Category Archives: smArtist thoughts

Embrace the irrational! Abandon logic!

Something useful I’ve learned in the last few months is that you should learn to be strategically irrational. This has benefited me in two particularly helpful ways and I’ve incorporated these into absolutes in my life:

1) You should never have a reason to be happy.

2) You should never have a reason to be confident.

It’s useful for a person to be happy, right? People should be happy. They shouldn’t have to live in misery or be unhappy, ever. People function better when they’re happy and they get more done.

Likewise, it’s beneficial to be confident in yourself. If you doubt yourself, you don’t try as hard and you can’t get nearly as much done. It’s also harder to be a leader if you’re not confident in yourself, because people can’t see the ideal in you that makes them want to follow you. Who would follow someone that doesn’t know where they’re going?

You don’t need a reason to breathe to keep doing it, do you? So why do you need a reason to be happy or confident? If they’re critical to your survival, why do you need a reason to do them?

If you can accept those two ideas, then you’ll agree that being happy and being confident are pretty instrumental to success. So it’s pretty simple when you get down to it and accept the possiblity of suspending logic and reason. 🙂
Now that leads to the question: What can you do to safeguard those ideas and ensure that you’ll always be happy and confident?

Don’t have a reason for being that way.

Sure, it’d be nice if you could know objectively that you are a big freakin’ badass, that you have 1.5 billion compelling reasons to be happy and every reason in the universe to be confident in your abilities. But that makes them fallible.

The root of it is the fact that for every REASON for being that you can comprehend, there is an objection that can arise that will counter it.

It’s easier not being happy and not being confident, and your mind will conjure up whatever reason it can to subvert you and make you doubt yourself. For every reason you have, you will find one more objection to squash it.

If you can accept the freaky ideal of not having a reason for being happy, you can stop those objections dead in their tracks.

Think about it — if you’re happy and confident, and you have absolutely no reason for it, and it’s not based in reality at all, but you cling to it nevertheless — what on earth could possibly dislodge that belief? What could make you stop being happy? What outer or inner force could convince you to stop being confident? You can be impervious to reasoning yourself out of good habits.

It’s a vitally useful stronghold of the mind to

1) Define what qualities are important to you in order to succeed, and

2) Adopt what measures are necessary to safeguard those against any potential adversary, including yourself.

I’m the biggest fan of logic and reason that you could possibly imagine, and coming to understand this entire message that I’ve given involved turning my entire world upside down and doubting everything I’d come to know in my whole life… but it was one of the most important things I’ve ever done, and it’s so goddamned important that I needed to tell other people about it.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

If you need a reason to be happy or confident, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

Productivity tip #3: Remove distracting stuff from your field of view.

One of the things I’ve found to be the biggest hindrance of concentration and productivity at work is distracting stuff in my field of view.

It could be a lot of things… action figures, art books, notebooks, meeting notes, any gewgaw or knick-knack the mind can conjure. But every single item in direct or peripheral view of your workspace is a potential distraction.

I’m not saying you should get rid of everything on your desk. I’m saying you should move it all out of your immediate field of view while you work. If you’re supposed to be focusing on your monitor, move anything that can draw your eyes away from it.

Ideally, when you’re looking at what you’re supposed to be looking at, you’ll see two hands, a keyboard and a monitor and nothing more. You’ll have to turn completely and inconveniently around to start distracting yourself from the job at hand.

Identify the things you’re supposed to do that are important to you, and identify the things that distract you from that. Don’t mix them. Put them in to separate places and make it a discouraging amount of work to switch between those two classes of activity (productive and unproductive).  If you can raise the level of difficulty in engaging in unproductive work, you’ll be more likely to maintain productivity.

Harness your natural talents and don’t rely too much on your simple will to succeed and be productive, because that can falter. Make it idiot-proof. Imagine yourself at your worst and laziest, and erect barriers to unproductivity for THAT guy. Then be your best. That’ll ensure that even at your worst, you can’t help but do your best. Don’t leave that idiot a way out, and stack the odds in favor of making yourself proud. 🙂

Productivity Tip #2: Remove icons from Quicklaunch bar.

