New Direction

Alright, I’m taking this particular blog in a new direction. It’s going to be an outlet for my writing exercises. It will be more of a writing portfolio than anything else. I’ll try to write persuasive and entertaining posts that make people comment. It will have no content focus. I’ll write about music, food, school, literature, work, and so forth.

Enjoy.

Hippie Logic

adapted from the post at CopyBlogger.com

A young man was struggling in everything.

In school, she was getting decent grades, but could never get the 4.0 semester he worked for. He had friends, but there was no one he felt really close to. he had a job, but felt like things were on the fritz and he was about to be let go.

When she saw a successful classmate of hers, she would wonder “how do they do it?” The girl in question kept a 3.9, had tons of people that loved them and a few she considered true friends, and she had an offer to stay at her job when she graduated.

Halfway into the semester, the struggling girl finally got over her pride after class and asked her classmate. “How are you able to have such an incredible life? How do you excel at everything you’re doing?” She asked if he would like to talk about it over coffee tomorrow. She was cute, so he quickly made the date.

After ordering their drinks from the bag-hatted girl behind the counter, they sat in the corner booth. She of course saw a couple people she knew so said hello and started on her latte.

“So how is it that you can do everything you do and do it so well? I’m a pretty active guy and I’m ok in school, but you seem to do things so easily.”

“From what I can tell, you’re doing it all right,” she says. “Well then what’s the difference? How come you are able to excel easily and I struggle just to get by?”

Another sip from her latte.

“You’re looking everywhere, but you’re not seeing anything.”

“I knew it was some sort of hippie logic.”

“No, no. Let me explain. Take a look around the coffee shop. What do you see?”

“I don’t know. Art, laptops, hipsters, the usual.”

“How many salt shakers did you see?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really looking for them.” He turns and scans again and realizes that the room is full of salt shakers. One on almost every table.

“So what’s your point?”

“My point is that you’ve been looking at everything, like your schoolwork and relationships, but you haven’t really seen any of them. You’ve been falling flat because you don’t know what you’ve been looking for. When you can focus and only look for salt shakers, they will be easier to find.”

The reason I struggle sometimes is because I try to do everything at once. Some people call it multi-tasking. I’ll never be good at that, so instead I do one thing at a time and I do it well.

Single tasking. My boy Leo talks about it over at Zen Habits.

So my advice is to stop multi-tasking. Look at and focus on the one thing you are doing right now, and do it well.

What do you think?

There’s opportunity out there

Here’s what I believe:
You really can be who you want to be
You really can work where you want to work
You really can be with the person of your dreams

You just have to figure out what you can offer in order to get those things.

Everyone lives in a wii.fm world. wii.fm is the radio station that plays only music that you want to hear. It only plays commercials that you are interested in. wii.fm stands for what’s in it for me

That’s something I learned in sales and marketing. I could have the greatest new product in the world that has all sorts of great features, but no one is going to buy if they don’t get anything from it.

Let’s say I’ve invented a new pen. The pen has a feature that makes ink flow more evenly than your normal pen. Big deal right? You’re not convinced to switch from your blue bic. But what if I told you that the easy ink flow feature means that your writing will be faster, easier, less smears, and your handwriting will look better and your essays will get better grades.

Pretty persuasive, right?

That’s marketing and sales right there. And guess what. That’s exactly what you’ve go to do with yourself.

I’m sick of hearing about the economy and occupying streets and all of that crap. There are jobs out there. There is money to be made.

I think that my generation has become complacent and comfortable in the IDEA that a degree means a job. That’s definitely what I thought when I first got into college. For a few fields, that may be the case, but overall it isn’t.

So here’s the solution: Learn how to pitch yourself to companies as though you were some sort of new software package or some other product. What can you bring to the table? What skills do you have THAT THEY NEED? How can you help fill the void in their business?

Personally, I want to be a writer for an ad company. A big one. I want my words to be heard all over the world. And I want to get paid handsomely for it. I also want to innovate and be written about in textbooks. I want to be so good that people want to teach my strategies to future students. I’m going to have a definitive SKILLSET that I can market to future employers. I am going to pitch MY specific product.

Do you think they are going to go with Joe Blow who graduated with a degree and was involved with a few organizations?

Or Rod Waynick, professional copywriter with a portfolio of sample work done for paid clients?

That’s what I thought. You’ve got to build your product and your brand. It’s never too early to start, so start now.

on energy

Energy is an interesting thing.

It can’t be seen.

It can’t be felt.

But it can be lost, gained, wasted, and invested.

I used to sell knives. Lots of them. Over $33 thousand worth. And one day, I quit. I was tired of the job. Or, to put it more correctly, I was tired because of the job.

You see, selling takes a ton of energy. You have to set appointments. Drive to the appointments. Perform your presentation. haggle. get rejected. drive to the next appointment. start over.

Now when it was good, it was very good. But the energy I spent was much less than any reward gained.

They told me in training that people buy because the perceived value is higher than the cost. For me, value (earnings) was NOT higher than the cost (energy), so I quit buying.

Now, do I spend as much energy writing and researching and creating content as I did selling knives? No. I spend more. MUCH more.

But I’ve discovered a very curious thing. I have discovered that if you are forcing energy to a place where, deep down, you do not want that energy to go, you will lose so much of that energy. That’s what happened to me with the knife selling gig.

I call it energy displacement, and it’s not a good thing. Energy has a natural direction and flow, much like a river. Going against that flow is rarely a good idea. If you’ve ever tried to swim upstream, you probably know what I’m talking about.

But if we put the energy in the places it wants to go, we can truly harness it and do great things. Just think about what would have happened if Albert Einstein had applied his energy to something like painting or writing fiction. Could he have been great? Of course. Anyone can do anything they want to do.

But would that greatness have been at the same level as his work in physics?

All I’m saying is that when you can put energy where it’s supposed to be, great things can happen.

So next time you find yourself exhausted by something you’re putting a lot of energy into, take a second look. Is that really where that energy needs to be spent?

Here we go again – a fresh start and new perspective

I’m sitting here, a year and a half older, but more than that in terms of maturity.  I’ve been through a couple things here and there that have taught me a lot.  I now know what it means to work hard and hit a goal.  I now know what it means to work with a schedule.  I now know how freaking important it is to learn how to FOCUS.

All of these things came about 3 years (seemingly) too late.

You see, I started out my college career in architecture.  I was so excited about creating things.  I was excited about learning how the built world around us is created.  I was excited about seeing my ideas come to life.

First year was great.  I kept my GPA respectable, although nothing compared to high school.  I was thoroughly enjoying my work.

However

I was the world’s worst procrstinator.  This caused to get really pissed off at the world because of my lack of results.  I would put things off until the last minute thus causing my work to be total crap.  What did I do while I wasn’t doing my work?  I don’t even remember, man.

There were a lot of frustrated nights pretending to work on stuff.  But I was really just messing around.  And like I said, I just got mad at the world.

So I left.

For Speech Communication.  I thought I would enjoy learning about how me communicate.  But I didn’t.  I didn’t do well there either.  But while I was in Speech, I took a job selling knives.  I did pretty well with that. I made some money, but more importantly, I learned how to manage myself.  Or, better yet, I was aware of how I managed myself.  I learned that I procrastinated when I was doing something I was not happy about.

I tried to jump in completely while leaving out everything else.  I lost my balance.  But I feel like now I’ve got it back.

After selling knives for about 9 months, I’ve learned how things SHOULD be done.  I truly feel that I’ve got it under control (relatively, anyway).  I’m really excited about starting architecture school again.  I think I’m going to rock, and I can’t wait to share everything here.

Thanks!

-Rod