*This is my “I’m a writer” picture. ;)

I’m in the process of writing a fictional novel, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do. The only problem and the reason I’ve been putting it off for so long is that I never knew where to start. I wanted my characters to be perfect, my story to be riveting. As is the case with so many things in my life, perfection became the only thing I could focus on and my ideas never materialized, because I couldn’t perfect them in my head.

Perfection is a great excuse to never get things done. Whether it’s a new business idea, a movie script, a novel, your next blog post or the answer to clean energy, if you set out to be perfect from Day 1, then you are setting yourself up for failure. Perfection is a process and you never start out at perfect. Every great athlete trained for years before ever getting close to perfection. Every great writer knows that good writing is re-writing.

This will be a quick post, as the point I’m getting at is simple. There is no excuse not to do something. You don’t have to be perfect the first time around. Just know that every time you try to do something and fail, you’re one step closer to getting it right. I finally took the plunge and just started writing my novel. I don’t know what it is about, yet, but after a few hours of dribble, I can tell you that certain elements are coming to light and I’m confident that a few more hours of dribble and I might even have a clue as to what direction my story is heading.

Whatever it is you’ve been putting off, today should be the day you decide to go for it. Just remember to learn and build off of your mistakes. If you can do that, then perfection is something that will come in time. For now, just throw out some dribble, see what sticks and go from there. If you’re having fun, then you’re on the right path.

Writing is re-writing. And “writing” is a metaphor for whatever it is you want to do. Just do it!

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While I was playing golf today (pictured above…yeah, I play casual Rambo golf), one of the people I was playing with complimented me and called me one of Austin’s movers and shakers. WOW! That made my head about as big as a blimp and whether they were just blowing smoke up my rear or being serious, it got me thinking what a real (someone other than myself) mover and shaker is made up of and how could I better become one?

Personality
First things first, I have never met a mover and shaker that did not have a magical quality about their personality. Getting ahead has always been easiest when people genuinely like you. So, how do you develop a winning personality? Well, I guess a lot of it is instinct, but there are a few things that will put you ahead of those lacking any personality whatsoever, or worse those having a bad personality. Here are a few tips that I think help any negotiation, relationship or conversation start on the right track:

1. Look people in the eyes. People want to know that you are sincere and by looking someone in the eyes, they can tell if you are being genuine or not.
2. Be genuine and sincere. There’s no point in faking this. Sure, you can pretend for a while, but eventually you’ll be found out and everything you’ve worked towards will fly out the window. Lose your credibility and you’re screwed.
3. Be friendly. It’s not hard to put a smile on and it makes everyone in the room more comfortable. Smiles are contagious and it’s hard to be anything but happy when you’re wearing one. Try it. Just putting on a smile for ten seconds will make you and everyone around you feel better.
4. Don’t come on too strong. We get it, you’re the life of the party, or the funny guy, or the hot shot at whatever you do. But, that doesn’t mean we want to hear about it all the time. Nobody likes someone who brags about themselves too much. Let others brag about you and spend your time bragging about the people around you. They’ll appreciate the compliment and it will give them an opportunity to talk about themselves a little. People love to talk about themselves. Set someone up to talk about something they are passionate about and they will love you, too.

Work Ethic
Personality can only get you so far, though. Sure, in high school and college it was easy to skate by on personality alone, but in the real world, you might actually have to do a little work. In the beginning you’ll need to work around the clock, that’s just the way it goes. But, if you’re smart, things will get easier and easier for you. Just remember, that you’re work ethic is not necessarily the number of hours you put in on any given project, but how well you manage the time and assets at your disposal. You don’t want to work 16 hour days, after all, what time would that leave you for networking and building new business relationships? The key is to hire people more talented than you and then become the best boss they’ve ever had. Work hard and get to the point where you can afford to put together a talented team. Don’t skimp on your hires, because they are an extension of who you are as a person and a company. It is much better to hire someone with infinite talent and pay them three times the average salary, than to hire three people who are unmotivated, just to save some money. The talented employee will be the greater asset to your team. Be a fun, fair and dedicated boss and show your employees that you appreciate them helping you reach your ultimate goal. As they help you get closer, reward them and thank them. Work ethic, like smiling, is contagious. If you work hard and are passionate about what you are doing, then your employees will be as well. Now, you can take over the world together.