You know the Quicklaunch bar next to your start menu on the taskbar? Remove your browser icon from that. The easier you make your browser to access, the more often you’ll access it. Delete that icon and leave it on your desktop, or, better yet, keep it nestled deeply in your Start menu so you have to WORK to find it. The more work it is to goof off, the less likely you are to do it. Time saved!

This is one of the best and most useful things I’ve ever done. I do less than half the web browsing I used to, simply because I made it harder to goof off than to focus on my job.

Sure, you can be super self-disciplined all the time.. or you can just understand that you will ALWAYS inevitably go for the path of least resistance, and if you can make it harder to goof off than work, you’ll end up working. It’s a fraction of the effort. People goof off because it’s easier. The solution: Make it harder. You’ve harnessed human nature and the problem is solved.

Overachievement – Buy this book if you want to succeed.

I’ve found an absolutely amazing book that I’ve been rolling around and splashing in for the last few weeks. It’s a book that presents a very compelling argument that goal setting, relaxation, visualization, stress management, and flow are all total bullshit that will hurt you. 🙂

It’s called Overachievement: The New Model for Exceptional Performance.It’s basically a book that takes a look at the superstars of the world in sports, business, and politics and finds out how they think. It’s written by a psychologist that studies these people for a living and draws conclusions from that. It craps all over conventional wisdom and presents a lot of damned convincing reasons for it.

It’s one my top three best books ever. It totally grooved along with things I’d already thought but hadn’t put into words, and taught me a lot more besides. Ever since reading it, my attitude toward work and life has completely taken a 180 for the better. I’ve been happier and more productive ever since, and I’m still not even completely finished with it. 🙂

Basically, if you want to kick ass and be truly great, follow this book’s advice to the letter. I’ve NEVER found a book with so much incredibly potent and useful information.

Here’s an excerpt from it that totally blew me away. It explains how some of the traditional “tells” of stress and anxiety that people think are bad are actually your body stepping up to help you focus on kicking ass, on a physiological level!

—- EXCERPT BEGIN —-

Being a clutch player means thriving under pressure–welcoming it, enjoying it, making it work to your advantage. I can teach you how to do this, but first you will have to retrain some instincts, and that will require understanding two things:

1) Everything that your body does to you when the pressure is on is good for performance.

2) Pressure is different from anxiety; nervousness is different from worry.

Butterflies Are Normal

What is really happening to the body? Like almost every animal, humans have bimodal sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems that have evolved over thousands of years. One stimulates the heart, lungs, eyes, and muscles; the other suppresses them. One prompts basic bodily functions such as digestion and processing water and waste; the other shuts these systems off. They work in tandem. The sympathetic system is crucial for finding food, being on the lookout for dangerous predators, and defending against enemies, while the parasympathetic system keeps the body fueled, warm, working efficiently, and prepared for reproduction. When one turns up, the other turns down, and vice versa.

Under pressure, the brain switches the body to red alert. This activates the sympathetic nervous system, and energy is redistributed from parasympathetic tasks to maximize sympathetic tasks:

– The mouth goes dry. This is sometimes called “cotton mouth” because the body is channeling effort into tasks more important than producing saliva. We don’t need extra spit to sink a free throw at the buzzer.

– Butterflies in your stomach. The sensation of “butterflies” occurs from excess stomach acid because the digestive system is shutting down. During a major presentation to the board, who’s eating lunch?

– Stomach cramps. This is because the stomach lining is shrinking. THe body has stopped producing bile and is trying to get rid of any remaining food.

– Sweat flows. This is a safety mechanism to prevent the body from overheating. Even an audition for the New York Philharmonic is not worth boiling vital organs.

– Hands, feet, or knees begin shaking. That’s the body sending faster motor signals from the cortex through the motor neurons out to the extremeties, which will be running, throwing, illustrating, acting, keyboarding.

