Pass This Way But Once
If you're a writer and you want to publish a book, you don't just have one shot at success. That might have been true about 30 years ago when you needed the blessing of a major publishing house in order to get your book printed and distributed. When Random House finally called you back and said they wanted to publish your book, you made sure you returned their calls and showed up promptly to meet...
Saving Trees
Last time I checked out at Costco, there was a sign hanging below the register that read, "Only one copy of your receipt can be provided to you." This is a simple point, but stores don't hang up signs like that without them being a response to customer inquiries. If you see a sign that says, "No Dogs Allowed", you can bet it's because people brought their dogs in and the store owner thought, "Gee...
Cynicism is Easy
It's easy to be critical of hope. It's easy to be openly critical of someone else's vision. It's easy to be cynical and encourage others to resist change.
But if life has taught me anything, it's that the easier something is, the less likely it is to be worth doing.
We Are The Champions
In the film What About Bob, one of the characters is a psychiatrist (Richard Dreyfuss) who takes on a new patient (Bill Murray) who ends up being quite a handful. The doctor is the author of a (fictional) book called Baby Steps, which he gives to all of his patients. It encourages a mindset on the part of the patient to take things in life in small chunks, to avoid being overwhelmed by reality. On...
Push and Pull
One of my favorite quotes comes from Galileo, who once said, "You cannot teach a man anything...you can only help him find it within himself." For instructional teaching, this maxim probably doesn't apply. I don't imagine any of us are born with the knowledge of how a car works...hence, the manual in driver's ed. Where it does hold true is for inspirational teaching, or the teaching of general truths about the world. I actually don't...
The Reason I Love Sales and Marketing...
...is because they're the two functions in any organization that contribute to revenue. Everything else contributes to cost. Sure, I hate the high-pressure used-car salesman who's doing everything in his power to extort money out of you for a lemon. And I hate the retail sales person who, like an incessant gnat at a picnic, buzzes around you trying to sell you something you don't need. But these vexations are extremes and, like most extremes,...
Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall...
When you're watching television and you see a man getting hit in the groin, you feel their pain. As the observer, your gut clenches up and you bend over, almost as if you yourself had been hit. On a logical level, you know you're not in any danger, but your brain still reacts as though what you're witnessing is actually happening to you. Scientists call the cells in our brain responsible for driving these kinds...
The Edge
If you're selling toilet paper to everyone in the world, you probably need to be pretty politically correct. When a Charmin ultra commercial comes on, you're doomed, because the message is going to be watered down, uninteresting, and crafted to speak to the widest possible audience. They want everyone to buy their toilet paper. I'm not convinced this is the correct approach. Here's a video created by Lane Bryant that's making fun of Victoria's Secret...
Stealing Loglines
In cinema-speak, a logline is basically an elevator pitch. It's a one-sentence summary of plot of the movie you want to write. If you're a screenwriter running around desperately trying to get someone in Hollywood to listen to your story idea, you'd better have a worthwhile (and short) logline that embodies the essence of the story you want to tell. Here's the one for Die Hard: "A New York cop visits his estranged wife in...
Salieri's Choice
In the movie Amadeus, Antonio Salieri recounts his life in his old age, his love of music, and his hatred of a composer named Mozart. Mozart, he claimed, was always able to create better music than he, and it drove Salieri crazy because he so desperately wanted to create great music. Yet, he lived in the shadow of this young musical prodigy, who was so much more adept at composing and for whom it seemed...