Open up a parachute of prosperity

One of the patterns set in motion by my childhood was, it’s not polite to talk about money in front of others. You should be humble, appreciative and most importantly, considerate for those who might not be as fortunate as you. 

As I grew older, however, I began to call this preconditioning into question. Especially when it pertained to my business. 

In my mastermind group, for example, we never used to share company financial information with each other. Until one day, my colleague pointed out the ridiculousness of such modesty. 

Look, we’re all friends. We all trust each other. Let’s open the kimonos, act like adults and start talking about money as a neutral topic, without a sense of guilt or anxiety. 

It was liberating. Not only did we create a more intimate bond between the three of us, but we also gained a more holistic understanding of how each of our business functioned. And that allowed us to support and encourage each other in new ways. 

Lesson learned, money should be treated as a tool to build, instead of a wall to blast through. If it’s true that money isn’t the most important thing in the world, which it isn’t, perhaps it’s time we surrender our puritanical predispositions and start having an honest conversation about something that’s really just fuel. 

That’s all money is. It’s a lubricant for other things. And once we name it, we can start to claim it. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What conversation about money will open a parachute of prosperity for you?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “11 Ways to Out Market the Competition,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Assets that are non monetary, but still meaningful

In any business, money is the primary measure of a company’s value, legitimacy and professionalism. 

Ask any owner. Nothing beats getting paid. There is no close second to financial compensation. Even if you’re not turning much of profit, having at least some cash flow is a deeply satisfying form of remuneration for your efforts. 

But what happens when the money simply isn’t coming in? What happens when you’re one of the millions of small business that takes a least a year to show profit? And what happens when you feel discouraged and inadequate and worthless because you still haven’t been monetarily remunerated for your efforts? 

For starters, don’t beat yourself up. Give up the insane notion that you’re alone. And understand that your problems might be uncomfortable, but they’re not uncommon. 

Because every business has money problems. Especially in the beginning. For now, believe you have value and dignity apart from your financial bottom line. Try not to confuse net worth with self worth. And instead of moaning about how you still haven’t made any money, focus instead on how satisfying it will feel to make your first sale. Use that milestone as motivation. 

Meanwhile, work on building assets that are non monetary, but still meaningful. 

Attention. Permission. Commitment. Perspective. Connection. Platform. Creation. Leverage. Trust. Surprise. Courage. 

Each of these marketplace currencies are scarce, and therefore, can pave the way towards money. It just takes time. More time than you think. Hopefully you’ll still around when the world is finally ready for you. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What early preconditioning about money do you need to call into question?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “11 Ways to Out Market the Competition,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Target markets are for amateurs

I was reading an interview with one of my favorite songwriters, who was asked if he had a particular audience in mind when writing his new album. 

Gibbard appropriately said, it’s not something I ever think about. I never write with an audience in mind. My goal is to write the most honest and earnest songs I can, and try to write to the best of my ability in whatever situation I find myself in. I let the cards fall as they will. 

If only more artists and entrepreneurs and organizations would embrace this attitude. Because the conventional, business school, corporate world strategy of identifying your ideal customer and finding your target market and building an avatar for your perfect audience is completely shortsighted. 

If the goal is to create the most value in the world and to serve the greatest number of people, then why limit your work to one small slice of the population? I understand there are product managers and company owners and board members and angel investors whose asses need to be kissed, but we do our business a disservice when we only satisfy a narrow band of our work’s total capabilities. 

The goal is to expand and diversify our reach, not shrink it. The goal is to make our value accessible to people with varying needs, not shut out potential consumers of our work. 

Because ultimately, just as the more we utilize the full diversity of our talents, the more meaningful our life will become; the more appealing we are to more people, the more our work will be sought. 

But once we’ve locked in to the one group of people we’re appealing to, our work can only be as good as that. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What if you didn’t have a target market?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “11 Ways to Out Market the Competition,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Making the water come to you

With a well, you have go to the water. 