– Faster heartbeat. The heart beats faster to get more blood through the arteries, carrying nutrients and oxygen to the working muscles and brain cells so they can perform at a higher level.

– The eyes dilate. And doing so makes vision more acute.

– The mind races. this enables you to process a greater amount of information in a shorter amount of time.

All of these adaptations are the body’s way of making us perform more efficiently when we’re under the gun. When humans face stress, we are hardwired to respond favorably. Our bodies know just waht to do. Quicker hands and feet, more oxygen and fuel to our muscles, greater visual acuity, increased mental capacity–sounds like a pretty good formula for coming out on top, doesn’t it? So whether you are running the hundred-yard dash in the Olympics, trying to get one hudndred stitches into a patient’s heart within a minute, getting your fingers to play the allegro in a Mozart violin concerto, or pulling off the biggest sale of your career, why would you want to be more relaxed?

Relaxation teaches your muscles to lose tone, your brain to be passive. You cannot win gold medals without muscle tone, nor can you perform at your utmost with other parts of your sympathetic nervous system switched to “slow.” Most people experience fight-or-flight symptoms and BAM!–their performance is overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety. But arousal and anxiety are not the same thing. You simply have been conditioned or taught to treat them as equals. They’re not.

– The physical symptoms of fight-or-flight are what the human body has learned over thousands of years to operate more efficiently and at the highest level.
– Anxiety is a cognitive INTERPRETATION of that physical response.

Most people have come to believe that anxiety and stress go hand in hand. That assumption, however, is dead wrong. Stress need not produce anxiety. Once Bill Russell, a famous athlete, figured out the connection between his body’s physiological preparation and his performance, he actually was relieved to be throwing up before the big game because he recognized it as evidence that he was ready to play his best. Butterflies, cotton mouth, and a pounding heart make the finest performers smile–the smile of a person with an ace up their sleeve. Fight-or-flight symptoms comprise the extra juice they’ll need to go up against the best, so they welcome it. Many CEOs have confided to me that what they love most about their jobs are the aspects that make them the most nervous. They definitely would agree with Tiger Woods, who has often said, “The day I’m not nervous stepping onto the first tee–that’s the day I quit.”

All the great athletes, musicians, actors, doctors and business executives I’ve talked to seem to think the same way. So why does everyone else identify the body’s sympathetic response to high-stakes situations with fear of failure? The confusion tends to stem from childhood, almost as an accident. Here’s what happens: It is the first time you have to deliver in public. You are eight years old, playing in your first Little League game, giving your first recital, appearing in your first play, or delivering that debut book report from memory right before hte class. Your body goes nuts, registering all the classic fight-or-flight symptoms. On some level (and it’s usually not a higher cerebral level because, hey, you’re eight and you don’t process things that way yet) you are wondering, “What is happening ot me?”

Then you proceed to perform poorly.

You strike out three times and let the ball roll right between your legs, you blow your lines, you forget the next note, you blank on what the book was about. The next time you are called upon to perform in public, your body still reacts to the pressure, but you think, “The last time I felt this way, I was so awful that the other kids laughed at me.” Before you know it, you have attributed poor performacne to the body’s natural response under pressure. You essentially instructed yourself that the root of your problem was your body’s effort to help you perform to your utmost.

Trouble was, you didn’t really have any “utmost.” You performed badly because you simply were not yet very skilled. You were only eight years old! Your teacher probably didn’t teach you how to prepare your speech; you hadn’t practiced enough with your instrument. Some of the greatest athletes in history were lousy at age eight–or much older. (Remember: Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team sophomore year.)

Thus begins a vicious cycle between physical reactions to pressure and high anxiety. For the rest of your school days and then on the job, whenever you are asked to perform in public and the symptoms of arousal appear, you fill your head with negative thoughts. That is why amateur golfers with decades of experience still dread standing on the first ete, or why fifty-year-old executives live in terror of every presentation or big meeting with the board. Performing poorly becomes identified with the body’s natural invigoration mechanisms. The anxiety gets worse until you finally tell yourse,f, “I have to learn how to relax.”

