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Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like working! 
Enjoy this video of my co-workers last night; unfortunately I skipped out before they took the stage.. Suzie, thank you for the great interpretative dance.
The new Hancock movie is going to be out on July 2nd, and the one thing I’ve noticed is that they’re promoting a movie with an unconventional slant on a traditional movie superhero.. well, quite conventionally. Billboards and TV (NBA Finals) tie-ins, but nothing (at least out here in Los Angeles, where the movie is set) that takes advantage of the plot.
This is a movie campaign that is ripe with ideas that could be done just about anywhere, and probably for less than the cost of a traditional billboard:
-Large scale graffiti project on the US Bank tower in downtown (ok, that’s a bit spendy..)
-Actually sticking a car on the needle of the Capitol Records building
-Punching fake “holes” through various office buildings throughout SoCal
-Fake bus benches that have been cracked/destoyed
-Whale outlines in sand along the SoCal beaches
-Crushed cars stacked in inconceivable ways along highways
Point is, just from viewing the trailers you can see that the opportunity was there to take advantage of our natural tendency to stop and pause for anything involving destruction or the unusual. It could’ve been fun and effective, but instead get the same old stuff that has grown tired and boring- just like some recent movies.
[I didn't write this, nor do I know who did.. it's been hanging on my wall for a number of years and can't find a copy online. Enjoy!]
Top 10 tips for facing failure:
1. Failure is normal. Everyone has faced failure. Some people talk about their failures. Some people don’t talk about their failures, which makes it look like they never fail. Don’t believe it.
2. Define or refine. Failure can define you or refine you. If you quit, you have allowed failure to define you. If you keep going, learn from it and get stronger, you have used failure to refine yourself.
3. Learn from it. Every failure has something to teach us, if we will only be teachable. To be teachable, we need to ask good questions such as “What contributed to this failure?” or “What can I do differently and/or better next time?”
4. Change your definition of failure. We live in an either/or culture. Either you totally succeed or you completely fail. Many times it’s neither.
5. Redefine what failure means to you. A failure is simply evidence that you took a shot at accomplishing something, that you want to be a doer instead of just a talker.
6. Successful people fail often. How can you be successful and fail often? You become successful by taking risks. Risk implies that you might fail. Otherwise it would not be called risk-taking; it would be called sure-thing taking.
7. Build on your failures. Many of the great success stories are built on what was learned from failure or the motivation that can come from failure.
8. Don’t fear failure. The of failure holds us back from doing many of the things we would like to do.
9. Give up your belief in failure. A wise person once said, “Failure? I’ve never encountered it. I’ve just learned lots and lots of ways that don’t work, and turned that into a few successes.”
10. Never, ever give up. An ancient Japanese proverb suggests that we are to “fall down seven times, get up eight.”
This article from Church of the Customer has some very interesting points on why the majority of small business owners have absolutely no internet presence.
Whoops- I almost let the cat out of the bag there by detailing exactly they need. That’ll come later- I promise- but for now it’s something to chew on.
Google finally pulled back the veil on their “GPhone” project and I had to catch my breath for a second. The funny part is that the reaction around the web seems to be the knee-jerk “I don’t want ads on my phone!”
It’s not about ads. It’s not even about what you currently use (and expect) your phone to do today. It’s a completely new idea that I believe will revolutionize quite a few ways we do things (once we figure it all out).
Want to set your phone to alert you when you’ve got a friend within a mile? Done.
Want to know when a home goes on the market within a pre-selected radius of the neighborhood you love? Easy.
We basically need to wake up and realize we’re carrying portable communications devices,
not cellphones, and that most are crippled by the carriers. Making this open-source now brings in a huge menu that is really only limited by our imagination.
Will there be ads? Yes, but only the ones you want to see.
What have I been up to? It seems like it’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to post here so I figured a little update would be warranted. Long story short, I’ve become a “blog master”.
http://blog.theexoticforum.com/
Of course, there are more to come.. As Al Pacino stated in Scent of a Woman, “I’m just getting warmed up!”
While I understand all of the knowledge presented (the nutshell that Marc describes) my knee-jerk reaction is that Age & Entrepreneurship (today) isn’t based merely on creative peaks and valleys- in fact, I’m a little shocked that throughout his research Dr. Simonton doesn’t take any outside factors into consideration.The bottom line is that age has no factor in entrepreneurship- it’s the entrepreneurial lifestyle that must factor into age. You can’t spend 24/7 on a startup when you’ve got a wife and kid at home, nor can you bet the farm when you’ve got little Jimmy’s college fund to look after. You can be at a creative peak throughout your lifetime, but I guarantee you won’t get as many at-bats as someone who is fresh out of college (or even still in college) and has absolutely no attachments or debt.
Of course, if you have one big payday early on you’re obviously going to be out of the above group for the most part- the Andreessen/Cuban effect. Your time is even more crunched but you now have ‘life capital’ that allows you to multiply it in various forms. Creativity doesn’t wane, it merely learns to thrive via different channels.
The gist? Take away the resources of time and money and you can’t be a successful entrepreneur.. at any age.
“NEW YORK (Reuters) — Monster Worldwide Inc., parent of jobs Web site Monster.com, reported lower-than-expected quarterly earnings Monday and announced a restructuring plan that includes cutting 800 jobs, or 15 percent of its full-time staff.”
Do they at least get a free subscription?