it’s still just a job. It’s just a job. Work is but one spoke on the wheel of a life. There are other things that are important too. 

Take it from a recovering workaholic, it’s better to commit career suicide than to die of suicide by career. 

Turkel, the historian and broadcaster, famously wrote that the only species out of work were human beings. And the very fact that our species has invented unemployment ought to give us pause. Unemployment isn’t natural to the universe, he said, it contradicts cosmic laws and isn’t healthy. 

Whatever rejection we might be experiencing at this very moment, it’s okay that it hurts. But also know that our rejections are our achievements for sticking ourselves out there. 

Every no we suffer is another opportunity to show the world that our value is stronger than the barbs it can throw at us. 

To quote Tom Waits, one of the greatest living songwriters:

When it’s cold and there’s no music, and your old hometown’s so far away, inside your head there’s a record that’s playing, hold on, hold on. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you allowing rejection to hold your happiness hostage?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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We want extreme change and we want it now. 

We settle for nothing less than a tornado of sweeping transformations and dramatic revolutions that come swiftly and broadly, leaving us permanently altered for better for always. 

Unfortunately, nature doesn’t care how we prefer to change. It has its own agenda. One that must be respected if we are to live in harmony with it. 

And in some cases, that might mean changing gently. Focusing on our slight, steady, constant flow of developments, rather than demanding grandiose moments of intense transformation. 

One helpful venue for playing out this incremental process is through our dream states. 

For example, academic anxiety is my most common recurring nightmare. It always takes place on final exam day when I forgot that I was taking the course, didn’t attend any of the classes all semester, never did the reading, and now I’m completely unprepared for the test. 

Ever had that dream before? It’s bad times. 

But here’s the spooky part. 

Over the past few years, my evolving dream self has started to have new and interesting responses to this situation. The first milestone was the dream when my teacher passed out tests to the class unexpectedly, but I looked down at the paper and knew every single answer. Perhaps that dream was a sign of my deepening ability to trust myself? 

And then in a more recent dream, my teacher passed out the final exams, but instead of my usual feelings of anxiety, helplessness and overwhelm, my consciousness suddenly came online. Right there at my desk. The voice in my head went:

Wait a minute, you’re thirty nine years old. There is no math class. You’re not in school anymore. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. 

And for the first time, waves of relief and peace suddenly washed over me like a gentle surf. 

Proving, that our dreams, just like our changes, follow a narrative arc. And when we step back and view them holistically, a through line emerges that we can follow and derive meaning from. 

New knowledge about ourselves shows up in tiny increments, like grains of sand piled one on another. 

That’s what happens when we let of our insistence on immediate gratification. 

We allow the changes in our life to build one upon the other, pushing us ever closer to the person we are supposed to become. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you focusing on the tiny increments of change that come to you daily?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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Optimism is not about denying reality, it’s about discerning which reality to focus our energy on. 

It’s a choice we make in each moment. A simple matter of proportion, perception and principle. 

Let’s explore a few examples. 

Instead of eulogizing our negativity, we choose to see and build upon the good in every moment. Trusting that this is only the beginning and more is on the way. 

Instead of dwelling on every minuscule goddamn problem and injustice around us, we focus on the many ways in which our lives have been nurtured, encouraged and protected. Trusting that our rewards will ultimately outweigh our frustrations. 

Instead of viewing life’s negative events to be permanent and pervasive to every part of our lives, we accept the unfolding of events exactly as they are. Trusting that everything is temporary anyway. 

Instead of scrambling around like a mad animal trying grab our piece of the finite abundance available, we focus on how we can help make the pie bigger. Trusting that we will find many a bite for this hungry mouth. 

Wilde famously wrote that we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. 

And so, keep the oxygen of optimism continually in the process. Discern which reality to focus your energy on. 

Pay greater attention to those things that provide you the most positive energy. 

You will thank yourself in the long run. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Who drains your optimism? 

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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Carlin notoriously wrote that the innocent victim was an outmoded idea. That there are no innocent victims. And if you’re born into this world, you’re guilty, period, fuck you, end of report, next case. Your birth certificate is proof of guilt. 

It was always one of my favorite bits. 