You trek an hour
outside of town and lower the bucket into the ground and crank the pump in the
hot sun and then schlep the heavy bucket of water back to your family without
spilling a drop along the way. 

That’s one approach. 

And then there’s plumbing. You
don’t go to the water, the watercomes to
you

What an innovative concept. You take advantage of the natural laws of
gravity and pressure, combined with amazing technologies like pipes and toilets
and sinks and tubs and faucets and valves and fixtures, and within seconds you
have cold water to drink and hot water to bathe, while the dirty water flows far
away from you. Ahhhh

And so, given the
choice, assuming you were fortunate enough to have the choice, how would you prefer
to get your water? By walking to the well, or by turning a knob? 

There’s no
question. Every one of us would choose plumbing. And yet, when it comes to our
businesses, when it comes to communicating our value to customers, most of us
are still walking to the well. We’re still schlepping around town, carrying
empty buckets to the marketplace and cranking the pump until we find customers,
and it’s depleting us. 

Walking to the well is an outdated, labor intensive and
expensive marketing model, and we owe it to ourselves to adopt a more
intelligent approach to finding water for our businesses. 

Perhaps plumbing is
the solution. Perhaps we could exploit the natural laws of business gravity and
pressure. Meaning, we build a value forward platform that leverages the volume of our daily output, multiplied the originality of our
creative voice, over the course of time, raised to the power of consistency,
to
help the market to target us. 

That’s how I’ve run my business for more than a
decade. And every time I watch another colleague of mine schlepping over to the
well, I think to myself, thank god for indoor plumbing. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How could you make the water come to you?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “11 Ways to Out Market the Competition,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Moments of Conception 195: The Business Card Scene from American Psycho

All creativity begins with the moment of conception.

That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here.

Based on my books in The Prolific Series, I’m going to be deconstructing my favorite moments of conception from popular movies. Each post will contain a video clip from a different film, along with a series of lessons we can learn from the characters.

Today’s clip comes from the business card scene from American Psycho:






One good idea
does not a career make.
Patrick is a textbook perfectionist. In fact, after
becoming embarrassed by the superiority of his coworker’s business card, he runs
out murders a homeless man and his dog in an alleyway in a fit of frustrated
rage. Perfectly normal, perfectly
healthy.
Proving, that perfectionists believe, whether they admit it or
not, that there is no level at which they will feel safe putting things into
the world, because there’s always something that’s not right about it. And so, they
end up spending a ton of time perfecting what they do, and doing it over and
over for years until they get it right. I have colleagues who write second,
third, fourth and even fifth editions of their first books. And it drives me
crazy. Because they’re just tilling the same earth. They’re not creating
anything out of whole cloth, they’re just building a time machine and recycling
themselves. That way, their idea never has to come to an end. But the reality
is, you have to end something to get to the next level. As my mentor used to
say, when you let go of what you are, you become what you might be.
Perfectionism, then, isn’t a fear of failure or mistakes or criticism or
rejection, it’s a fear of death. Because everything has a lifecycle. Everything
dies. Even a good idea. And so, our job as creators is to land a good idea,
follow it to success, celebrate the victory, then go back to the workbench and
find another one to land us at an even higher level. Otherwise we’re just
another one hit wonder. Are you working
on one piece, or contributing to an ongoing body of work?

Too busy
feeding the monster.
Keep your overhead low, and you’ll never have to compromise.
Because the risk is minimal. You’ll free up enough financial space to bankroll
your capacity to experiment. And you’ll have the surplus energy to awaken
alternative ways of thinking. Maybe even say no to the work that doesn’t serve
your creative evolution. But live above your means, and you’ll price yourself
out of doing interesting things. Because the risk is too high. You’ll be too
busy feeding the monster. And you’ll expend all your energy keeping the furnace
up to operating temperature. Making it harder and harder to do what you believe
in. When I was just getting started as an entrepreneur, I lived with my parents
for two years, eight months and twenty nine days. Which made it difficult to
get dates, but it certainly kept my overhead insanely low. And so, this
afforded me the opportunity to save money be brave and take chances and hone my
craft and most importantly, fail quickly and quietly. All of which cemented the
foundation from which I was able to acquire, perpetuate and expand new business. Had I
maintained overhead costs of administrative items, office expenses and other
indirect responsibilities, I never would have had the personal or financial
resources available for the direct actions that led to business growth. What is the
cost of the way you’re working?

