I'm going to do something I rarely do, and reprint nearly an entire post from Seth Godin, because this one really hit me where I was living at the time I read it. Now with Seth issuing a post to his blog every single day, the need for an editor comes seriously into question because 60% of what even the most talented writer can do is rubbish, but if you're willing to wade through that rubbish, many of his posts have real longstanding value. This is one of them.
Read Seth's post in the coloured print first, and then go back and see my own notations in the regular font. I think you'll see why it resonated with me.
Take what you can get (?)
When I started my agency in Korea, CarlsonCreative, things were fairly bleak for the first six months. My staff told me that we were not getting pitches because we would not do them for free. I had also set a bar that clients needed to be of a blue-chip and pressworthy variety, ie: I wanted big logos so that when we finally won something, no matter how small, we could publicize it and get the street-cred of being an upstart David (no pun really) who had won against the Goliaths.
We scored our first pitch with the Armstrong flooring company from the US and followed that up with the Korean Broadcasting Corporation (KOBACO) and eventually, British American Tobacco - all paid presentations with the latter two turning into well paying clients and significant press generation vehicles. Within 18 months, we had become a 'hot' shop and the big agencies were truly scared of us.
We took this to heart and I am still a believer in this today.
This has been redefined for me in the last few months with the pressure to get my feet planted in a new market representing the most basic of needs like eating and paying the rent. These things are of course primary, but certainly not the ultimate goal in the longer term. Why the hell, in a million years, would I want to teach business English in an already overcrowded market of teachers and schools who are busy undercutting each other on an almost daily basis, when I've got a quiver full of marketing and advertising arrows that have flown true for my entire career?
Because it's what I 'could' get initially, but it's not what I 'want' to get, eventually. What I'm after eventually is what I have been able to do my entire life - to balance business and creativity in a way which benefits my clients and provides me and my family a superior level of income and professional satisfaction.
So I'm surviving. But that's not my definition of success. And I'm doing the work and not dying on the vine waiting for perfect in an imperfect world - but I'm spending more and more time defining what makes me unique in the market and striving to build a practice off that. This last week I renegotiated a contract which now pays me 30% more and broadens my responsibilities to consult on marketing with a client who had previously only needed language instruction.
Later in the week, I'm having coffee with a blue-chip sort of guy who works soley in the marketing business and in the evenings I busy myself with promoting this blog and writing copy for various businesses from software to arts and achitecture. All of this is still a far cry from having my own company in Korea, but at least I can remember what that was like, before we landed the big-fish client, and retrench my current life experience to more closely chase the dream of 'getting' what I can take, instead of just 'taking' what I can get.
.
Many thanks to Seth Godin for helping me articulate this more clearly.
I was having lunch earlier in the week with a partner in a management consulting firm here in Munich. His firm specializes in consulting to media companies including broadcast, newspaper and magazines. Conspicuously absent from his client mix were digital media companies. In asking him what kind of work his firm did with these traditional media companies, he spoke of restructuring and cost cutting measures, mentioning specifically that when a media company looses revenue, the first thing they do is cut marketing. "But you can only cut so far", I responded, "how much from expenses saved is put into R&D"? He had no answer for that, meaning probably that the answer was none.
how-the-hell-could-anybody-ever-make-any-money-off-that? If I cut $10 from your budget you've got $10. You can see it in your hand. But if I invest that $10 into coming up with new ideas to keep your particular Titanic from sinking, can you see that? Not today. And the things you need to see, instead of cold hard cash and an office full of empty cubicles, are opportunities - opportunities to turn that leaky barge into a seaworthy vessel one day again on new and un-chartered seas. And precious few management consultants have the ability to see things like that, let alone newspaper companies or magazines. Things like opportunity not immediately quantifiable. But opportunity cost is - what it costs you when you fail to take advantage of an opportunity. You can measure that in your competitor's new BMW around here. And that's where Infinite Wisdom takes its cue. To look at a business' future as a qualifiable process and a willingness to embrace opportunities instead of wasting time and money over a lost quantifiable past.
