Category Archives: The Empire

Life Lessons, The Empire

I don’t celebrate your accomplishments long enough

I often don’t dwell long enough on the accomplishments of my business partners before moving on to the next problem they/we need to fix and thats kindov shitty. My nature as a problem solver has its benefits in business, and especially the kind of business that requires lots of those balls in the air being juggled – but a major downside is in the glossing over on the completions in the meantime.

When we fix a flat tire, my instinct is to say “great&goodjob and now what about the transmission and oil and steering fluid and double-axel-piston-valve-port” (idk cars). But that’s kindov obnoxious. Especially if the person changing the tire isn’t a mechanic and even more so if they didn’t know how to change a tire before they learned just to change that one. That deserves some dwelling over before just racing ahead to the next problem to solve or otherwise it can be discouraging as a person is faced with a seemingly endless list of problems.

That’s how I see life, of course (an endless sea of problems that we have to be diligent not to drown in) and while that mentality might be a good way for me to charter my ship, I am recently seeing that it has a drown-y effect on others. It’s a bummer to do something good and then have the immediate next-thing be a new thing that is wrong and needs work and attention, time and energy to solve and otherwise deal with.

I should be better about this and will try to be, but the first step is knowing it about myself and warning others that it is a problem within my nature to skip over the good and scurry right to the next thing that is not-so-good. I excuse this about myself because 1) I don’t deny people recognition for their accomplishments and 2) I celebrate people as a whole after they’ve collected a series of impressive points that make me swell with pride or admiration over them but the problem with both those points is that 1) Sometimes a quick thumbs up isn’t enough or appropriate for the effort put into the accomplishment and 2) if you don’t enjoy the small accomplishments enough, it is less motivating to make the big ones – especially when the small ones lead to the big ones. If you’re building a pyramid, each milestone and perhaps each day of brick laying should be celebrated, not just the grand opening of the finished product. ps: is it telling that the first construction example I thought of was one traditionally built by slave labor? oops.

I don’t mean to be a slave driver. I mean to do excellent things.  I’m hard on those in the trenches because that excellence can only be earned with diligence from tough soldiers. Further, an obsession with success is what allows me to lead those troops to those excellent things in the first place, so I don’t want to lose that – but along the road I do recognize the need for motivation acknowledgement more than what I currently do.

I’ll do better. You’ll all do the same. But I’ll make you feel better about it.

 

 

The Empire

“Work with you to make money and build things? Nah. I’d rather do it for free”

Why do people hate making money and building things that benefit them? It makes no sense to me yet ever since the advent of social media, my biggest struggle has been in convincing people to de-value social currency in favor of actual currency.

It started with Myspace picture comments and now it’s Facebook likes and Twitter stats. Those things are only useful if you make them useful towards something, and they are fine as a metric towards that end but if you subjugate that end and make the digital approval of strangers the only currency you traffic in, then you are wasting your life.

That’s just a truism on its own but in regards to people within my sphere, it becomes unconscionable because I’m actually trying to leverage those platforms for things that matter. Thus when people insist on using those things exclusively for things that *don’t* matter – they are not only wasting their own time but they’re undermining what i’m trying to do and trying to make them a part of. It is short-sightedness that I have little tolerance for, especially after the 99th time explaining it.

Not to pick on individuals more than others but to do exactly that for just a moment: I have been unsuccessfully trying to get Anna to leverage Facebook for years but the Likes are more valuable than the dollars the same uploads and efforts she does in Facebook would yield. Same with Anastasia who doesn’t do anything on any social media except Instagram and I can’t get her to do the same things she’s doing there – even if it is literally just embedding the same IG uploads to a brand to build – because again, the immediate social currency isn’t there. The worst (unsurprisingly) though is Wyatt, who is completely obsessed with Twitter and has the nerve to excitedly brag to me how many interactions his tweets yield. It’s infuriating that he insists on getting thousands of twitter views, mentions, replies, and retweets and its all for absolute nothing. His Twitter name is some less character version of “BulletProofDiction” (bltprfdction? idfk) yet he has no blog he either maintains or links to (even to an ancient version) – YET – his display name is his full name… If that sentence wasn’t immediately obvious to you on why and all the reasons it is stupid beyond belief: Brand building means actually building a brand… If he wants it to be his name then it should be a him-centric account promoting his website. It isn’t. If he wants it to be the Twitter for a website he runs, it should be an account for that website that links to it in the bio and in frequent tweets. It doesn’t. It’s the worst of both worlds and is a total waste. and he’s happy to be wasting it all on activity that doesn’t matter.

I don’t know why I can’t drive this simple concept home… It’s not that Twitter doesn’t matter. It’s that he refuses to make Twitter matter. You have it explained to you what to do and what not to do – you claim to agree – you get specific instructions and claim to accept them – and then ignore it all to go right back to whatever you are used to.

How is this not unclear at how insulting and annoying this is?… I didn’t get insulted and annoyed and say I don’t want to work with people like this because they use a micro-blogging communication service. What I hate are instances where their approval-based dog mentality (that I think is gross and that they are gross for embracing instead of fighting) manifest themselves in ways that show a clear ignorance and apathy for the goals and work I am focusing on in addition to the detriment and dead weight in exactly that sector.

It’s like you love raking leaves for the fun of it and because people give you positive attention for it and I say “hey, I actually have a leaf-raking business. Why don’t you keep doing what you’re doing using a LeafMeAlone Inc rake and hat I’ll give you and then when people come to the company because of it, you’ll be a part of that action and increase the attention, love-of-doing, and significance of what you like doing anyway – and you claim to be enthused only for months to go by not doing it and you come up to me expecting me to share your excitement that your non-branded raking got thumbs ups from a tour bus passing by, showing me the pictures of the people in the bus raising their thumbs while I continue putting in the long hours in my leaves removal business I feel strongly about.

STILL they choose familiar-waste-that-feels-fun over new-growth-and-evolution.

Why do people hate progress, productivity and making money so damn much?