Over an Instagram conversation with a high-school friend recently, I found myself thinking back to the days when I would be sitting in my room holding a Todd McFarlane comic book trying so desperately to mimic his talent. My friend and I were always blown away by his work on Spiderman. The full-page illustrations contained so many details, most of which were beyond my imagination. I spent hours looking at those and trying to draw something that might be considered just a fraction as talented.
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Did you know if you leave your Apple Pencil just sitting around, not in use or ever being charged, that it will die, never to be resurrected ever again?
Well, now you know.
Once I learned that the Pencils can die, I made sure that when I got a new one that I would at least attempt to do a better job at keeping it alive. I would also attempt to use the Pencil more. When I first got it, I did very little with it. Lately, that has changed a great deal for me as I have made it a point to block out free time and use to be creative.
Recently I had a few packages heading my way from Amazon, one of which was being delivered via USPS. I was not in a real rush for it. Amazon gave me an estimated delivery date of Sunday by 9:00 p.m. I thought that was a little odd but not entirely out of the realm of possibilities given that I have had packages delivered late on Sundays in the past. The Sunday evening the package was to be delivered, I was about to go to bed, around 10:00 p.m., and remembered the package that was to arrive. Not seeing it in the mailbox or on the front porch, I checked the tracking info.
Back in February, I sat down around lunchtime in front of my laptop and noticed something strange happening with my inbox. Rather than the normal amount of emails, I saw that I had just under 1,000 new unread messages. Naturally, I started to panic.
I hopped on to our hosting account and quickly started a dialogue with the support team there and found that this was not a spam attack as I initially thought. What I was receiving were thousands of newsletter and form subscriptions. Some automated process was running and subscribing this email account to newsletter and contact forms all over the internet. It was fast and it was virtually unstoppable.
In just a matter of 2 hours, the primary inbox at work had received a little over 55,000 emails to the point where the only solution was to delete the email account entirely.
In September of last year, I caught a post by Jon Acuff on Twitter describing a book that he had just finished, followed up with a link to his website for those interested in learning how to finally start reading more. Always wishing I had read more, I went to his website and quickly went through his list. It was simple, common sense stuff, that made reading more feel within my reach. What I liked most about his list was the control it gave me. My rules and my goals.
I also knew that I shouldn’t wait until January of 2018. The desire was there and I knew if I waited that I would never start. I thought about all the times where I had wandered into a book store, bought a few books, and declared that was the moment I would be reading more. And it never happened that way. The books ended up being sold at a yard sale, given away, or donated to a library.
I did not have a specific goal of the number of books I wanted to read. I figured that if I had said that I wanted to read 100 books in a year and didn’t come close to that, then I would feel like I had failed. The reality is that couldn’t be further from the truth. Had I finished 15 books, it still would have been a success because it would have been more than I read before. My goal was just to read, to keep books handy, and to keep going and see where I landed in a year.
I went to a book signing recently to meet an author and pick up a copy of their book. I have taken my oldest daughter to something similar, but unless my memory is failing, I have never been to one of these for myself.
Our dog is pretty conditioned to doing the same things over and over again. One part of his routine is getting a treat any time he comes in from going outside to go to the bathroom. But he knows where the treats are and when we open the closet door, he comes running.
Sadly, people are conditioned to similar specific behavior, only with their mobile devices.
Several years ago, I landed one of the biggest freelance projects I had ever landed. The scope of this project was very large and also included print ad creation for many businesses. One of which was the largest vehicle dealership in the area.
This dealership advertised all over the county. I regularly saw them in magazines, newspapers, highway billboards, you name it. So it totally caught me off guard when I was sent a Word file after asking them for their hi-res logo.
I need _______. Can you do it?
I have seen that approach many times and honestly, whenever I see it, I cringe. It is far too often like a horror film where you don’t know what is waiting for you on the other side.
Most recently, I countered such a question with a few questions of my own. I asked what their budget was and what timeline they had in mind for the project. Not surprising, I received no answer. It left me scratching my head a little in that I wondered if they even had the answers.
Look, I know sales isn’t easy. I get that.
I am also very aware that the technology we have today provides sales reps and account managers with the ability to track, send, and report on just about every little movement from a potential client.
For nearly two years now, part of my role is to obtain international bulk accounts. The vast majority of the communication that I do is electronic. I have used just about every tool provided to improve that process. Some of the most recent applications allowed me to see when a potential customer had opened an email that I sent, if they clicked on a link, and how many times they did each.