Putting our heart into it isn’t enough.
That’s merely the price of admission.
To keep the momentum going, to keep the resistance away and to keep the goal in sight, we have to put our back into it. Real, physical exertion. Sweat equity. Elbow grease. Getting up earlier than we need, staying up later than we want, and aching every moment in between.
That’s what life requires of us.
Without it, we’re just watching from the sidelines.
It’s the ugliest part of any endeavor, but it’s also the most transformational. Something about the movement of our bodies, the calories we expend and the physical price we pay changes us. Like a yogi stretching her body in unexplored directions, our exertions create new muscle memory. We come out on the other side better than we were before. And if we’re lucky enough to share this experience with someone we love, the intimacy between us deepens, and our relationship is never the same again.
When we decided to leave home and relocate across the country, my parents were enthusiastic, empathetic and encouraging.
But they were also concerned.
They knew I had a history of omitting feelings, withholding emotions and concealing the contents my inner life. And if I planned to live a thousand miles away, that lack of communication wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
You have to talk to us, they said.
Not just updates. Not just fill the in the blanks. Not just curt answers that end the conversation as quickly as possible. But real talk.
What position did I need to put myself in to commit to this?
The first answer was ritual. The conscious practice of mindfulness, the ceremonial acknowledgment of importance and the purposeful experience layered on top of an activity to focus my intention. I knew that if I could create a sacred container around an act of communication, I would stick with it.
The second answer was writing. My first love, my first language. The one thing in my life I couldn’t remember not doing. And the only place I could always go to figure out what mattered to me. I knew that if I could find a way to make writing a part of this, I would stick with it.
So I did.
Combining the two, I began a weekly ritual of writing letters to my parents. Nothing fancy. Nothing structured. Just a simple email to purge my heart and render my truth, until there was nothing left.
Everything that was going on in my life, I shared. Good and bad. Feelings, desires, fears and questions, nothing was off limits.
The folks loved it. It gave them a window into my heart and a snapshot of my life. And now, every week, they can’t wait to get that email.
More importantly, I loved it too. It cleansed me. It was a form of meditation. By writing what I felt, I learned what I knew. And now, every week, I can’t wait to send that email.
That’s how we make commitment stick.
By putting ourselves in a position that taps into the best, highest version of ourselves.
Carrot Creative was the first full-service agency specializing in social media strategy, design and development.
I sat down with Mike Germano, CEO and Co-Founder, and posed three crucial questions about belonging:
1. Good brands are bought; great brands are joined. Why do you think your employees join yours?
Carrot Creative spends more time on company culture than on clients. Our employee avatars, for example, are badges of honor. Unlike uniforms that suppress individuality, these cartoons actually represent people’s styles. Also, we broke down every part of our company culture and assigned an employee to take ownership of it. We have committees for everything: Welcoming new talent, after hours events, even beer. It’s how we give face to each component of our organization. That’s why people want to join us.
2. The great workplaces of the world have soul. How do you humanize your culture?
We’re the one company that lists everybody who works for us, what they do and where to find them on social media. Forget about employees being stolen. My job isn’t to hide my people – it’s to build an awesome culture that allows great work to happen. Besides, if people do leave, we have an alumni committee. We even retire employees’ numbers on the wall. Not because they used to work here, but because they did something great here. That way, we’re constantly talking about and connecting to former talent. That dramatically reduced our turnover rate. We’ve only had one person leave in the past two years.
3. Belonging is a basic human craving. What do you to remind employees that they’ve found a home?
We’re not a startup. We’re not an agency. We’re a hybrid. Even at the origin of our organization, we never listened to anybody. We built this company as the ideal place that we would want to work. And so far, we’ve been right. We attract top talent, which attracts top clients. The coolest room in our office is the one with the family tree wall. It has pictures of employee, both current and past. And it’s a visual reminder that everyone belongs to our family. Especially in a city where you fight so hard to be cool and hip, this group of nerds wants you to be yourself. We’ve created a workplace where your craziness and uniqueness will be embraced.
Thanks Mike!
Meet the Carrot Creative team here.
Punctuation changes posture.
And posture changes everything.
When we live our lives as periods, we crash into the wall of certainty with eyes of arrogance. And we see only what we want to see.
