When I was invited by a friend to go to the Bushmills Whiskey party in Boston the first thing I asked was:

“are they going to have anything besides whiskey drinks?”  I’m not a huge fan of whiskey (until last night).  My friend said “no, it’s a whiskey party, what’s wrong with you?”

Since I hadn’t seen this friend in a while, I went.  I assumed it would be another branded event where I’d be handed informational pamphlets, had the sellers bug me about how whiskey is made, why I should buy it, cram in a room with 600 people, blah blah blah.

This wasn’t like that.

1) Bushmills knew who they wanted and they wanted tastemakers so that’s who they invited.  They didn’t need to pack the place to the gills until it was uncomfortable so they could report numbers back to corporate.  It was an event that you could wander around in or even find a seat if you wanted.  wonderful.

2) They recorded and branded content for themselves and their partygoers.  A ton of it.  It was genius.  Since they had all the right tastemakers at their party they launched a small army of photographers into the room to take photos of everyone enjoying their product.  Good lord they probably have a zillion videos and photos of happy, real people enjoying Bushmills.  They also had a cool photo group set up in one corner to take fun photos with your friends and some hipsterish props (think antlers and mustaches).  They had iPads there so you could immediately upload your photos to your Facebook page, Twitter, and whatever other channel you wanted to upload to.  Here’s mine:

Since they were inviting kind of a hip crowd they made sure that the photos, the props, the food, etc. were all in a certain style so that this crowd would want to upload it.  Can you imagine if they had some bright splashy frame around this photo?  Not nearly as many people would have wanted to upload them.

They also printed some of the photos out so that I had hard copies to take home.  The rest I can get off of their Facebook page.

This is genius because in one night they got a non whiskey drinker to:

try their product, have photos taken with it, upload a lightly branded photo to my Facebook page, visit their Facebook page to check out the rest of the photos I was in, and also have hard copy Bushmills branded photos on my refrigerator.  All because I happened to like the style everything was created in.

3) They knew what else their audience would like from an event.  Some of the tastemakers they invited were foodies, so their appetizer offerings ranged from bacon brownies to gourmet baby back rib bites, to cupcakes.  Branded cupcakes of course.  This gave people additional options to capture the event the way that they wanted to.  I saw people all over the place snapping iPhone pictures of the food.

Overall Lesson:

When you want to do some type of event that has branding to it, go all the way.

Think about your audience and the style they will like, not your style.

Create content at events and also, think of ways to help people at your event create their own content.

I just had to post this.  It looks like the coolest conference ever.  And it’s in a tent, so that’s pretty fabulous too.

Do Lectures Trailer from The Do Lectures on Vimeo.

3 years ago I fell in love with a painting I saw in a gallery in Santa Fe.  I stood there for nearly 2 hours looking at it.  From every angle.  First one way and then walking by it, and then going into another room before coming back.  Then  trying to decide if I could justify spending more than 2 months rent on this.  I took the card of the gallery telling myself that I could always have it shipped.

Over the next 3 years, I thought about this painting often.  It literally was haunting me.   Also in this time period, I lost the gallery card and forgot the artist’s name.

Last week I went back to Santa Fe, found the gallery and ran from room to room looking for the painting.  Or something from the artist.  The gallery owner came up and asked me what I was looking for and I described the painting to her.  She told me that the artist had beautiful work but was ‘difficult to motivate’.  That she often painted entire paintings only to sand them down and start over, often completing only 1 work in long periods of time.   She had even told the artist that she could sell her work easily if she would just stop ruining it before it made it to the gallery.

“she’s feeling like she’s this tortured artist, but… it’s a business and she could make a good living”.

She then told me that she hoped I had learned a lesson about things you love at first site.  “You take them, you don’t miss out on things you’re going to think about for years.”  She told me how she wanted to go over to the artist’s house and grab the paintings before she could paint over them and bring them into the gallery.

So I’ve been thinking about this artist that ruins her own paintings.  It’s not so uncommon, there are Buddhist poets that burn their poems once they write them and even Picasso was known to paint right over his work with a new work. Less romantically, there are also a lot of entrepreneurs that do the exact same thing.

Bloggers that excessively edit their posts and never publish them.  Business ideas that are never opened because the owner has a bad day and decides it’s a stupid idea.  People that get a few bad reviews and discard their great idea.  Even social media and marketing plans that never see the light of day because the creator is too afraid to speak up at the brainstorming meeting.