Talent is not
the measure of man.
This movie perfectly epitomizes the sheer materialism,
narcissism and greed of the eighties culture. But it also fetishizes success.
To the point of pathological obsession. And it’s a reminder that, not matter
what decade it is, we’re all still parishioners at the church of continuous
improvement, worshipping at the altar of better, feeding our addiction to the
pursuit of excellence. And it breaks my heart. Spend five minutes perusing the
bestseller list, and it appears we’ve turned mastery into some kind of fetish.
As if the sole purpose of existence was to become the best at things. I’m
sorry, but there’s more to life than achieving supremacy. What good is putting
in your ten thousand hours if it robs you of the very capacity for joy and
wonder that makes life worth living? What good is barreling down the road to
greatness if you don’t even look around to take in scenery? Talent is not the
measure of man. Enough with all the goddamn pressure and rhetoric on becoming a
world class expert. Just express yourself. Honestly and prolifically. Forget about
being good, forget about being number one, and just focus on creating an
exhibition of love. That’s enough. You’re enough. All yardsticks are illusions. Would you rather be the best at what you do
or the best of who you are?

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What did you learn from this movie clip?

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For a copy of the list called, “11 Ways to Out Market the Competition,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Never the same speech twice. Customized for your audience. Impossible to walk away uninspired.

Now booking for 2016-2017.

Email to inquire about fees and availability. Watch clips of The Nametag Guy in action here!

Test yourself out to your own flight

Often times we feel inadequate because we haven’t found a way to test ourselves yet. 

We don’t have any victories under our belt to garner greater trust in our own resources. 

I started my publishing and consulting company the day I graduated college. But at age twenty two, I had no business model, zero customers and hardly any credentials. Wherever I showed up, I always seemed to be the youngest, dumbest and least experienced person in the room. 

Not to mention, I was still living with my parents and working nights as a valet parker, so my feelings of inadequacy were crippling. 

And so, I spent the first few years being judgmental about my flaws, fixating on everything that was wrong, getting down on myself and blowing every minor incident out of proportion. Until my mentor gave me a powerful piece of advice:

If you don’t feel inadequate at least some of the time, you’re probably not stretching enough. Let your feelings of inadequacy do their job, he said. Allow them to be the driving force of better. 

His advice lit a fire under my ass. It compelled me to test myself for real. And so, I left the nest, quit my part time job and went full time with my career as a writer. Because I knew the only way to quell my feelings of inadequacy was to achieve success on my own steam. 

Campbell explains that everyone has that time in their life when they’ve got to test themselves out to their own flight. To find out if they’re really a match for the task. To see if they possess the courage and knowledge and capacity to win. It’s a critical threshold of the hero’s journey. And while this test doesn’t guarantee that your feelings of inadequacy will evaporate forever, it does afford you a few notches on your victory belt. 

That way, when you reach the next phase of the journey, you can look down and remember, I am equal to this challenge, I trust my resources, I am the person who can do this. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

When was the last time you tested yourself?LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “8 Phrases That Payses to Reduce Emotional Reactivity,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Rent Scott’s Brain is part mentoring, part coaching, part consulting, but all strategy. 

Whether in person, via phone, or another digital channel, Scott works with you both strategically and tactically to achieve your goals. 

His brain will be a source of profound holistic improvement for your business. 

You’ll learn powerful strategies for: 

Ideation. Messaging. Storytelling. Platform creation. Brand development. Content strategy. Inbound marketing. Thought leadership. 

You’ve seen what he could do with a nametag, imagine what he could do for you.

Learn more @ www.rentscottsbrain.com.

Meditation is bringing your humanity into focus

There is no such thing as a bad meditation. 

