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When others push your buttons…

April 16, 2012 in confidence, control, time with 6 Comments

Via chrisguillebeau.com

People will take over your life if you let them.

How do they do it?

Step 1: They begin by taking over your time.

  • When they send a message in one place to say they’ve left a message for you in another place, you know you’re really in trouble. Watch out!

Step 2: They continue by asserting their priorities over yours.

  • One hour after asking for something: “Have you had a chance to look at that yet?” Do not mistake urgent for important.

Step 3: They assume they know better than you do.

  • Most of the time when someone says something will help you, what they mean is “This will help me, but let’s pretend it helps you too.”

Step 4: When you decline to give in to the demands, they’ll attempt to make you feel bad.

  • “I’m not sure why you’d say no to this great opportunity.”
  • “I really need your help to ensure this project succeeds.”

Sometimes, we let people take over our lives by entrusting judgment to them. We assume that other people know better than we do. We assume that other people’s priorities are more important than ours.

Sometimes we are wrong.

We should stop that.

For the whole story click here.

Why creators should work alone.

February 16, 2012 in artistry, control, creative, process, video with 9 Comments

“Most inven­tors and engi­neers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best out­side of cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments, best where they can con­trol an inven­tion’s design with­out a lot of other peo­ple design­ing it for mar­ket­ing or some other com­mit­tee. I don’t believe any­thing real­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary has ever been invent­ed by com­mit­tee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a com­mit­tee. Not on a team.” ~ Steve Wozniac (Apple Co-founder)

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. And again. And again.

Creating art is not a team sport. Artists can and should contribute to a team, but team creation can get needlessly messy, muddy and unproductive.

Team creativity only works when the “experts” are allowed to give their best to the team with the least amount of constraints from others. This requires clear communication up-front and a strong understanding of the boundaries before beginning the project.

A moving target is death to creativity and innovation.

Plus, creators who work in a corporate environment like to hit the mark. Who doesn’t?

I happen to agree with Steve Wosniac about this. Working alone is the best scenario for innovation. Create outside the group, then bring it to the group for the others to do their part. Otherwise, you may end up with this scenario:

video link for mobile

Just don’t let them try to re-do the artists work.

What are your thoughts on this? Any experiences you could share with us?

Stop trying to control everything!

May 21, 2010 in control, excellence, perfection with 0 Comments

News flash: there is no such thing as perfection on this side of Heaven. Use whatever other adjectives you want (amazing, awesome, spectacular, epic, whatever) but perfect is not achievable or sustainable here on planet Earth.

Life is messy. Relationships are messy. Ministry is messy. Why? You can’t do life without people and people are messy. People are imperfect. We are all on a journey of becoming, growing into the most mature versions of ourselves, but we are not there yet. Hopefully, we are better than last year. Hopefully, we are better than last week. Hopefully we are better than yesterday. The point is we should all be growing and improving.

Patience is required to navigate the messiness – ours and that of others. It is a rare commodity among perfectionists. Perfectionists don’t like messy projects, messy people or messy life. Perfectionists like to control things. Immature perfectionists try to control people, too. They struggle to be satisfied with better. They struggle to be satisfied, period.

Better is great, but better is not perfect.

Artists are walking irony. Our world is usually in various stages of disarray, but somehow we are OK with that. We just can’t stand when we’re not in control. We just can’t stand showing unrefined and imperfect work to the outside world. It gets too messy to let people in to help us, or God forbid, affect the final product of our work. We would have to depend on people we can’t (or shouldn’t) control.

Let’s face it. We like control.

We need to get over that. Reasonable people don’t expect perfection. So if perfection is the bar you must attain, what does that say about the bar? I say it’s too high. I say it’s unreasonable. Quit torturing yourself and your co-workers. Quit being unreasonable. Nobody’s perfect. We need to learn to be satisfied with better and best and set perfection aside. Your sanity could depend on it.

Be excellent, by all means, but be reasonable… and stop trying to control everything.