I’ve ruined plenty of perfectly good ideas, most notably in my first business.  I had done this artsy (really cool in retrospect) event that got a lashing in a local publication the next day.  I let that review become my gallery owner, I started editing out the creative parts of every event until they were stale, boring, and eventually not fun to create anymore.

So here’s what I propose:  When you are having one of those ideas that you want to shoot down imagine this gallery owner over your shoulder grabbing your idea and taking it to market for you.  Envision your gallery owner taking an objective look before you cover it up with something else.  It may not turn out to be the most excellent idea ever but I think having a moment where you allow an outside perspective (even if it’s yourself thinking about it from a different angle – like the gallery owner looking at it through a seller’s eyes) can get you out of your own way.  It just doesn’t make sense to kill an idea, business, or half finished project with a jury of one.

Have you ever tossed an idea you wish you hadn’t?

pic of artist is Matte Stephens, here’s an interview with him.

I love this!  I love it because I am irked by networking events where everyone starts off with ‘what do you do?’, which is an insanely hard question to answer (Penelope just wrote a good post about it).  In fact, I was just laughing with a friend of mine over her impression of herself explaining what she does to her parents.  There are even 2 artists that created a whole series composed of videos of artists explaining to their parents what they do for a living. So it’s maybe safe to say that it’s a hard question to answer and yet everyone is asking it.

So Icebreakertags is a site that allows you create your own more original nametag that can get people talking about stuff that’s a little more interesting.

If you don’t run a group you could just write this in on the blank nametag that they give you at events.  Here are some of my favorites:

If I could induct one new word into the dictionary it would be:

What is your best practice?

I can teach you:

I haven’t posted a unique piece of furniture in a while – but this is quite a comeback! Check out this chair by Maximo Riera

We’re only 4 days into the new year and already things are different.  Like, for example, that I’m going to be telling you how my life became not so fun in 2010.  The 2010 me wouldn’t have done that.  2010 was a year of Order (see right side of the poster).  So much order that it almost made me stop blogging.  Order is great, don’t get me wrong it’s just that too much of it can be, well, boring hard to write about. (hence embarrassingly long hiatus from this blog).

So this year, I need a little chaos (see left side of this helpful chart) in my life.  A little more….   of the me that writes every day, finds cool things and points them out even if no one else already said it was cool. I’ve got some other chaos related changes as well.

Exercise in FUN ways:

Last year I went to a hip hop class once and then stopped because there was an ‘incident’ where I ended up facing backwards and everyone else was frontwards and that pretty much summed up that class.  I went back to the gym and stayed there.  Order.

This year I’m going to choose something else that seems fun and active and do it.   And stay there, even if I face backwards once in a while.  I found the first thing I’m going to try a few weeks ago when I spontaneously bought tickets for the roller derby.  While I was watching the game I was already thinking of a good roller derby name and how I could come up with a great outfit.  If you want to watch a great roller derby movie rent Whip It.

Here are the skates I feel as though I cannot live without.

Creative For Creative Sake, Not For Client’s Sake:

Remember when I used to blog about how cool my manicures were?  That went out the window in 2010 because I found myself only being creative when I was working on a client’s strategy, which I can’t write about since that’s super top secret stuff.

Plus, it’s not good for client’s either if I’m only creative in one way.  Granted, my amazing manicures, skull wallpaper, etc.  doesn’t directly help me come up with great strategy but I’m convinced that it does help me think out of the box.

I also just ordered this ‘Creative Journal‘ and I’m REALLY excited to get going.

More Films:

If you take out the things that your heart leads you to (chaos), you won’t be watching too many foreign films.  Work just isn’t going to require that you watch a movie about the formation of Pixar or the downfall of the 80′s art world.

That’s sad, because watching totally out of the way films is one of my absolute favorite things to do.

Here’s what’s on my immediate list:

Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

Waking Sleeping Beauty – This is about the making of modern animation.

So this year, I’m not making any ‘get down to business’ resolutions.  I did get down to business.  Now I need a little chaos back and I know it’s not going to ruin my career if I do that.

desk – $350 from a flea market.  Don’t you love the industrial / farm chic-ness of this?  The bottom is made of metal pipes.

deer antlers – $50 for 3 sets. Flea market.  I love, love, love these and was going to spray paint them white but decided that we liked them au natural.