Style
Many would argue that style doesn’t matter as long as the quality of work is exceptional. Obviously, quality of work is the most important thing to worry about, but when it comes to taking on new clients, style goes a long way. In business, first impressions can make or break you. As you are out on the town networking, you never know who you are going to meet and you only get one chance to meet them the first time. I’m not saying you have to be dressed like you walked out of a GQ Magazine every time you go out. But, it certainly wouldn’t hurt. The key is confidence and confidence is its own style. If you can be 120% confident in you and your company while wearing jeans and a T-shirt, then that is exactly what you should wear. But, big clients want to see that their money is going to be handled responsibly and that 2004 5K Fun Run T-shirt with the cut off sleeves doesn’t necessarily scream confidence. The same goes for your office. An interior decorator doesn’t cost that much money and it is well worth the investment. It’s hard to close a $100,000 (much less a million dollar) deal while your client is sitting in a folding chair you bought at a church yard sale. Perceived value can go a long way.

Can’t afford fancy office furniture, or worse, can’t afford an office yet? Not a problem. Do what I used to do and find a swanky conference room downtown that you can rent out for a nominal fee. Most big office buildings have a reservation schedule for their conference room, and you can usually work out some sort of fee by the hour to rent it out. In nicer buildings, the rental will even come with a secretary that can take drink and food orders and take your forwarded phone calls for the duration of the rental. This is an inexpensive way to impress clients and put them at ease from the get-go. You want each potential client listening to your pitch, not wondering if the water stains on the floor were an artistic choice. For really special/important clients, I suggest finding a conference room that looks out over a body of water. Trust me, clients like this.

Networking
Great! You’re sporting a winning personality, putting in 10+ hour days with a staff that’s doing the same and you’ve developed impeccable style, now what? Now we need to round up some business, shake a few hands and land some clients. This is where networking comes in to play. Whatever city I happen to be in, I like to find the local rag paper and find out what the recommended or popular events for any given night might be. Events designated as industry networking events are obviously the best, but any event that you feel will draw a crowd will suffice. When you arrive at the event, open a bar tab and if you can afford it, tip the bartender twenty or so dollars right off the bat. This will assure that you take precedence over everyone else at the bar. Nothing is more embarrassing than trying to buy a prospect client (or worse, beautiful young lady) a drink, only to have the bartender completely ignore you. Now, make your way around the room and meet people. For more information on how to network, you can read this post that I wrote a while back. Perfect! Now make sure you have some business cards (the more creative you get with these, the better) and more importantly, make sure you get a business card from everyone you talk to over the course of the night. I like to make little notes on each card so I remember what we talked about, then when I get home or the next day, I will send a personal email to each person I spoke with the night before. If I feel they could be a potential client, I make a personal phone call, as well, to request a meeting where we could get to know each other better and decide if our two companies might be a fit with one another. You can word this however you like, but if you can afford it, people love a free lunch. Just remember to save those receipts!

Time Management
Finally, the greatest thing you can ever learn to do is manage and use your time efficiently. The typical mover and shaker will work 10+ hours a day, 7 days a week. But, that doesn’t mean you’re always in the office. Much of that time will be spent drinking (I mean, networking) and pitching new clients. When you are in the office, though, it is important to create a list of things you need to do for the day and then prioritize them in order of importance. Learning to delegate to your staff or project team is the most important thing you can do in freeing up your own time. Remember, if you hired well, then your staff is more than capable of handling anything you throw at them. So, determine what chores need your personal attention and then delegate everything else out to your project team. Hold weekly, or bi-weekly meetings with your staff and make sure everyone is on the same page. Let them know how you’d like to see something handled and then ask if anyone has a better suggestion. A lot of the time someone else will have a better idea than you. Congratulations, you put together a great team!

