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Tag Archives: artist

June 17, 2010 Learning new ways to focus.

Distraction

Do you have the gift of focusing on one thing extremely well? If you do, you’re probably quite successful; (at least in that one area of your life!) Like a laser on metal, focused energy creates intense results.

If however, you struggle to focus on one thing even if when you want to, it can leave you feeling like you’re not getting things accomplished, keeping you from all that you ‘need’ to achieve.

Is this you?
Well, don’t lose heart. Learning to recognize and acknowledge weaknesses in yourself is the first step towards making actions for change. Better that you see the problem than not.

No-one is going to ask you to stop focusing on multiple things. It’s not realistic & not who you are.

1st:
Write down on post-it notes the things that are getting your attention. Try to narrow down really how many different directions you are being pulled. One post-it to each distraction. This gives you an opportunity to try and see how big the issue is.
The good thing about this list (hopefully) is that it might show you that you’re not as distracted as you first thought you were. Most of you will probably have a list that is less than seven to ten things. If that’s the case then we have something to work with. (Seven is an outside goal.:) )

2nd:
Now you have your post-its, stick them in order of how much energy you give them. If surfing the web distracts you more than anything or chatting with your friends, put that in front. Be honest with yourself.

3rd:
Once you have these ranked, in the top right corner use a pen and write their rated order number.

4th:
When completed, rearrange them in the order you know they SHOULD be. Hopefully now we are starting to see a divide.
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Now if things are ranked low and rated low, you can automatically recognize these as unnecessary distractions to your success and work towards taking them out of your life. If that’s reading online gossip, move away from that computer.. heck, turn it off! If it’s watching TV, playing computer games or just general procrastination, then stand up and move. Ban yourself from that area or set yourself a strict time limit as you would children.

For the things that rank high on your ‘should’ ratings, put those more in front of you. Set up doing that action in a place that you spend a lot of time to force you back into that habit. For many creatives that thing you SHOULD be doing more is creating! NO?

This is not school. No one is going to force you to focus on something and give you a punishing grade if you don’t. It’s important to recognize you’re not single-minded and learn how to work with that. If you have seven things that distract you, you can still achieve A LOT in a seven day week.

Now. Off to paint!

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June 16, 2010 Reaching the tipping point

The Throb of Anxiousness

There’s a deep fear connected with putting your creations out there for the world. (A blog is no different, believe me!)
There’s a chance it won’t be liked; a chance it’ll be rejected; a chance you’ll fail. (or that you’ll upset some people!)

At some point though, if you want success, exposure or just an opportunity to share your art badly enough, you are going to reach a tipping point and just begin putting it out there anyways. Once you do, you will have immediate success, everyone will love you and you’ll hear the ring of “yes, yes… YES” in your ears…….

Oh….
hang on…
Let’s get back to reality.

Reality:
Expect to hear no’s a lot, particularly in this current market, but don’t stop trying if you truly believe what you have has merit or most importantly POSITIVELY ADDS TO THIS WORLD WE ARE IN. (Not implying that what you paint has to be positive.) Keep in mind there is no magic formula to success and if anyone says there is, they’re probably being less than truthful.

Your talent, the way that you’re present your work and WHEN you present are just a few of many factors that will affect mini triggers of your success. So don’t take ‘no’ to mean no. It just means no from THEM. There’s a lot of other people on this planet. Don’t be afraid to meet this challenge head on.

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June 14, 2010 Looking after your ones and zeros.

Protection for all

How many of you would say, “My life is on my computer.” ?

If you have anything at all to do with creatively getting your art out there, I would say it’s most of you to a degree, and yet the majority of people do an abysmal job of looking after the data on their machine. (I apologize if that’s harsh but for those that don’t, I’m intentionally trying to jolt you awake!)

This is one area that actually gets me slightly vexed and with good reason. Too many times I’ve been asked to save precious ‘ones and zeros’ by people I care about and for the most part I now refuse… because to even TOUCH another person’s drive is an incredible responsibility. I forewarn you now, DON’T DO IT! If that drive dies on YOUR watch… oh boy… do the owner’s get ugly at the person who last had it! It’s just not worth it.

To alleviate this problem, I’m going to give you a break down of what you should be doing with your files to protect them.
If you are a PC user, I’m sorry. I can’t document a good solution for you knowledgeably. Perhaps someone else can; feel free to do that below. My focus is going to be on the MAC owners.

