Are You The Gatekeeper?
If so, your days are numbered. Time was, only so many books could be published per year. Each one had to be printed and distributed to bookstores, so as a publisher, there was a cap on how many you could produce each year. So, the name of the game became being very selective. If you publish a book, you better be reasonably sure it will sell well. It gave them license to discriminate. Now we...
Nobody's Listening!
Here's an idea: pick a topic that interests you (preferably one you're familiar with), find a venue that will let you stand up for free, and then offer to speak on that topic for free. Post fliers, or find local organizations that are willing to tell their members about you because what you're talking about is relevant to what they do. You don't have to do a lot. Just spend an hour or so making...
The Wonderful Wizard of Google
In the movie The Wizard of Oz, I remember how strange and giddy the inside of the Emerald City was, when the singing quartet Dorothy and company finally arrive to see the wizard. After a bunch of silliness at the front door, they get inside and are greeted by throngs of singing people all dressed in green, an arena full of marvels, horses that change colors, and spa treatments. It's all brightly colored, shiny, and...
Why I Hated English Class
How do you find the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle? If you have any recollection of this being hammered into your head year after year during grade school, you know that you square each of the other two sides, add the numbers together, and then take the square root. a2 + b2 = c2 This is a problem that has a convergent solution. You have a classroom full of 30 kids, and...
Discovered By Whom?
There are lots of people living on the streets in Santa Barbara, where I live. A lot of the more enterprising ones have musical instruments, like guitars or djembes, and manage to get small bits of cash from performing on the street. I overheard a conversation about these people. One person remarked about how talented so many of them are. The other person agreed, saying, "It seems like they're good enough to be discovered by...
Selling Change To Others
People don't fear change just because it's different or new. They're afraid of it because of its higher level of perceived risk over that of the status quo. If you work for a company and see an opportunity for improvement, it may be hard to pitch the idea to management because they're stuck in their ways. If what they've always done has worked, then why bother fixing it? As long as the status quo appears...
A Young Man's Fancy
According to the old adage, springtime brings about a natural inclination in minds of young men to start chasing skirts. Supposedly, something in the air just makes males more likely to venture out on the prowl. I wonder if this natural drive manifests itself in other ways? Are men more likely to start looking for new jobs when spring rolls around? That information might be useful to headhunters and recruiting firms. I've never paid any...
The Search For Spirituality
Do you teach people how to be spiritual:
By trying really hard to teach them how to be spiritual?
-or-
By showing them how to let the spirituality that exists within them to flourish?
I think educators faces a similar question: Do you try to educate kids into being brilliant or do you work to let the brilliance within flourish?
What Critics Want
If you write a book that people read, and it's sold on Amazon, it might get one-star reviews from people that haven't even read it. If you're an independent musician and you put your music on MySpace for all to hear, you'll probably get some wall posts telling you that you sound exactly like [insert popular band here], and that you lack originality, so you should stop trying to record music. If you start making...
Let Them Drop Acid
When you think about it, the Beatles were basically the "boy band" of the 1960s. It didn't really get interesting until they started dropping acid and doing heavy drugs, which led to "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and beyond. So, here's an idea: take Justin Timberlake, the Jonas Brothers, and Hannah Montana, put them into a studio for six months, and make them take drugs. LSD, crack, heroine, cocaine, and all the booze they...