The mistaken identity between stress and anxiety is so ingrained that when I ask new clients to tell me about their experiences performing under pressure, they often respond with a soliloquy on fear. I want to hear about breakthrough moments, the good stuff, but they tell me about choking, doubt, and ducking every opportunity that might activate such awful feelings. No wonder in our culture few words carry a more negative connotation than “pressure” and “stress.” Stress gets blamed for everything that doesn’t have an otherwise clear diagnosis. Going gray or losing your hair? Must be stress. Unidentified pains or headaches? You guessed it. But stress is not the cause; it’s how you interpret stress that causes psychosomatic illness.

In performance arenas, psychologists call this “self-intimidation.” You feed your mind with thoughts and instructions that your body is doing something wrong. You tell yourself that you’re not going to perform well because of your own natural instincts. You use emotionally exaggerated language such as “my heart is jumping clear out of my chest; my stomach’s so twisted upside down, the knots will never come out.” Often you say, “If only I could just relax, I’d do so much better.” You undermine your confidence by creating an irrational fear of yourself. Athletes like Dennis Rodman and John Rocker make a multimillion dollar living out of intimidating opponents. Most people are already intimidating themselves–for free.

—- EXCERPT END —-

The whole book is that awesome. Buy it. 🙂

Productivity tip #1: Focus better with post-its.

I had the idea yesterday of helping myself to focus by writing down exactly what I’m going to do next on a post-it note and put it on the bottom of my monitor. When I’m done with it, I throw it away and put up another one. If I cannot avoid switching tasks before it’s done, I’ll stick it to my desk and put another in its place until I finish that one. When that’s finished, I put the other post-it back up.

If my mind starts wandering or I ever wonder what to do, I just look at the post-it on the bottom of my monitor, go “Oh yeah!” and get back to it.

I definitely use a To-Do list, but the bigger it gets, the harder it is to focus on just one thing at a time with all the noise around it. Having a single post-it note with a single to-do on it has been helping tremendously.
It’s been working really well so far for me. If you have a huge, varied workload and have problems focusing on one thing at a time, try this. 🙂

Ignore the Anti-Learning Brigade.

“You can’t learn art.”

Have you ever heard that?

“You’re just born with it.”

Or that?

“Oh, that looks just awesome, don’t change a thing! It’s perfect.”

How about that?

People that say that are poison. I call them the Anti-Learning Brigade. The snobby intellectual artsy elite. They’ll play both angles… tell you that it’s impossible to learn to do what you’re trying to do, or that you can’t or shouldn’t try to get better at it.

Why? To grant themselves a false and unearned sense of superiority, and to cut off your legs so you can’t compete. They may not realize they’re doing it — I’ve seen plenty of examples of that — but the result is the same.

The reason I dismiss them is because of this simple question:

What does “You can’t learn it” offer to help people that want to learn it?

That’s not knowledge. That’s not wisdom. That’s not any kind of help. That’s ANTI-KNOWLEDGE. That’s the most destructive, least constructive, most useless piece of advice that can be imparted to another that’s trying to learn.

“Stop trying. Stop putting forth the effort. You’ll never do it. No one can do it… except me, I was born with it. Some people have just been born with the skill and have done it all their life. How could you possibly compete with that? It’s inborn, a gift, not something that can be trained. Just give up. Don’t try. You’re wasting your time.”

I’ve made my life and career out of ignoring people like that, to my great benefit. I’m past the point of thinking anything they say holds weight, but when I see them telling eager young kids that are just starting out that they’ll never be good and can’t learn, I get angry.

Very angry.

Because if I’d listened to them when I was at that stage, I’d be nowhere. I think about where I was then, and where I am now, and I imagine everything I learned and everything I became in that time DYING. All that existence unravelling, just because someone was insecure and trying to hold me down.