The next thing you know, Forbes, People, GQ and Time will all be knocking on your door. Have your butler politely seat your admiring guests, you’ll be downstairs in a moment.

How did you become a mover and a shaker? What advice would you give to someone trying to achieve that status?

P.S. Yes, that is a Softball Tournament t-shirt that I’m wearing in the above picture (very similar to the 5K Fun Run shirt I was talking about). Hey, I never said I was a mover and a shaker, someone else did. I’m going to call that t-shirt, “dressing to your client’s tastes.” What I wear, drink and how I play on the golf course varies wildly when I’m meeting with an Alt. Rock band manager, as opposed to the creative director of a national agency. Now, if I could only find that pink polo!

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I’m a product of therapy. From my freshman year in high school, up until my Junior year, I went to therapy at least once a week and most of the time it was twice a week. Therapy is what parents turn to when they don’t know what else to do. It’s a way to say, “We give up,” without really saying it, “Let’s turn him over to a professional.” Does therapy work? Sure. But, it can take years. I’ve always thought that therapy was a good way for parents to feel like they weren’t failures. If a therapist can’t do any better than the parents did, then they know it’s not their fault. But, of course, if the therapist helps in any way, shape or fashion, then they can take all the credit for taking their kid to a therapist in the first place.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I had terrific parents, who did a great job at raising me. The problem was that I was the most hellacious child anyone could ever get stuck with. It wasn’t that I was inappropriate in public, or too much of a drunk, or on drugs. It was just that I questioned the nature of everything. If you couldn’t explain something to me in a fashion that would please the Supreme Court, then your explanation, as to why I couldn’t do that something, fell on deaf ears. I did what I wanted, to the detriment of everything and everyone around me. I was selfish and in a way, I think I still am. I refuse to pick a career, I jump from project to project, hobby to hobby, profession to profession without thinking about anyone else, but myself. I’m in the process of discovering what it is I really love and damn anyone that tries to hinder that process! So, what does any of this have to do with therapy? Good question.

If you ask me, therapy is a really expensive way to talk to someone that will listen to you and give you a little perspective and an unbiased opinion of what is happening in your life, as they see it. Isn’t that what friends are for? Personally, I’ve gotten better advice from writing letters to strangers, at random, in the phone book. I did this for a year and got so much great advice that I couldn’t keep up the massive amount of correspondence any longer. Before you consider therapy, try writing all of your problems in a letter to five complete strangers at random in the phone book. Trust me, you’ll save a lot of money.

So, does therapy work? Absolutely! But, it only works if you want it to work. It’s one of those “help me, help you” situations. Therapy is more about you wanting to help yourself, than it is about you wanting a therapist to help you. It’s merely a way for you to trick yourself into thinking that you’re in good hands, thus you can completely open up and feel safe. The thing is, if you would just open up and feel safe with a trusted friend, colleague or random stranger, the results would probably be the same. You are the only one that can help yourself and the problems in your life. All you have to do is convince yourself that you are in control.

That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? We, as a society, are so bad at taking responsibility for our own actions. We go to therapists, churches, psychics, etc. so that we can have a crutch; someone else to throw our burdens onto. But, couldn’t we just as easily release the weight of our burdens into thin air? Aren’t all of the above, just a way for us to convince ourselves that it is possible for us to achieve great things? I don’t want to raise any theological debates (but, I’m certainly open to them), but don’t we rely on an awful lot of metaphors to convince us that things are going to get better? Is that a bad thing?

I don’t think it is. I respect and encourage members of any religion, denomination, mindset, or background. So, long as what they are doing is working for them. If you’re seeing results from therapy; then therapy was probably a good idea. If a weekly discipleship group makes you happy and you find comfort in the Lord, then why on earth would you stop going? For me, I feel like I can skip all the metaphors and get directly to the source. I love my life and even when it sucks, I know that it will instantly get better as soon as I turn towards some more positive light. I don’t need metaphors or psychobabble. When I feel down, I put on a funny movie, read a good book or have a long conversation with a friend that I love.

