How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Pandemic

And as a result of the pandemic, I’ve spent the last year focusing much of my attention on how to make the most of the challenges.

I released a new book titled Personal Creativity Management and launched GetProlific.io, an online community where people can find an effervescent fountain filled with vivid and compelling ideas dedicated solely to helping people see, smell, taste and even experience how they can dramatically improve their productivity for themselves and others.

As we’re coming on the One Year “Panniversary” of Covid, here’s my list of tips to help you stop worrying and learn to love the pandemic:

1. Challenge Yourself! Find the silver lining to every dark cloud!

During covid, we have all developed pandemic fatigue. And rightly so. Even right now, there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

Are there ways to turn this positive? What’s so awful about tunnels? Sure, the air is chilly, the thick darkness makes it tough to walk, and it kind of smells. But any student of history knows that tunnels have helped people throughout the ages win wars, escape persecution, protect villages, move goods, travel safely, transport waste, bury treasure, park cars, link cities, treat water, find gold and escape to America! Let’s give the tunnel a little credit.

With no light at the end of the tunnel, we are forced to get creative so we can see in the dark. And just like we learn to download and carry a super bright flashlight app to help us see in the closet, we learn to make better use of our technology.

The question isn’t whether or not there’s a light at the end of this tunnel, but whether we maximize the opportunities we encounter while crawling and stumbling our way through the darkness.

2. Use Colorful Energizers and Be Like a Bunny

All of my 50+ books started out as color-coded notecards at home on my kitchen table. The bright colors stimulate your creative juices, get the ideas to flow, can be moved around freely to organize, optimize and capture the evolution of critical thoughts and breakthroughs.

It’s a way to create organized chaos that attracts conversation and sparks the interest and enthusiasm of people in the vicinity of the table. They can often offer up new ideas and perspectives which improve the work, and to tell him to clean up the table before dinner! Just hand them a pencil and a sticky note or a notecard and say “Have at it!”.

3. Use Spreadsheets to Plant a Field of Ideas and Grow Bushels of Wonder

Years ago, back when the power was on, I expanded my publishing empire by converting thousands of colored notecards and stickies and into a spreadsheet with four columns:

• What’s the Problem?
• The Idea
• How Does it Work
• The Tag Line

This handy structure guides the development, continuous improvement, and performance of each critical element and action needed to create hundreds of innovative unique patentable projects.

I then turn each row of columns into a page of attractive useful information that is then packaged in a unique and often times hilarious set of Steal Scott’s Ideas cards that illustrates the process and helps people and teams innovate anything and everything they are thinking about.

This method is particularly useful and is easily utilized to a new global crisis, new information, unforeseen changing circumstances (like unemployment), and surprise opportunities (like unemployment) and if the power is on, you can share the spreadsheet via text, email, social media, and Google docs and get comments on all sorts of crazy ideas.

4. Everyone Wears a Nametag on Zoom!

Twenty years ago, I gained national recognition for tattooing my name on my chest.

Now that using Zoom is the norm, everyone in a meeting has a nametag right above or below their picture. My utopian paradise where everyone is wearing a nametag finally came to fruition. While clinical proof is lacking that wearing a nametag helps fight the pandemic, it clearly helps with the challenges of social distancing. You know the name of 25 people in seconds! And everyone knows you too!

5. Congratulations! You Made It Through Another Day!

It may not be sexy but it pays off in spades to keep a victory log on an annual wall calendar where you place a gold star on it every time you complete a major step in one of your goals. Then at the end of the day over dinner when your spouse says “what did you do today?”, you can point to the wall and say “I executed steps 4, 5 and 6 and got halfway through number 7, dear!!”

If your spouse is impressed you might get to receive a “Gold Star” for the calendar on the wall of your office or even one for the good deeds you do at home for your refrigerator. Lo and behold, time will fly by and when you get enough Gold Stars, you can vocally declare without any guilt that it is time to take an impromptu day off, and you have the victory log and the visual proof to justify the looks of doubt and far that are reflecting back at you.

6. Encourage People to Take the Artistic Initiative

Before the pandemic, young people (e.g., in their teens and twenties), had the opportunity to perform songs at Karaoke Bars and even at open mic nights. While this high labor intensity labor of love demonstrated a very low return on financial investment, the pandemic has made it very difficult to perform these live in-person events.

But guess what! Opportunities abound! You can encourage your kids and teens to grab their guitars and microphone to an empty parking lot and park your car near a picnic table and then just hook up an amplifier with a power-supply to your car, and voila! Live concert in the park, or in a tunnel, and on social media for all to listen to.

If you scope out a spot at a venue with a lot of foot traffic, remember to bring a hat or a money jar for donations when the kids play and sing as loud as they possibly can for maybe two hours at a time. You can even place a pay me button using PayPal or Venmo on social media! This may turn into a job so be forewarned. It could also turn out to be a local news story that prompts a concert documentary about the whole experience.

Told you tunnels weren’t so bad!

Happy Panniversary Everyone! Hope these tips help you stop worrying and learn to love the pandemic.