Work Lean

Tapping into your creative broadband.

By Brad Beckstrom

When you start a creative endeavor, secrets begin to reveal themselves. The secrets may be things you had heard about but had not experienced. They may be things that others in your field know, but you’re just beginning to discover.

You can be well read, attend conferences, work in the industry, stand over other’s shoulders and give direction, but the secrets won’t reveal themselves until you begin. Until you begin hands on practice of your craft daily.

We are all creative, but that creativity often lies dormant until we tap into our creative broadband. This creative broadband is not just important to artists, it’s equally essential for a professional athlete or a standup comedian. Here’s how Jerry Seinfeld put it speaking about professional athletes:

“I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”

Jerry Seinfeld still does stand-up in small comedy clubs around New Jersey and New York. He’s constantly working on new material, testing it out with small audiences. He’s creating content on YouTube, getting feedback from larger audiences. He doesn’t need to do this but he knows he has to. He has to keep banging away at the core elements of his craft, combining them and connecting the dots. Finding out what works, no different from a young comedian just beginning to refine his act.

The cool thing about this is, regardless of your level of success as a musician, comedian, major-league pitcher we are all in the same boat with Jerry. If we stop, assume we’ve risen above the small, the less significant or less important, we fail. [Read more…] about Tapping into your creative broadband.

Our Education System in Reverse. Learn then Do versus Do then Learn.

07/15 by The Frug 1 Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

It seems like our entire education process is backwards. I believe this is especially true of higher education. Much of the emphasis is put on educating ahead of doing. Many of us get through high school, and often several years of college, before choosing a major. That’s quite an investment of time, becoming “educated”, without a clear path or passion.

In high school, students often search for universities based on cost, location, and reputation that their GPA & SAT scores “align with.” Many universities encourage this GPA and test score focus by promoting the high GPAs of students they admit. Here in Virginia, the two largest state universities boast they are admitting students with 4.5 and 4.2 GPAs. Imagine all of the talent they are excluding from our public universities. We only need to look at recent history to see artists, entrepreneurs, writers, inventors, musicians, and entertainers often come from far outside the system or drop out of it in frustration.

Stellar Students

The stellar students and test takers who do gain admittance often never truly find their path, entering the job market searching for a position based on attributes like salary, location, and benefits. Only 62% of these stellar students will work in a job requiring a college degree or related to their college major. [Read more…] about Our Education System in Reverse. Learn then Do versus Do then Learn.

Learning to See.

07/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

I’d been working in marketing and advertising for 30 years, but still felt like I’d never really created anything. Sure, I’d produced events, created new products, award-winning campaigns, promotions, even new agencies. These all had something in common, they existed solely to promote products. These creations included logos, brand imagery, engaging copy, but they really belonged to the products they were promoting more than the person or teams who worked on them. It was time for me to step back and start creating again. Creating, like I was back in school, telling stories and taking photos with my first camera. Doing it just for the experience.

Earlier this year, I embarked on a quest. A quest to create something, a body of work. A quest, free of branding, focus group input, monetization strategies, or even logic. I started this quest before I even knew exactly what it was or how it would work. I started in Bangkok, Thailand, walking for miles and taking photos with my son’s camera. As I walked, the anticipation of more kept me moving forward, seeing many things I’d never seen before. My knees and legs ached from all of the walking, but it felt great.

My visit to Thailand was originally planned as a sabbatical. I had a few meetings but not enough to slow me down. Each morning as I set out, more than scenery came into view. I was learning to see again. [Read more…] about Learning to See.

Creative Ambition or Shooting Yourself Out of a Cannon Every Day.

07/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

I had a dream the other night that I was getting up every morning and shooting myself out of a cannon. The dream was odd because it was on a bit of a loop. There were multiple human cannonball shots, featuring me, but they were all different. Some of these went well, others went very poorly. I don’t recall any crowds cheering. It was just me and the cannon.

I’m glad I don’t visit a shrink or try to attach any deep meaning to these type of flying, falling dreams, but at times, they are oddly insightful. You see, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about creative ambition. Creative ambition in the sense of mastery, versus success and recognition. Shooting yourself out of that cannon, taking all of the risk with the just the dream of ending up a bit further down the road.

Making art versus money, what would happen?

When many of us think of “ambition”, we think of success, recognition, financial rewards. What interests me is looking at ambition from a new angle. Asking the question; what would happen if we took all of that drive and ambition and threw it into making art versus making money?