By what right can one human tell another that his efforts will never matter? That his hard work will amount to nothing? That he’d be BETTER if he GAVE UP and STOPPED TRYING?

Never listen to these people. Ignore them. Cut them out of your life. Treat what they say as a challenge to try harder, get better and improve. “Can’t learn it, eh? Watch me crush you.” It does happen. People can make themselves out of nothing. You can learn anything. You can get better at anything.

You don’t even need to start out being smart! You just need to be willing to learn and have the determination to BECOME smart. If you’re persistent enough, never give up, keep trying and constantly adapt to new ideas and throw out your favorite old ones, you can do absolutely ANYTHING.

If no one could learn anything, no one could DO anything. And look around you. See how the world works. Cars move, airplanes fly, skyscrapers are erected, electricity flows, computer systems whirr happily, and the gears of the world go on grinding. If no one can learn anything, how does any of that work? I haven’t seen many infants assembling airplanes lately.

Explain that, Anti-Learning Brigade.

Personal inertia and engines of success!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal inertia and change, and how no matter how hard you try, some things about yourself you can never change. And what to do about it.

This past week or two I’ve been wrestling with myself over how best to spend my time, and how I naturally lean toward goofing off and wasting it. I know I’m going to do it, and I know beating myself up over it isn’t going to make me WANT to get better at it. In fact, that’s the worst way possible.

So I’m trying to get down and nitty-gritty and understand myself better, warts and all. Based on my past behavior and my natural inclinations, I have learned the following:

1) If I have the choice between doing something challenging and productive and doing something easy and fruitless, I will probably do the easy thing.

All the self-discipline I’ve used on myself to try to get better at it can only go so far. So my solution? Forcibly remove all the easy and fruitless activities. Bye bye internet. Bye bye cable TV. Bye bye DVDs. Bye bye beer. Problem solved.

Basically, I’m looking at myself as a rat in a maze, and I’m just removing obstacles and changing the maze myself to achieve the result I want. 🙂 I know I’m going to act like this. I know I will probably goof off, despite my best intentions. So the only logical answer is that I should completely remove the choice to do something easy and fruitless.

That ties into something else I learned about myself:

2) I have a highly addictive personality.

When I find something new and interesting that I love, I will absolutely exhaust it.


  • If I get something awesome and fun to do at work, I will work myself to death with insane hours until I’m done with it.

  • If I find a new exercise routine that I enjoy, I will repeat it until I can’t move.

  • If I find a new book I like, I will sit down and read the entire thing in one sitting, then buy three more books by that author on Amazon.

  • If I find a new kind of beer I enjoy, I will buy and drink cases of it.

  • If I find a new restaurant I like, I will go there every day for a week.

  • If I meet a new girl that I’m interested in, I can’t get her out of my head and I have to fight the urge to spend all my waking time talking to her.

And so on. I keep going until I hit some sort of wall and HAVE to stop. The incredible thing is that I never notice that I’m this obsessed, because I’m having so much fun.

And I never realized how intense I was in that regard until recently. And it’s funny (and scary) how totally involuntary it is. So this ties into the personal inertia concept… what can I do about that if I’m such a slave to my own whimsy? Surround myself with the kind of things I SHOULD become obsessed with and hack away at for a year until I get tired. 🙂 That’s why my apartment is becoming spotless. That’s why I’ve been eating healthier and exercising and why I’ve lost another four pounds just this week. And that would be why I am at work on a perfectly nice Sunday afternoon.

So the whole point of this is… know yourself. Understand your strengths and weaknesses. Find ways to turn your weaknesses into your strengths. People all fall into specific patterns of behavior that are VERY easy to recognize and take advantage of. Learn to understand your own, predict how you’re going to act and react to the things around you, and learn how to play yourself just like a game to get better performance and BE better.

Ultimately, we’re all just machines. Thousands of little systems that act together in very precise, predictable patterns. You don’t even have to think about them, because they simply work the way they do automatically without you ever realizing it. Hitch a ride on that! At that point it’s not even effort, it’s like totally free bonus time in which to kick ass.