1. Time Machine.

If you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard (10.5-10.6) and aren’t using Time Machine to back up in the very least, then you should do so. Mr. Jobs kindly created the perfect solution for just about every instance of error with regards to your files. Time machine backs up your entire machine every hour from the first moment you turn it on and keeps back ups of everything to an external drive, so that if you ever lose your machine for whatever reason then you just turn on another mac and back up with the external drive. It does it ALL for you.

2. For laptops

Apple has also made TIME CAPSULE. This is a powerful wireless router solution that contains a hard drive in it, backing up your machine any time your laptop is turned on. Yes. WIRELESS BACKUP! Time machine initially got bad reviews when it came out, but it’s been dramatically improved since then and it WORKS. I have three wireless laptops that back up to this on the hour every hour when they are on, and never EVER had a problem with it. I have also had a laptop die and then backed up to where I was when the new one arrived, so it’s not a gimmick. It actually does what it says it will.

3. External drives.

Now we get a little more hardcore. Particularly for people with more data than their main hard drive can handle.
I want you to read this next part very VERY carefully.

NO-ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR DATA BUT YOU.

Let me say that again. No one.. .including Apple… cares about your data BUT YOU. If something goes wrong with your machine, EVEN IF YOU HAVE APPLECARE, Apple has one responsibility… and that is to get your machine back to where it was when they initially sold it to you. The first thing any hardware company will do if they can’t get something to work is WIPE the drive (restore everything to factory settings)…deleting all YOUR DATA! It’s not personal. It’s task driven. Their task is to make your machine work. PERIOD!

For this reason, I STRONGLY recommend that you don’t keep ANY data on your machine at all! JUST PROGRAMS. I know I’m using a lot of capitals as I type this, but it’s THAT important. Saving your files to an external drive means that you can get a virus on your computer and know that formatting your machine is FINE. In fact, it’s something YOU can do yourself from your time machine whilst you hook up your external data drive to another machine and carry on working!

A machine is NOT valuable… THE DATA IS!

So that leaves two new questions. Which external drive should I get and how do I back up my external drive, because Time Machine doesn’t do that.

4. Which Drive?

First, make sure that you pick a single drive and not a raid drive. A raid is an external drive with two hard drives inside it. The reason to not get a raid drive is that you double your chances of something going wrong. You want an external drive with a single drive inside it. Here is a photo of a raid drive. This is WHAT NOT TO GET. As you can see it’s one drive but it has two hard drives in it. (Left and right.) DO NOT PURCHASE THESE.



As for which drive to purchase, well you can do the research for yourself, but I strongly advise the Seagate Freeagent 1tb, 1.5tb or 2tb drive. MAKE SURE YOU GET THE MAC VERSION, NOT THE PC. The mac version has Firewire 800 ports at the back, making for significantly higher transfer rate when you want to upload and most particularly ACCESS your files. You will probably have to order them online. Most electronic stores only carry pc versions of this drive. (meaning it only has USB 2.0 and not firewire. Again. DO NOT PURCHASE THE PC VERSION OF THIS DRIVE.)

The drive is $199 on Amazon currently.

This is a very quiet and reliable single hard drive and I can’t tell you how much I approve of this item. THUMBS UP!

4. Purchase TWO identical drives.

This is also very important.
One drive for your original documents and the second to MIRROR your first drive.

No drive is 100% guaranteed. Anything can happen at any time. A mirror is essential. What a mirror does is take what’s on the main drive and ‘mirrors’ it onto the second; a perfect carbon copy of your data. Although not impossible, it’s unlikely that your machine, your external drive AND your mirror are all going to go out at the same time and as I’m sure you can see, the odds of securing your data increase dramatically.

5. Software to move the data.

To move the files from the first External Drive to the Mirror you will need a software program to tell it to do that. Seagate has that program you can download, but I’m not a fan, especially not for the MAC version.

For the past several years I’ve been using an amazing program by a truly remarkable programmer. It’s called Superduper. by PocketShirt.