Godin supposed today in his blog that if we are unhappy with what we have accomplished in the last ten years that maybe we should spend the next ten years at least doing something proactive, that we won't look back on and say we missed something. Something fun. Something motivating. Something qualifiable. His book, Survival Is Not Enough, sums it up for me and all those management consulting firms and traditional media companies who should be spending their time on creating a new future instead of trying to manage their fading past.
I'm going to do something I rarely do, and reprint nearly an entire post from Seth Godin, because this one really hit me where I was living at the time I read it. Now with Seth issuing a post to his blog every single day, the need for an editor comes seriously into question because 60% of what even the most talented writer can do is rubbish, but if you're willing to wade through that rubbish, many of his posts have real longstanding value. This is one of them.
My birthday week in Dalat was inspiring. I was taken as a birthday gift and if one can be given peace, comfort, hope, inspiration and confidence in a big box with a ribbon on it, that was my gift. A gift from God. No cakes cut, no candles lit and no songs sung. It was perfect. 
cooking and the like. The staff are courteous and casual and make a science out of staying out of your way while still making sure that all service points are met. Birds sing daily and nights by the fire are standard. Our villa had three fireplaces, making me a full-time Boy Scout and just as happy as could be. Candles are lit in groups of three always. Flowers arranged immediately. A trip to the market one day brought tuna, vegetables, fruits and the finest of Dalat's vineyards - and with the help of the resort kitchen for pots and pans, I was able to cook a meal that rivaled what 
the chefs had been preparing for us the whole time. Magical. With a jazz soundtrack. Morning was delivered in waves of reflection and care. Introspection and extroversion. Exploration and discovery of truth, love, logic, loss, magic and pro-activity. Beautiful mystery, explained - explained again. 
driven from the lake house to the local convenience store for the morning's milk and eggs when I saw the newspaper headline as big as it could have been printed, "Di Dies!". This I knew somehow, would be reacted to profoundly by my wife who was still sleeping back at the cottage. When I asked her why this was such important news, during the day long coverage
her response was simple. "David", she said, "Don't you know that every little girl wants to grow up to be a princess?" This response would prove to be a milestone in my understanding of women in general but not prepare me much for my traveling companion's reaction to Jackson's death. "Michael Jackson was a foolish man. He couldn't manage his life or his money", was the statement. No sorrow, no sympathy, no regret. Just a cold hard statement of what was essentially the truth. Michael Jackson was a victim of himself and no one else - now relegated the the historical oddity chamber of pop fame.
And did he contribute to my life? Yes. But did his death have the impact on me of that of John Lennon's? No. Because with Lennon a part of my childhood died but with Jackson only a part of his childhood died. He seemed to live in a perpetual Peter Pan state and that, in the end, may have been his demise. He refused to grow up. And my week in Dalat would teach me that, that was exactly what I needed to do.
I have always been extremely guarded of the childish part in me that looks at a white sheet of paper and conceives castles to commerce and so showing that to others has been something I have avoided - even to my wife during our 15 years in marriage. Yet here in Dalat I was being confronted by a friend, confidant and full-time muse to look beyond my reality and into a future of intelligence, stability and growth - a future so unlike anything that Michael Jackson could have ever conceived.
And so a death, and a birth, were happening in Dalat - all at the same time. It was coincidence, and contradiction and contrition to the fact that I would need to leapfrog some things in business and jump-start the machine again - all inspired by the most unlikely person I had met through a failed job interview. Who knew. Well, it seems that God knew. From Dalat comes the invention of a new business. A combination of art, commerce, logic. illogic, inspiration, analysis, magic and maturity. I'm not going to go into a full description now, but I will explain the name. The name came from a desire to combine creativity and logic in a business sense. The name is Infinite Wisdom. More on that later. 