Come on, just IMAGINE how much better you can be if you can just add or remove one little factor to turn your inborn unconscious quirks and weaknesses into happy, puttering little engines of success! 🙂

So, loyal readers, I’m curious! Have you ever turned a weakness into a strength? What was it and how?

Destroy your timesinks.

Ever wonder where all your time goes? You get home from work, then practically before you know it, it’s bedtime. Where did all that time go? You sure didn’t get anything done, did you?

I’ve been finding that happening to me a lot lately, and I decided to crack down.

A few months back, I threw away most of my worldly possessions. Then I sold off most of the rest, including almost my entire DVD collection. I also downgraded to basic cable so I could spend more time doing things I cared about.

When I moved to Austin, I never got cable TV or internet. I just stole wifi from my neighbor, being the morally upstanding gentleman that I am. :)  Since I got here I’ve been spending a lot of time at home messing around on Youtube, Myspace, online dating sites, watching DVDs on Netflix, drinking beer, etc. I found that all of my evenings were relaxed, but mostly wasted on things that weren’t terribly important to me. Just pure time sinks. Unproductive activities with no tangible results or benefits to me. Just something to do to pass the time for the sake of passing time. One day, my neighbor locked their wifi connection, so I was internetless. So I decided to use that opportunity to make a change.

No more internet at home!

Not permanently, mind you… this is really just an experiment to see how long I last, and to see what I actually DO when I have no TV or internet. And to sweeten the mix, I poured out all my alcohol and stopped drinking alcohol at home. I never did it excessively, but I want every last bit of mental sharpness I can get.

So this past week I’ve been getting better, and I’m pretty amazed at what my body and mind automatically do when they don’t have an ‘easy out’ to spend time on. I’m only going to be on this earth so long, so wouldn’t it make sense to maximize what time I have and spend it wisely, instead of squandering it?

I still view time as a currency. Something you spend. You will never get any more time than you have, so it would make sense to allocate it wisely, no? But there are so many things out there that can just suck it up without you realizing it. And it’s easy to do. You don’t have to work hard at it, or learn anything to do it. You just let yourself get whisked away by it, and you wonder where all that time went. And you shrug, and keep doing it.

I hate that and it drives me crazy.

I guess I’m what you might call a Type A Personality. Very hard-working, impatient, hyper, always moving and improving and optimizing and trying to get things done. When I see waste in any form, or a problem, I get agitated, often visibly, and I want to correct it. So when I saw how much time I wasted, it really got under my skin.

So once I banished alcohol from my home, got rid of my TV, DVDs, music and internet access, I found myself with lots of very interesting ways to spend my time.

Mainly I’ve spent my time reading, cleaning my condo, cooking for myself, working out, and spending time with my cats and sugar gliders. Since I don’t have anything going on in the background to distract me, everything I do seems richer and more focused. It has more meaning. I’m not thinking of something else when I’m doing it, and every action I take seems to have more purpose, just because I’m more consciously willing it to happen. The intention to act is there, undiluted and beautiful.

It’s funny, because time seems to move a lot slower now. I bust ass at work (I love my job) and go 120mph all day, go home, and it all slows down. I get so much more done at home, I take care of all my bills, chores, and obligations, I feel more at peace with myself, my pets love the attention, I get to bed earlier, I get up earlier, and everything just starts falling into place.

So I’m going to see how long I can keep this up. I know not having internet access at home will start to bother me as time goes on, but I’m in a really sweet spot right now and I want to maintain it as long as I can.

Everyone should try this. Identify the least productive timesinks you have, and cut them out of your life. Don’t even leave them there to be an OPTION. Cut it out like a tumor. Then see how it goes. 🙂

What are your biggest timesinks?

Problem = Steps to Solution

Apologies for the lack of posts lately! Been very busy at work and spending lots of time out enjoying life and having friends.