Anytime you use a concrete life situation to let go of compulsive and competitive thoughts, that’s a meditation. Anytime you pay attention to your inner and outer experiences with acceptance, patience, and compassion, that’s a meditation. Any time you increase activity in your brain connected with empathy and decrease the activation of fear, that’s a meditation. 

There’s no right or wrong way to do it. There’s no time limit, there’s no certification, there’s no mantra and there’s no wardrobe. All meditation requires is that you give your muscles of attention the opportunity for growth. 

Campbell was famously asked what kind of meditation he practiced. Surely someone as obsessed with mysticism and mythology and spirituality would be a regular practitioner, people assumed.

His answer was, I underline sentences. 

That was his meditation. That was his yoga. Joseph rented a shack out in the country and engaged in intensive and rigorous independent study, nine hours a day, every day, for five years straight, and that launched his career as the world’s prominent chronicler of the hero’s journey in mythology. 

In fact, there’s even a library with his name on the door which owns his entire three thousand book library and archive. Visitors can flip through the pages and actually see the key passages he underlined in his meditation. And so, not only can meditation be whatever we want it to be, it can also become the foundation for something that genuinely useful for other people. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How are you giving your muscles of attention the opportunity for growth?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “8 Phrases That Payses to Reduce Emotional Reactivity,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Rent Scott’s Brain is part mentoring, part coaching, part consulting, but all strategy. 

Whether in person, via phone, or another digital channel, Scott works with you both strategically and tactically to achieve your goals. 

His brain will be a source of profound holistic improvement for your business. 

You’ll learn powerful strategies for: 

Ideation. Messaging. Storytelling. Platform creation. Brand development. Content strategy. Inbound marketing. Thought leadership. 

You’ve seen what he could do with a nametag, imagine what he could do for you.

Learn more @ www.rentscottsbrain.com.

Grow up and stop throwing your toys around

A business is a beautiful laboratory for understanding growth. Especially for the entrepreneur. Because when you’re the sole employee of the company, your identity is the company. The enterprise is only as mature as you are. 

And so, as you grow from boy to man, from newbie to veteran, from a kid having a good time to an adult with real responsibilities, you start to revise your long held vision for what your business could and should be. Because you realize, this isn’t a passion project or an expensive hobby or a basement adventure anymore. This is your career. This is your livelihood. 

The question is, now that you’ve earned a sizable chunk of experience and patience and reputation and perspective, how will your business evolve accordingly? What will be the next incarnation of your enterprise, as a natural extension of the person you’re becoming? 

Perhaps experiencing a traumatic life event will challenge you to outgrow your origins and change your brand direction proudly. Perhaps getting married will challenge you to double your fees to decrease labor intensity so you can spend more time with your partner. Perhaps taking on more breadwinning responsibilities will challenge you diversify your income streams and build a more sustainable business model. Perhaps becoming more involved in your local community will challenge you to create a charitable component to your service offerings. 

The point is, every company starts out as a one thing and evolves into another, just like every person starts out as one animal and evolves into another. 

Evolution isn’t an option, it’s an inevitability. It’s the cost of doing business. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

Are you limiting yourself to one vision of your capabilities?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “8 Phrases That Payses to Reduce Emotional Reactivity,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Rent Scott’s Brain is part mentoring, part coaching, part consulting, but all strategy. 

Whether in person, via phone, or another digital channel, Scott works with you both strategically and tactically to achieve your goals. 

His brain will be a source of profound holistic improvement for your business. 

You’ll learn powerful strategies for: 

Ideation. Messaging. Storytelling. Platform creation. Brand development. Content strategy. Inbound marketing. Thought leadership. 

You’ve seen what he could do with a nametag, imagine what he could do for you.

Learn more @ www.rentscottsbrain.com.

A real and vulnerable step towards approachable care

For many patients, the worst part of the doctor visit is getting on the scale. 

Weighing themselves in front of another person can cause a high degree of fear, anxiety, shame or discomfort. What’s more, confronting that dreaded number can become a trigger unhealthy, obsessive or compulsive behaviors, especially for people with eating disorders. 