But.
When we live our lives as question marks, we knock at the door of mystery with knuckles of curiosity. And we see what needs to be seen.
The choice is ours.
Everybody wants the scar, but nobody wants the scab.
We’re too impatient to wait, too accustomed to instant gratification and too seduced by our something-for-nothing culture. That’s why we seek shortcuts to boost our numbers, trick people into buying from us and, eventually, get what we want without actually putting in our time. Because we can.
Why bleed for what we want when we can buy what we don’t need?
I’ll tell you why.
Unless it costs us something, it’s not worth anything.
In any endeavor, there is no hope for easy conquest. It has to be something we work for. Something that burns a few calories and puts a few hairs on our chest. Only on the sacrificial field, only through the harsh and revealing light of adversity, do we truly do our most meaningful work.
We have to be willing to bleed for it.
The only stories that count are the ones we pay for.
The ones we suffer through, burn calories for, lose everything from, change everything with and stop lying to ourselves because.
Without that expenditure, without that investment of emotional labor, the story doesn’t truly belong to us. It may be superimposed upon our memory, but it will never be scored upon our heart.
But when we get it right, when we courageously take ownership of our experience; those stories demand to see the light of day. To be given voice to. And to find a home in the hearts of those who would dare to listen.
All we have to do is grab a microphone.
Because if we don’t share it – it never happened.
We can’t be in the pretty good business.
We have to be amazing. We have to bring everything inside that we have. We have to figure out a way to blow people away, every time, in the most magical and unexpected way possible.
Only then do we have power. Only then do we have choices.
And it’s worth all the preparation. All the sweat. All the early morning starts and late night finishes. All the moments when the towel stared at us, wondering if we’d give it the satisfaction of landing in the ring.
We didn’t go through all that bullshit just to show up and not be amazing.
Eminem told us to lose ourselves in the music, the moment, to own it and never let it go.
Maybe it’s time we started acting like it.
The Jar Group is a data-driven agency of internet enthusiasts who produce integrated marketing strategies and happy clients. They were named on the Inc. 500 List of Fastest Growing Private Companies and Linkshare’s 2010 Agency of the Year.
I sat down with President AJ Lawrence, and posed three crucial questions about employee belonging:
1. Good brands are bought, but great brands are joined. Why do you think employees join yours?
For a large company, part of the tradeoff is security. Their culture is secondary to increasing profit. For us, we provide our clients with high quality work, but never at the expense of a great working environment. After all, the work we do is strange. Not everyone can divide their minds into five different areas at the same time, so we have to have a workplace that’s worthwhile and enjoyable.
2. The great workplaces of the world have soul. What do you do to humanize your culture?
Companies can too easily get caught up in archetype language that nobody understands. For us, we don’t have a simple, pithy answer to that kind question. Our mantra is simply something we live. It’s work. We don’t hire assholes. We make clients money, we don’t just get them press. And it’s more than making clients feel good, it’s making them look like heroes. That’s how we get more work.
3. Belonging is a basic human craving. How do you remind employees that they’ve found a home?
It’s not about reminding, it’s about engaging. We have team lunches on Thursdays. Cocktail hours at the end of the workday. We take field trips to Coney Island together. And we’re clear on what we’re trying to achieve and what we expect of people. Too many agencies put efforts on long terms employees or rising stars, but why create a culture where there are tiers of people? We’re hiring the people we want to be here because they can help us do more cool stuff. And cool stuff might mean more work, but that’s part of the fun.
Thanks AJ!
Meet the The Jar Group team here.
We all hear voices.
That doesn’t make us crazy – it just makes us human.
The hard part is when the voice we most want to be quiet starts to torment us.
Our natural instinct is to ignore it. Or run away. Or drown it out. Or stick our fingers in our ears and pretend it’s not really there.
And with most voices, that’s a helpful approach. It protects our dream, safeguards our vision and keeps us from demanding excessive reassurance.
But it turns out; the voice we most want to be quiet is the voice we most need to hear.
It’s the one worth listening to, creating from and motivating ourselves with.
