Category: Productivity

Build Your Career by Building Your Audience

Although not specifically directed at the TV biz, this article is loaded with tips for corporate creatives in all fields:

Dammit, muncher, we're not talking about this kind of audience - are we?
Dammit, muncher, we’re not talking about this kind of audience – are we?

by Sean Blanda

Tell me if this has ever happened to you: A well-known person in your field loses their job with impressive company X. Deep, deep inside you feel a vague sense of guilty satisfaction. They weren’t that talented anyway, you tell yourself. This will clear room for more up-and-coming talent, you say.

But then weeks later when you’ve already mentally moved on, you read that well-known person has landed on their feet, yet again, with a new job at impressive company Y. No schadenfreude for you. So what is that well-known person’s secret? It’s not (always) talent. No, the thing that keeps creative people employed and in full control of their destiny, isn’t some hidden genius. It is the ability to build and serve an audience. Cynically, it’s much harder to quietly let someone go if their 4,000 Twitter followers will hear about it. But practically for those of us whose who operate behind the scenes or aren’t the “face” of our department or company, an audience is the best job insurance possible.

Consider the plight of the person hiring creative talent. Or the person hiring anyone, really. They have a marketing campaign for a client meant to build customers. Or maybe they are responsible for a team that does not have a ton of headcount to work with. While the job market is risky, those doing the hiring are risk averse—VERY risk averse. read article

LB: Envy – Deadly Sin with a Positive Effect?

by Larry Brody

Just discovered the above video on the interwebs and definitely believe it’s worth sharing.

One of the dirty little secrets I’ve learned over the years is that many a showbiz biggie has gotten a boost from at least one of the so-called “7 Deadly Sins.” Whenever I say this, most people’s brains automatically zoom right to the sexier sins and the casting couch. But in my experience the most helpful sin has proven to be envy. It’s helped some of the most – and, yeah, least – talented biggies in films, TV, music, et al over some otherwise impossible hurdles.

Sorry if I’m bursting any bubbles. (But you’ll thank me later.) read article

Peggy Bechko’s World: Smarten Up, Write in Longhand

cursive

by Peggy Bechko

Writing By Hand Can Make You Smarter.

True?

Not true? read article

Stop Censoring Your Creative Work!!!

“To thine own self be true,” remember? Or as Our Beloved Larry, LB himself has said, “If your work doesn’t present the world as you see it, then you’re betraying not only yourself but your art.

Or, to put it a bit more helpfully:

braindamageby Matthew E. May

It’s one thing to reject the ideas of others…we do that almost automatically. But when we reject, deny, stifle, squelch, strike, silence and otherwise put ideas of our own to death, sometimes even before they’re born, it is the highest crime against creativity. It’s an act of pure tragic mindlessness. I often think of this self-censoring as “ideacide,” because it entails the voluntary shutdown of the imagination, the long-effects of which eventually kill off our natural curiosity and creativity. read article

Next Time Someone Wants You to Create for Free, Consider This

Good advice for not only writers but everybody who, well, who works, actually:

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A fine piece of work in progress from Robert W. Tinsley (artist, writer, TVWriter™ friend, bon vivant!)

by Andrew Griffiths

We all have to deal with people wanting us to do things for free. There are those who blatantly ask for it, those who try to negotiate on price because that’s what they do and those who are just plain cheap.

What does it mean when someone wants us to do things for free or cheap? It means they don’t value what it is that we do. And in some ways, that is kind of insulting. Over the years the projects that have caused me the biggest grief have always been the free ones or the cheap ones. read article