Work so far at NCsoft is completely kick ass. For this game, I am the art department. We’re outsourcing all of our game’s art, which is terribly exciting for me since that’s been one of my biggest interests for my whole career. So lately I’ve been looking at artists of all kinds, sending out art tests, art directing, building a budget, scheduling, organizing data, putting new art into the game, writing documentation, etc.
It’s an incredible amount of work, and I’ve never done *all* of this at the same time before, but it’s an absolute blast. Learning to go from creating hands-on art from a micro level to starting to manage, lead and direct from a macro level is an INCREDIBLE perspective shift for me.

EVery day I come up against interesting and difficult problems that I have no idea how to solve. Finding the solutions to those problems is a thrill for me. I’ve found that, ultimately, all it comes down to is looking at a problem, breaking it down into easily digestible chunks, prioritizing those chunks and blazing through them one by one.

So far it seems like a skill, like riding a bike. I’m getting better at breaking down problems and solving them bit by bit. I’m even learning to apply that to my personal life… like how to improve upon things I wish I was better at.

I’ve never really seen this type of problem solving as a key life skill before, but it really is. No problem is so big that it can’t be broken down into smaller, more discrete elements and solved. The bigger the problem, the scarier it looks until you disassemble it into easily understood bits, and then it’s just like anything else.

It’s been a thrill to train my mind to look at a problem and start seeing it as a series of steps to a solution. And the fact that as many people rely on me as they do, and that I’m responsible for all the art on the project, is that much more incentive to get better at it.

So in short, yeah, NCsoft is kicking ass. I’m learning so much, so fast, that I barely have energy at home to read or kick ass on personal projects, just because I feel like I’m going 120mph all the time at work. And I LOVE that!

And the best part of all? No crunch!

I’ll get back to posting more soon, stuff like details on how I’m doling out work, organizing the project, directing artists, developing my tasklists, etc. I think I have a really great opportunity here to provide a unique perspective over time of how a mere artist ascends into management and figures out what the hell to do and how he’s doing it. Because if there’s anyone else writing from this perspective, I’ve yet to hear about him. 🙂

Make Friends Everywhere You Go

Here’s a fun little life strategy: Make friends everywhere you go.

Since I’ve been interviewing, setting up the move and calling dozens of people asking all sorts of questions, I’ve started getting in the habit of treating people like people.

It’s very simple. I’ll show you how to get the most out of every person you meet. This is all you need to do:

  1. Smile, make eye contact, shake their hand and get their name. This is SO important! You’d be surprised how few people will bother with this, and how much better service you can get.
  2. Show an interest in them. Find some way to relate to them. Even something as banal as the weather can work. Be a little self-deprecating, or funny. “How are you?” “Fantastic, I’ve almost waken up! Noon’s too early for me. How about you?” Try and find some way to connect with them and wake them up from whatever dry, boring routine they may be stuck in, and lure out the living, breathing, thinking human being inside.
  3. Give them a chance to utilize their experience. Ask your airplane seatmate what they do for a living, and what’s involved in it. Ask the nice lady at the deli counter what her favorite kind of meat is and if you can have a sample. Ask the customer service tech what he could do to save money on what you’re paying. Ask the waiter what his favorite drink is.

Be it a cashier at a supermarket or a voice on the phone, be friendly. Ask for their name, write it down and remember it. While you’re waiting on something, ask them something about themselves. One of my favorite things to do on the phone is to ask someone where they are. Because call centers are so spread out, you could be talking to someone in Phoenix, New York, Washington, Florida, Canada, or, of course, India. You can get peoples’ entire life stories out of them, and it’s often hilarious and interesting.

My favorite experience in that was talking to a Cox cable tech that used to work at a nuclear power plant. He told me all about what it was like to work there, the incredible dangers they faced, all the ridiculous safeguards, and how engineers late at night were able to create perfect synthetic diamonds in the reactor, on the side, just to make extra money. Fascinating stuff. AND he fixed my problem! You can enrich any experience, and calling tech support is a great place to start.