All comedy aside, though, what the hippie dippy weatherman was hinting at was something terrifying that we rarely confront:

We haven’t grown up enough yet to know that we were never innocent in the first place. 

Give that thought a moment to sink down into your solar plexus. 

It reminds me of a poignant article published on the anniversary of the most devastating assassination in our nation’s history. The journalist wrote:

What we lost, and what we have been mourning and seeking to restore since that day, is the image of country as this place where all skies are endless, all possibilities are open, and all big things are doable, that sense of ourselves as a nation in spring. But we were never innocent. What we were, you see, was young. 

Perhaps losing our innocence, then, is this integral part of coming of age. And maybe it’s not event, maybe it’s a process. Where we widen our awareness of evil and pain and suffering in the world around us, but we also realize, oh wait, maybe all those enthusiasms and joys and voracities of our youth are still available to us, they just require a lot more work to secure and sustain. 

Look, we can’t unring the innocence bell. We can’t return to that naive time before the world sank its jaws into us. 

But just as swiftly as the sky will turn blue again, we can always choose to bask contentedly in the peace of where we are today, grateful for the magic carpet ride of history that brought us here. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Have you grown up enough to know that you were never innocent?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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Heidegger, the seminal existentialist philosopher, believed that language was the house of being. In his famous letter on humanism, he wrote:

In this home of language, man dwells. Those who create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation of being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in language through their speech. 

Insanely dense and abstract and difficult to read, ain’t it? 

My college professor once told me that reading his philosophy was like trying to swim through wet sand. 

And so, instead of breaking our brans trying to dissect and decipher his every word, let us be inspired by the spirit of his message. Because what the great philosopher was trying to tell us was, language is the lever we have for changing ourselves, and the world around us. 

Here’s an example from my own experience. 

For the last twenty years of my life, friends, family, peers, clients and total strangers from around the world, have come to know me as Nametag Scott. Now, it was never my intention to create this brand for myself. But when you start doing anything twenty four hours a day, whether you like it or not, it’s going to identify you. It might even define you. 

And that brings us back to language. The house of being. 

Thanks to my little experiment, people know me not as Scott, but as Nametag Scott. There is now a prefix before my first name, for better or for worse, for the rest of my life. 

And what is a prefix, exactly? A prefix is any word or letter or number placed before another. It’s something that adds an introduction. It’s a preformative piece of language, because it alters the form of the words to which it is affixed. Placed in front of another term, the prefix literally modifies the meaning of whatever comes after it. 

Scott, for example, is a name. Nametagscott is a story. 

The prefix, the power of language, invites people into my home to dwell. 

What’s your prefix? What’s the story that introduces your name? And what trademark have you trained the world to associate with you? 

Answer those questions, and you will use the lever of language to change the world around you.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you living your life as an expression of your values that invites people to belong to the neighborhood of your being?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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Einstein didn’t invent relativity, but he did create a new way of seeing information that was already available to everybody else. 

Darwin didn’t invent natural selection, but he did build a conceptual framework in which natural selection made sense. 

Newton didn’t invent gravity, but he did give a name to something that was already there, and that label helped people understand it. 

Gates didn’t invent the computer, but he did build a better operating system so that more people could easily use computers. 

That’s the good news about innovation. We don’t have to invent something new. Sometimes we simply have to notice, name, redefine, make use of, adapt ourselves to, associate ourselves with, pioneer in, and become the unquestionably committed fanatic of, some universal law or an idea that already exists. 

Godin outlined this phenomenon on his popular marketing blog, citing my nametag experiment as a search engine optimization case study:

With determination and patience, you will certainly win. But it requires inventing a trademark and then building a business or service or organization around this trademark that people actually talk about. You want to be able to say to someone, just google the word blank. Ginsberg owns the term nametag scott. It’s like owning the perfect domain, via the search engine. If you want to win, make an incredible product and offer a remarkable service, but also associate a unique term or trademark with it. Something that isn’t generic, and preferably, not a crowded search term already. 

We have to remember, nametags existed long before my little experiment went viral. Seinfeld even did an episode about it. 

But the difference is, nobody stuck to nametags like me. Nobody published more books about nametags than me. Nobody gave themselves more permission to pioneer in the obscurity of nametags like me. 

That’s why that word is mine. Forever. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What word do you own? 