No matter what your therapy is, aren’t they all based on the same principle? Sometimes, it is nice to know that someone will listen to you without judging a word that you say. Getting good advice is an amazing thing. I’m not saying that getting advice is a bad thing. Far from! I would be no where if I hadn’t met some of the most fantastic and helpful people at exactly the right time and place. But, what I am asking is should we really be paying $150.00 an hour to talk to a complete stranger? Did 4 or 5 years of schooling really warrant that hourly rate?

What do you think is the best way to deal with problems? How do you handle stress in your life? Do you reach out to a therapist, a friend, a congregation? Like I said, there’s no wrong answer. If it works for you, then continue doing it. I’ve never had much luck with therapists, unless you consider learning I don’t need a therapist a breakthrough. But, what works for one person, may not work for another. Why do we have to chastise people who get their advice from different sources than our own? Are we not completely different people? Wouldn’t it make sense that some of us would feel more comfortable with advice from one source, while another might find great truth in some completely opposite form? At the core level, isn’t most advice a spin or twist on a few universal truths?

Why do we feel so obligated to make others think the way that we do? Why can’t we all just do what makes us happy? I’m going to ask my therapist about this when I visit her next week. ; )

What do you think?

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I’m walking down a closed off Sixth Street, it’s 6pm and the street is packed and smells of heat dried booze and Kabobalicious wrappers. I’m already deep into my seventh or eighth drink of the day and trying to maneuver through the sweaty mob without ever looking up from my iPhone. They say that when you lose one of your senses that the others are heightened to compensate for this loss. I have lost my ability to take my eyes off of my iPhone, which means that my body has naturally taught itself to parade through a crowd without ever looking up. This is South by Southwest and there is a lot of business to be done. And, of course, by “business” I mean “networking” and by “networking” I mean having an excuse to get drunk with every major record label and production company executive in the nation, all within the course of a week. Organizing this kind of networking booze and schmooze is no easy feat, which is why I’m simultaneously having 30-50 conversations at the same time via text message, while I feverishly enter party times and venues into my iCalendar. The iPhone has changed the way I live my life. And I’m not just talking about raising the efficiency of my networking skills.

It’s 2am on a Friday night and while many of the bars are closing down, the ones I want to go to are just now opening. That’s the advantage of attending an event with after hours parties all sponsored by Red Bull. The down side being that injecting that much Red Bull into your body in so short a period of time can make your texting thumbs a little jumpy and the iPhone starts predicting words that you might have wished it didn’t. I’m sure Steve Jobs will figure this one out soon enough. As I pound Red Bull number six of the day, I’m texting back in forth with a lovely young lady I met the night before. Of course, she and her friends, like anyone else addicted to fun, are headed to yet another Red Bull party on the East End. We’ve been back and forth in text convo for the past 14 hours and while I’ve only met her once, and I never rearranged my schedule to do so, I feel like I now know her better than anyone. In saying this, I could be right. You see, the thing with falling in love via different forms of social media is that it is easy to get right to the point of things. When you have a few seconds to choose your words, questions and answers wisely, then getting to core information like birth date, place and time are questions that don’t seem inappropriate at all. Of course, this can then be plugged into an Astrology chart reader via Safari and voila! You now know that this is the person you’ll spend the rest of your life with, the stars have predestined it.

Okay, so perhaps its not exactly like that, but it’s similar. If I meet someone at a bar and we communicate the way that people traditionally do, then it could take me months before I figure out if that person is even someone that I want to hang out with, much less fall in love. But, if I implement a little text message Q&A, then without wasting any time whatsoever, I can ultimately learn as much about a person as I want to, or as they are willing to share. Over the course of 14 hours, I was able to learn more about this particular girl then I knew about previous girls that I had dated for months. Because of text messaging, I was able to get ALL of the formalities and “Hi, how are ya’s?” out of the way and move directly into the “So, we’re pretty compatible…” stage of our relationship. Is this the future of dating? Are text messages the new love letter?

