The Frug: Live Lean. Work Lean. Travel Lean.

The Big Audacious Quest.

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.

Everyone under 25 needs to read this story.

05/15 by The Frug 1 Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

Theodore R. Johnson worked for UPS and never made more than $14,000 a year. After a 28 year career with the company, he retired in 1952 with $700,000 in company stock. He remained retired for 39 years, while amassing a fortune of $70 million.

Johnson died at the age of 91 leaving much of his fortune to an education fund he established with his wife, for disadvantaged students attending small colleges.

70 Million! How did he do it?

Many people today retire, worrying about if they’ll run out of money in their later years. How was Johnson able to retire and grow his $700K into a $70 million fortune that will benefit many into the foreseeable future?

He used some of the same tools we have available today. [Read more…] about Everyone under 25 needs to read this story.

Multitasking with Your Left foot and Your Right Brain.

04/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

The secret was in my feet.

By Brad Beckstrom

Many people think they they can multitask effectively. Companies put it in job descriptions, people put on their resumes, and talk about it in interviews. Neuroscientists say that we’re not actually multitasking but quickly switching from one task to another. Even if we believe we’re getting more done, multitasking makes us less effective.

But, what if we were to combine a single focused mental task with a simple physical one? A single physical task like walking. This way we’re able to do the physical task almost from muscle memory and focus on the mental one with minimal interruption. We can also minimize interruptions by being in motion instead of sitting in an office, for example. [Read more…] about Multitasking with Your Left foot and Your Right Brain.

Free e-books, Charging Stations, and Hot Coffee.

04/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Saving our public libraries.

By Brad Beckstrom

We used to have a Borders bookstore down the street. We also had a couple of independent bookshops with a smaller more curated selection of books.

Both are gone.

It seems like a brick-and-mortar battle in which the big guys and the little guys both lost. I used to go to bookstores all the time. I like to have a destination when I go on a bike ride, maybe get a cup of coffee and thumb through some new releases or the crazy selection of 1000s of magazines they had. It wasn’t frugal either. I could walk into a Borders and spend 60 bucks on books and magazines, sometimes work-related, sometimes something I had no intention of purchasing when I walked into the store.

Then along came Kindle, iPad, audiobooks, feed readers, ebooks, and podcasts. One click ordering from Apple and Amazon. Strong competition from every direction. It’s so easy. You hear about a great book, open up the Kindle app on your iPad and download a free sample. If you like it, it’s yours with one click, usually for less than 10 bucks, sometimes for $1.99, sometimes free. The books even sync across devices. I read a lot more now, fewer magazines, more great writing.

The problem with doing all of your reading on a digital device.

First, we were spending more on books than we ever had, thanks to Amazon’s recommendation algorithms and one click ordering. [Read more…] about Free e-books, Charging Stations, and Hot Coffee.

Dedicate each day to someone who never got a shot.

04/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

Regardless of where you are in your life right now, there’s a very good chance that if you’re reading this, someone would die to be in your shoes. In fact, there’s a good chance that someone did die to be in your shoes.

Meaning that they sacrificed their life for freedom, or they left this earth too early with so much more to do. An image in the 3/29/15 Washington Post displayed a Syrian flag made up of 220,000 individual dots, each one representing a life lost since the pro-democracy protests in Syria began nearly four years ago. How many of them were children, or people just beginning their adult lives? People who never got their shot, never got a chance to shine.

It seems like some of these tragically sad stories quickly enter our consciousness and then depart, whether it be a devastating Asian tsunami, a suicide airline crash, or the latest school shooting. Few of us like to dwell on bad news. There is often little we can do to prevent or remedy these tragedies happening half a world away.

When I see or hear something like this, I think about just one of these people, just one person in that war, just one person on that plane, or in that classroom who never got their shot. Someone who probably had something amazing to share.

Each day I think of someone new. It could be someone in a photo or someone who lived many years ago. I dedicate my day to them. It helps me think about how valuable each day we have here is and how we have the opportunity to waste it, or spend it doing something great.

The Frug

The Costco Date. Declaring War on your Grocery Bill.

03/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Jumbo Dog and Refillable 20oz Pepsi. $1.50

My wife Kelly and I have started a new tradition. The Costco Date. Kelly actually coined the term and I jumped on it. I was recently complaining about our grocery bill that two growing teenage boys have something to do with. We had bailed on Costco a few years back primarily because the times we usually went, weekends, it was usually a zoo. I have better things to do with my time than visit a big-box store on a weekend. We also started ending up with oversize stuff we didn’t need like giant jars of olives and other questionable clothing and gadget purchases.

We’d started using Amazon Prime for paper products, pet food, and lots of other items so we decided not to renew our Costco membership. That was before I decided to declare war on our grocery bill. [Read more…] about The Costco Date. Declaring War on your Grocery Bill.