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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A magazine editor once gave me brilliant writing advice. 

She said to be careful not to overuse the second person point of view in the work. It creates a separation between author and reader, and can appear preachy or bossy. Instead, try to write in terms of we and us. It unifies the reader and writer, becoming a journey that we’re on together, rather than an expedition that only you are qualified to lead. 

Forget about writing, that’s just good advice period. It’s a gentle reminder that when we change our pronouns, transitioning from me into we, the context of where we sit in the world is dramatically enhanced. 

Berkeley conducted a famous study on this very issue. They took about two hundred married couples, half married for fifteen years, half married for thirty. And one of the most important variables studied and reported in the research were the numbers of times couples used words such as we, our, us, as opposed to words like, I, me, you.  

Sure enough, analyses revealed that greater weness was associated with a number of desirable qualities of the interaction, i.e., lower cardiovascular arousal, more positive and less negative emotional behavior; whereas, greater separateness was associated with a less desirable profile, i.e., more negative emotional behavior and lower marital satisfaction. 

When we change our language, we change our life. 

Even our most innocuous parts of everyday speech are unconscious representations of the nature of the identification with self and other. 

If we want a window into the inner workings of intimate relationships, the qualities of the connections between us and our partners, let us look at the language. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you on a journey of exploration together, or an expedition that only you are qualified to lead?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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Katamarithe most hilarious, bizarre and interesting puzzle action video game of all time. 

The plot concerns a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari, which rolls around various locations. It collects increasingly larger objects, everything from thumbtacks to human beings to monuments to baseball stadiums, until the ball has eventually grown massive enough to become a star. 

Who thinks this stuff up?

Playing the game, however, is surprisingly satisfying. And my theory is, it’s because katamari mirrors something that is fundamentally human. 

Growth. The exhilarating moment by moment process of expansion and evolution that we call life. And the fact that anything can stick to us and make us grow. It’s just a matter of attention and intention. 

Because if we contract into scarcity, framing our experiences as mistakes, failures, throwaways and dumbass wastes of time, then we have not grown one bit. 

But if we expand into abundance, treating everything is an ingredient in the greater self which we are building, then we can collect enough material to recreate the stars. 

If you think the world has figured out a system to keep you from growing, you are wrong. Human being are magical, highly adhesive beings whose divine inheritance is to grow as massive as they choose. 

Take it from a guy who has been wearing a nametag every day for twenty years. 

Being sticky is a good thing. 

It’s how we attract people and experiences which enhance our potential. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Did you let this day pass without personal growth?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

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

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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Growth is not when we stop making mistakes, it’s when we stop beating the shit out of ourselves for making them. 

Once we learn to eliminate that hostile tendency, we become unstoppable. Not even our own inner critic can keep us down. 

Buddhists have a phrase for this response called the second arrow. The teachings tell us that the first arrow is what is. It’s something comes with the territory of being alive. But the second arrow is the sense of unworthiness we inflict upon ourselves. It’s the constant, critical and uncompassionate evaluation of everything we are experiencing. 

And that’s a choice we make. We choose beat ourselves up mercilessly, calling names, pointing fingers and essentially treating ourselves in a manner that we would never stand for from somebody else. 

We choose to berate ourselves for not winning the game of life, making the cognitive mistake of keeping score of our missteps and failures.

This second arrow has harmful implications. Powers conducted the preeminent study on the dangers of beating ourselves up in a clinical psychology journal. His research found that overly harsh self criticism has been showed to undermine motivation, impede progress towards goals and increase procrastination. 

Turns out, the arrows we carry around are blocking our ability to contribute. 

And it’s true, beating ourselves up can feel quite good. Doing so gives us a chance to play the victim, earn attention and sympathy from others, divert our eyes from the real issue, escape the consequences of our mistakes and distract us from taking action. What’s not to like? 

But since making mistakes is part of learning to choose well, let’s not make life any more painful than it already is. Let’s forgive ourselves for being human and get back to work. 

The big yellow bird was right when he sang, everyone makes mistakes, oh yes they do, big people, small people, matter of fact, all people, everyone makes mistakes, so why can’t you? 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you still beating yourself up for not winning the game of life? 

* * * *

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.

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