That’s why certain people will decline the weigh in portion of their appointment. Because as a medical patient, it’s part of their bill of rights. When prompted with the scale, they can simply ask to skip that step. Or they can call the office ahead of time and alert their doctor. Or they can weigh themselves at home and use that number instead. 

Some patients will even proactively tell the nurse, no thanks, it’s not relevant to my visit

Good for them. Each of these examples are empowering boundary setting tools that help reduce the patient’s experience of anxiety. By stating their needs around the weighing process, they are taking a very real and potentially vulnerable step towards true self care. 

In fact, when I think back to certain doctor visits, I wish I would have had the courage to decline the scale. Of course, doctors still have to do their jobs. They took an oath to do no harm. And in many cases, body weight is a critical factor in effective treatment. 

The question is, what happens when a medical professional needs to obtain a patient’s weight, but doesn’t want to create an uncomfortable moment during the visit? 

They ask patients to step on the scale backwards. Facing out. With no number in sight. That way, the doctor gets the information she needs, and the patient avoids a potentially stressful experience. Everybody wins. 

The first time I heard about this trend, I was astounded. Step on the scale backwards. It’s a simple, easy, respectful and powerful moment of patient care. And there’s a lesson each of us can apply to our own lives. 

How might we make communication a relaxing experience? How might we honor people’s boundaries in a memorable way? 

That’s the hallmark of approachable service. And it scales.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How are you allowing your customers to have the best of both worlds?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “8 Phrases That Payses to Reduce Emotional Reactivity,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

Rent Scott’s Brain is part mentoring, part coaching, part consulting, but all strategy. 


Whether in person, via phone, or another digital channel, Scott works with you both strategically and tactically to achieve your goals. 


His brain will be a source of profound holistic improvement for your business. 


You’ll learn powerful strategies for: 


Ideation. Messaging. Storytelling. Platform creation. Brand development. Content strategy. Inbound marketing. Thought leadership. 


You’ve seen what he could do with a nametag, imagine what he could do for you.



Learn more @ www.rentscottsbrain.com.

Shame isn’t to be resisted, but reinvested

I heard an interview with a screenwriter who admitted his primary tool for productivity was shame. To lock himself into a daily framework that would make him feel guilty for wasting time. 

Often times, quite literally. Adam said he frequently did his best writing in hotel rooms. And his thinking was, if I’m paying for a room, just to be in it to a write, and I’m blowing it off to play video games, that’s really pathetic. Because essentially he’s just wasted his time and money when he should have been working. 

And so, those feelings have positive implications for his productivity. They make him feel bad about his behavior, not about himself, and the guilt and shame and embarrassment create the necessary friction to motivate choice and change. 

Perhaps shame isn’t to be resisted, but reinvested. 

Jung famously called shame a soul eating emotion, and that may be true, but there’s no reason to back away from shame as a useful strategy for making things happen. 

Richter’s research on the positive workplace aspects of negative emotions found that that managers and employees can help channel workplace shame into creativity, if the situation is handled skillfully and sensitively. Turns out, ashamed employees are more likely to engage in creative activity as a way to restore their positive self image. 

They can convert seemingly negative energy into novel and useful ideas. 



LET ME ASK YA THIS…

How might you develop a healthier, more productive relationship with shame?

LET ME SUGGEST THIS…

For a copy of the list called, “8 Phrases That Payses to Reduce Emotional Reactivity,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com


Rent Scott’s Brain is part mentoring, part coaching, part consulting, but all strategy. 


Whether in person, via phone, or another digital channel, Scott works with you both strategically and tactically to achieve your goals. 


His brain will be a source of profound holistic improvement for your business. 


You’ll learn powerful strategies for: 


Ideation. Messaging. Storytelling. Platform creation. Brand development. Content strategy. Inbound marketing. Thought leadership. 


You’ve seen what he could do with a nametag, imagine what he could do for you.



Learn more @ www.rentscottsbrain.com.

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