You’ve chosen an uncertain path. You’ve adopted an inconvenient lifestyle. You’ve embarked upon an unconventional journey. You’ve felt the voice inside you growing more urgent. You’ve committed yourself enough so you can’t turn back.
IN SHORT: You’ve decided to play for keeps.
This is the critical crossroads – the emotional turning point – in the life of every young artist.
And I’ve been there myself.
From my latest book, Writing is the Basis of All Wealth, here’s a list of suggestions to help you along the way:
1. Lessons are for losers. Some musicians were never that good at playing music. They just represented something important. Whether they created a spectacle, built an emotional connection, told a remarkable story, started a movement, inspired a revolution, changed popular culture, defied the norm, crossed categories, gave voice to a new generation or raised global consciousness, the fact that they didn’t have a lot of talent didn’t matter. They had bigger fish to fry. Which doesn’t mean talent is unimportant, just not as necessary as we once thought. If I were starting as an artist today, I’d invest more of my time creating, connecting, inspiring, dreaming, shipping, sharing, risking, performing, promoting and engaging, and less of my time taking lessons.
2. The power of germination. I’ve always been an excellent producer. It’s just my nature. I’m impatient, I’m a quick start and I’m an executor. I take action without waiting for permission, and I turn a seed into a forest before most people realize it’s raining. Lately, though, I’ve been practicing the fine art of waiting. Instead of my normal tendency to drive towards closure, I’ve consciously created more time for things to germinate than is comfortable. Instead of obsessing over the branding of my next project, I’ve moved forward without satisfying my need to label everything. It sucks. Letting go of a process that’s been good to you is always a bitter pill to swallow. But despite my impulsive nature, despite my predisposition to execute with all my might, I’m starting to learn that anything worth doing is worth waiting for.
3. Center doesn’t serve us. Only when we work from our edge does the real juice emerge. That’s where all the action is. That’s where we get the best view, find out who we really are and have the most potential for change. The edge is where we’re most challenged to bring forth our best ability. Great art lives there. It’s where we find the finest, bloodiest expressions of our experience. And if we’re willing to crush the boundaries of our creative capacities and make something truly special, truly new, it has the power to change people forever. If that means we have to try a new genre, so be it. If that means we have to experiment with a new medium, so be it. If that means we have to venture out into a completely different venue, so be it. We didn’t pursue a career in art to work from the middle. Save the yellow lines for the armadillos.
4. Bad is relative. Who are we to judge if an idea is good? That’s not our job. As artists, our job is to notice. As artists, our job is to render our unique experience. As artists, our job is to treat everything we discover with deep democracy. Only time will tell if it’s any good. Millions of people thought Christianity was a bad idea – but they still wrote it down. Later, over the course of hundreds and thousands of years, that idea went on to change the world forever. Bad isn’t good, bad breeds good. How many bad ideas did you have last week?
5. Transition from creation to discovery. Instead of sitting down with form already in mind, we arrive at the page, the canvas or the clay trusting that the sculpture is already inside the stone, knowing that our job as the artist is to simply chip away. Instead of attaching ourselves to a particular approach, we commit to an unknown process, thinking less and emerging more, allowing everything to come out from the center of us, as opposed to blindly throwing spaghetti against a predetermined wall. Instead of our tendency to drive towards closure, we consciously make more time for things to germinate than is comfortable, sitting with their namelessness, slowly waking up to what is true about ourselves. The cool part is, while discovery takes longer, requires more uncertainty and asks us to be more patient and vulnerable than we’re used to, the work that results is truer, better and bolder.
6. Circulation is everything. If we never ship anything, it doesn’t matter how talented we are. We may as well be winking in the dark. As creators, our primary task is to create. But a close second is to circulate. To share as much as we can, with as many people as we can, as often as we can. That’s why we got ourselves into this whole mess in the first place – to be heard. Steve Wozniak, someone who was constitutionally disinclined to share, still had a mandate to circulate. He knew he had to ship or risk fading into obscurity. Fortunately, his pal Steve Jobs came along to nudge the sharing process. And they shipped one of our world’s most important innovations. We can never let the fear of failure trump our desire to express.
REMEMBER: When you’re ready to play for keeps, your work will never be the same.
Make the decision today.
Show the world that your art isn’t just another expensive hobby.
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