I like to consider myself quite the romantic and I’ve been known to write my fair share of love letters in the past. That’s just something that I enjoy. But, in the past, even via mediums like email, Facebook and MySpace, it still takes a long time to get to know someone well. God forbid I go to the grandiose gesture of hand writing all of those letters, it would take me years to really get to know someone and in the letter format, it’s way too easy to build a romantic caricature of yourself. Which means, when you finally do hang out with this person, they aren’t who you thought they were a lot of the time. With text messaging that is also true, but not nearly to the same extent. Text messaging allows that you are much more candid, but still comfortable. I can’t spend an hour carefully crafting my answers in a text message, or I could, but it wouldn’t make for much of a conversation. Text messaging takes all of the positive things of writing a love letter and all of the positive things of getting to know someone and combines the two so that everyone can decide if they really like each other in a time period that is much more conducive to our run and gun society.

So, can you fall in love via a text message? I think I might have already fallen in love several times through text messages. But, if nothing else, I have certainly created a much stronger bond with people in a much shorter period of time. And, at the same time, I have opened up a very efficient line of communication. Over the past month, I have started communicating with many clients via text message and find it to be much more efficient than email or phone conversations. Text messaging has in a matter of weeks completely streamlined the way that I do business and interact with clients. Of course, there is a time and place for face to face meetings and phone conferences and MySpace and Facebook. But, I’ve been amazed at how much and how quickly information can be communicated through a simple text message. In under five text messages, I can communicate the equivalent of ten back and forth emails and completely cut out any of the fat. Text messaging makes business and personal interactions lean, which allows me more time to put towards providing my clients with more value, or falling in love with strangers.

Send me a text and find out what I’m talking about first hand…512.785.9160.

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I’m really tired of feeling like I’m censoring myself on this blog. I feel like the reason that I write three posts and then take a month off is that, like I’ve said before, I’m not writing what I want to write; I’m writing what I think people want to hear. Well, that game is over, because like it or not, social media is not the only thing I’m interested in. I started writing about it because it was a fun buzz word and I use many different forms of social media in my everyday life. But, that is just a delivery tool to get the message out about the things I’m really interested in.

Over the past five years I have been the Marketing Manager of a series of health clubs, gotten my real estate license and acted as a Realtor, handled the marketing for a series of apartment complexes in Austin and an apartment locating firm. Since starting my own company I have acted as a music video, short film, documentary and commercial producer and writer. I am actively seeking work as an actor and have starred in a 14-episode national campaign for Toyota, hosted MTV’s TRL, been on MTV’s Room Raiders, been in a promo spot for the MTV Movie Awards, starred in six short films, one feature film and am now shooting a web series that I was cast in, which is being scouted by FOX. Of course, most recently, I have acted as a social media consultant for companies large and small. And my future plans consist of shopping a book that I hope to finish writing by the end of April.

Am I saying all of this because I want you guys to be impressed? Not at all. I’m just saying that there’s a lot more going around in my brain than social media and from now on this blog is going to reflect that. I know. I know. I keep promising to let you guys in on the rest of my life and thus far, I have failed miserably at even letting you in on the slightest part of it. But, this time is for real.

So, stay tuned and hold on, because as you’ll learn, I like to work hard, but I party even harder. If you’re uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the inner workings of a 24-year old trying to find himself, then you might be shocked or surprised. But, if you’re along for the ride, then let’s grab a drink and get started!

P.S. I’ve failed miserably at putting together my own web show. I really just don’t have the time or patience for it. But, what I do love to do is talk and hear my own voice. If you have a web show, big or small, I’d love to be on it. I’ve gotten several emails this week of people saying they couldn’t find guests for their show. Well, here you go! If you’ve got a web show, get in contact with me and I promise I will be more than happy to come on and talk about anything, even if I know nothing about it. Think about it…could be fun. ;)

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