I’m not strictly speaking to career artists, musicians, writers and other creatives here, I’m speaking to everyone. As human beings, we’re all natural born storytellers and creatives. It’s how we learn. It’s always been how we learn — from cave paintings to stories passed down through generations in front of campfires. [Read more…] about Creative Ambition or Shooting Yourself Out of a Cannon Every Day.

How I freed up 20 weeks of extra time a year.

06/15 by The Frug 1 Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

I was sitting in a cab stuck in DC traffic yesterday. This particular stretch of road was so bad that we actually sat in one place for what felt like 5 minutes. Off to my left there was a large modern glass office building, sweaty folks in suits and ties scurrying in and out in 92° weather. It appeared to be a large law firm. I looked up at the second floor and I could see a man speaking to two other employees next to a very large pile of boxes. He was waving his arms, wildly gesticulating at two co-workers whose heads were down. One of them put her hand up to her mouth like she was about to cry or throw up, not sure.

I knew that street well. It was an often used shortcut to get to the 3rd Street Tunnel, the bane of my existence when I worked in DC. This tunnel connects with many of the major federal office buildings, Union Station, Capitol Hill, hundreds of large office buildings for media outlets, law firms, lobbyists, real estate developers. It’s always rush hour in this tunnel and on the strip of 395 that connects Washington, DC and Virginia. As you come out of the tunnel, just over the bridge, you see the Pentagon, one of the world’s largest office buildings. This little strip of road is a big part of the reason that DC ranks as the second worst traffic city in the country behind LA.

I walked away from this commute years ago. It’s 7:05am and I’m at my desk, plugging away and I love it. Why? Because I work from home. The people I work with also work from home in places as far away as Hobart, Tasmania and as close as Alexandria, Virginia.

When I first started contemplating working from home, the first thing I did was start adding up the time I would save. The numbers really surprised me. I’ve rounded these off and included vacations/travel etc.

Commuting – minimum 1 hour per day, round-trip. About 240 hours or 6 weeks a year.
Useless unscheduled or prescheduled meetings plus prep – 6 hours per week about 288 hours per year, or 7.2 weeks. I’m not including important meetings in this number.
One hour per day of interruptions – work related and chitchat (very conservative estimate). I had a private office so I’d imagine these would be a lot worse in an open floor plan. 240 hours or about 6 weeks a year.

I couldn’t believe the total – 19.2 weeks per year of wasted time.

I didn’t believe it so I ran the numbers a few times. Each time they were higher. I stuck with the lowest estimate. This is a good starting point when considering working from home. Your commute may be longer or your interruptions may be shorter, but regardless you’ll be surprised.

What could you do with nearly 20 weeks of extra time?!

This is where the fun started. I wasn’t just saving time, I was saving money. Think about the costuming we do for work environments. Light starch on our casual dress shirts and khakis. Appropriately matching belts and shoes. Lunches out, coffee shops, automobile maintenance, gas, tires and oil for that commute. [Read more…] about How I freed up 20 weeks of extra time a year.

The Big Audacious Quest.

05/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

A Single Step

By Brad Beckstrom

I lost something 30 years ago and I just found it. In high school, I dreamed of creating great images, starting my own creative studio. Life moved on, the working world, a business, and later, a family became priorities. After college, I put down my camera creatively. That was 1985. Just this past year I picked it up again.

You see, I didn’t physically lose the camera. I’ve taken thousands of photos in the past 30 years. I’ve traveled, taking all of the requisite nicely composed tourist and family photos. I’ve loaded up Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and the like with iPhone photos.

In the mid 90s, I experimented with the first digital cameras, producing digital postcard events for clients. Images that included full-color logos and postcard backings. The personalized postcards were printed on-site using high-tech dye sublimation printers at events across North America and as far away as Singapore. They were phenomenally popular and drove our business for years. We printed and loaded literally tens of thousands of images onto the web using something called fetch, before photo sharing sites like flickr or SmugMug arrived. My interest in photography had paid off, but in the end, this was just high-volume, branded event photography.

How I began to scratch that long-lost creative itch.

One snowy Saturday I came across the award winning documentary “Finding Vivian Maier.” It’s about a longtime nanny who took over 100,000 photographs and hid the negatives in storage lockers that weren’t discovered until decades later.

She had shown her work to no one. [Read more…] about The Big Audacious Quest.