Superduper has a ‘smart sync’ feature that is similar to Time Machine for your computer. It looks at what is on your first drive.. and matches it to the second. Genius! The first time you back up, it will take a while, but it’s 100% automated and you can set it to back up whenever you like. In my case, every night at 1:30am, it backs up my entire drive to the mirror and I never ever have to think about it or deal with it for a second. In fact.. I have six external drives all together. Three drives filled with data and three mirrors… and it does it all seamlessly.

The programmer’s name is Dave Nanian and if you ever have any questions or problems, he ALWAYS responds and helps you. This is a top notch program made by a top notch programmer. I can’t speak highly enough of how satisfied I am with the product and the customer service.

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One last thing. PLEASE, please get yourself a battery backup with surge protection. Don’t let a thunderstorm wipe out your ‘life.’
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So there you have it. Between your Time Machine, your external drives and your mirrors, you are pretty much covers. I’ve been asked about offsite backing up too, but I have to test it more before I endorse. The one I’m looking into is Crashplan. Perhaps a later blog.

Ps: Neither Apple, Seagate or Pocketshirt have paid me to endorse their products in any way. I’m simply proud to promote great solutions that work!

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June 13, 2010 Do what you do… only keep doing it.

Give up... and be a scarecrow

No matter how far along you are in your career, it’s easy to lose hope, particularly if you’re “blessed” with that creative gene. Do you find yourself prone to fantastic highs and rock bottom lows with shades of grey and empty numbness in between? (Been offered a pill to fix that? Don’t take it unless you have to… You’ll really miss out!)

What you have to say through your joyful and suffering production is ESSENTIAL to this world, even if it’s only to a limited few…. even if it’s only to your child… or your sibling’s child or a random stranger; a single soul.

Make a pledge: “STOPPING IS NOT BE AN OPTION.”

You were put here to create, to express and to enhance this world with your unique angle of this moment in time. All that invisible stuff inside of you is so much more important than how you look, or your physical ‘curves and bumps.’ It’s a richness you MUST share and there’s no way to know if you’re succeeding in this mission UNLESS you keep moving forward and fullfill that destiny.

If you build it… they will come, but if you don’t.. they most assuredly won’t, so do what you do… only keep doing it. (For as long as you are able.)

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May 31, 2010 Reaching Your Turning Point

For the past year I’ve been slowly losing my self-esteem. The job that I’ve been doing has been giving me less and less stimulating and worthwhile jobs and since so much validation of my existence is tied up in my production, when my production suffers, I suffer with it. The world has gotten blacker and blacker, with that facebook message box calling me, beckoning me daily to really tell the world what I think…. and it’s been so tempting to just F bomb the living daylights out of it.

Perhaps your life at sea

But finally now I feel like I’ve hit a turning point. A mental turning point that  is so much more important than the next new job of validation and particularly it’s paycheck.  I’ve realized my worth…. My skillset and my approach to life and the gifts I have with my spouse, my friends and family.

Being negative is too easy, too common and let’s face it.. it gets us no where. Think about the people that you gravitate towards or want to read about. Are they moping around or talking about the blackness or are they uplifting and buzzing you? If this is what you gravitate towards and look for in people, isn’t it arguable that people are also looking for that in you too? Right now you may not FEEL like being positive… and believe me.. I’ve been there.. very RECENTLY actually.

My advice to anyone out there is to STOP. Just STOP totally and give yourself a week to have a chance to restart. Take a moment to write down things that you know you do well and… as you do… be honest and aware of the things that you don’t.

Are you fantastic at dreaming?
Are your skills in coming up with pie in the sky ideas?
Are you  someone that is details orientated and can pull apart things that don’t work?
Are you someone who can sell? (Good at meeting new people)
Are you someone that can give ideas visual life?

Remember that you AREN’T the whole picture and you’re not supposed to be. You are a piece of this life puzzle and people are out there that can DO the things that you can’t… and do them very well!!!! I see more and more people who’ve been like myself,  looking inwardly, trying to be the person to have the full solution for someone then eating themselves up when they’re not.

STOP! PLEASE STOP!
Get some close friends together and brainstorm, or heck… just one friend! Spend some time talking to them about where they are at and how you can help them with your skill set that you’ve written down and ask them for some brainstorming for you. RESTART and perhaps you’ll have a chance to find your place again.

You are special… and parts of all of us are incredibly unique. Recognize that first and perhaps that positive realization will be the first thing to get you back on track.

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