Showing an interest in them can make a huge difference. Once you stop treating people like objects or drones, they can really open up and be incredibly pleasant, and get you favors you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. This week, through simply being friendly, remembering names, showing an interest in people and making a friend, I saved $450 on one of my moving costs.

It’s incredible what people can do if they like you enough to bother, and if you’re bold enough to ask what THEY would do, or what THEY think. Give them a chance to utilize their experience.

See, I believe that, deep down, people really do like interacting other people, and being good at their job. It’s just that most people never give them a chance to do either one of those. When I went to get a new cel phone, I chatted with the salesman for a while, asked him questions about his own personal preferences in a phone or a plan, and we established a little camaraderie of sorts.

But when it came to getting a text message plan that was right for me, I was stuck with a bunch of choices I didn’ tlike. So I asked him if there was anything else he could think of that I could do, and he paused a moment to think it over. He remembered an old, obsolete plan that was barely left over in the system and was only very rarely offered. He found it and gave it to me, and I ended up saving HALF what other people generally pay. And I still enjoy it to this day.

More anecdotes: When I still drank coffee, I’d make friends with the Starbucks baristas and ended up getting free drinks all the time. When I ate out more, I’d eat Quizno’s religiously and get them to give me free extra meat, or custom-make sandwiches for me not on the menu, or give me free food and drinks anytime I wanted.

In fact, just this morning I was in a hurry, shopping for high-top shoes for the motorcycle riding classes I’m taking tomorrow. I was friendly with the salesman and got him to start really THINKING, and putting his expertise to work. He knew which kinds of shoes ran narrow, the conversion rate of shoe sizes between brands, and the best price for what I’m looking for and what stores to check out if I couldn’t find what I wanted there.

He made some strong recommendations to me, and I ended up going with a pair of shoes I’m VERY happy with that he recommended. How many times have you been in a shoe store where you just pointed at the shoe you wanted to try on? Give them a chance to utilize their experience.

Almost every time I get on an airplane, I’ll start a conversation with the person in the seat next to me, and we’ll end up talking for the entire flight. A couple months back I sat next to a cute girl, chatted with her a while, then we grabbed lunch together at the airport and chatted for a couple hours while we were waiting for our planes. I got to kill a couple otherwise boring and empty hours and meet someone new and interesting. 🙂

I even got my own travel agent out of it. I started talking to him, and he told me all sorts of amazing stories about the places he’d traveled all over the world. The incredibly deeply ingrained socialism of Sweden, inadvertently rooming with the US Olympic skiing team in Norway, and personally visiting the highest point of every state in the USA. He even clued me in on the best way to find great deals on travel, the fastest and cheapest way to get a passport, which airlines to avoid, the best times of year to fly, etc, all for free. He also gave me a huge list of sights to see and places to eat in the place I was traveling to. All for showing an interest in him. 🙂

Another example: At my local Target, I’ve made friends with the guys in the Electronics department. Anytime the lines up front are long, I can walk up to one of them and have him check me out at the never-manned cash registers hidden in the back of the Electronics department, and I NEVER, EVER have to wait in line.

Also good to make friends with: Human Resources. They’re the lifeblood of most companies, and the hub of most high-level information flow. Whether you’re inside or outside of a company, the HR rep can be a valuable ally. And I don’t mean this in a manipulative way… not at all. You can simply increase your chances of getting to the top of the pile, or getting advance warning of a layoff, or really any kind of information you might like to know. They tend to be incredibly connected, pleasant people, so it can really only benefit you to be nice to them. ALWAYS befriend HR people.

And the same goes for the office tech guy. If you need something difficult done to your PC, how much faster do you think he’ll get it done if he enjoys your company?

And don’t even get me started on the number of job opportunities I’ve had come to me just by being friendly and outgoing wherever possible. 🙂

In summary, BE OUTGOING! Make friends wherever you go. You should do it simply because it’s fun to do, and the bonus is that the rewards can be incredible!