So this is the first post from my new office.  Well, what should have been my new office until the New Jerseyite’s job went virtual and now it’s OUR new office.  I didn’t handle the news terribly maturely.  In fact, I was terrified of us working in our new office and how that would affect our relationship.  Would our working time suddenly count as ‘quality time’ together and would we take off and do separate things the minute we were done working?  Did he know that I can be a stress ball all day long some days and that’s why I work so well remotely from other human life? Did he know that during my breaks I sometimes watch ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians”?

Then I found tons of articles about couples that work together.  Here’s one that  summarizes six major areas of potential trouble for couples who work together: (1) strife caused by restricted job mobility; (2) excessive demands on each spouse’s time and energy; (3) inability to separate professional and personal problems; (4) role conflicts; (5) spouse competitiveness; and (6) bringing home work-related problems.  You can tell this article was written when tech wasn’t such a big business since ‘bringing home work related problems’ has already been something we struggle with considering both of our lives are pretty much all online.   This isn’t a couples problem, it’s an everyone problem.

On the other end of the spectrum here’s a more modern one that says that especially in the tech world “coworking” with your significant other can be a good thing if you can learn to retain your own personal life and friends. This made me feel slightly better since it didn’t end with a vision of us killing each other in my mind.

I brought all of this up in a 2 hour marathon talk about the subject and the New Jerseyite said “you wake up at 6:30 to work and take a gym break at 9:30 when I start working.  Your schedule is so different than mine so we won’t really be working together all that often”.

A few days later I found this article about a couple who works together (and has) for 20 years and has some great advice on the topic.  For example, ‘don’t separate your work and life’, which obviously flies in the face of most advice but makes a lot of sense.  Her wholistic view of career fits nicely with people in the tech world.  I start to feel even better about our new office.

File cabinet – $60 – This used to be in a bank!  Flea Market.  I also got these old advertisements from another flea market for something like $1 each.  I’m going for kind of an old school Mad Men on a Farm sort of look.

So we’re going to have to figure this out, learn to work together, and if we have a tough day there’s always my favorite addition to our new office:

Confession:  I love hearing about people’s morning routines, particularly artist and writer morning routines but basically I just love hearing how people spend their morning.  It’s such an intimate and creative time so I think what you do with it says a lot about you.

The Unclutterer organizes his morning routine around drinking coffee.  Architect Robert Venturi says he takes notes in the middle of the night so his morning routine is to organize those notes.  Here’s a whole site about morning routines.

When I stumbled on Sarah Wilson’s article about morning routine I decided to share some morning routine love over here.

In the morning I get up around 6:45 and lay in bed for at least 10 minutes looking out the window and waking up.  Then I make coffee and pick out my coffee cup (I have a ridiculously huge collection and they are each different).  I’ll choose an old one from Santa Fe if I’m feeling writer-y or a 60′s mod style if I’m feeling really productive.  I feel like it sets the mood for the whole day.

Then I get back into bed and read a few music, art, movie, or fashion blogs to get my creative mind going.(A few mornings ago I found this page with the best first sentences from novels that I’ve been reading all week)  After that I move onto internet / advertising blogs to see who’s got a new site or a new product or what people are talking about.  I usually tell the New Jerseyite about cool stories or funny things during all this while filling up my cup with a steady stream of fresh coffee.

Then I answer any pressing emails, open up my work docs for the day and head to the gym.  After that, it’s all email, calls, and fun projects.

If you are one of those that’s rushing around in the morning here are 6 ways to shave time off your morning activities so you can squeeze in the paper or a short writing time.   I love the one about setting your clothes out in advance – my mom always did that when I was young and now I do it before I have to go to early morning meetings (turns out outfit coordination isn’t at its peak at 6AM when you usually get up at 7).

What morning routine piece could you never live without?

Made me smile – $18 by Jacqueline Dufresne.

photo credit – from moon to moon

When I saw author of “Eat,Pray,Love” Elizabeth Gilbert speak this spring she said “every afternoon I take a silence bath” in which she basically just sits in a room quietly and hangs out with her cat or falls asleep.  “Rough life” I thought “must be nice to be an author with a gazillion readers so that you can take silence baths every day”.  Sometimes I don’t even get to take a real bath every day and  the only silence I get is after I offer up a great idea at a meeting which is frankly less than tranquil.  So yay for Elizabeth and her silence baths.

But the idea stayed in my mind for months.  I wondered if this silence bath was more than lazy meditation or relaxation.  I began to think maybe it was more of an incubation period and perhaps similar to a process I call “marinating”, the secret ingredient to the strategy process.   Also why my bigger projects take me over a month to craft.   Here’s where it fits into the strategy timeline:

1) Read tons of articles.  See films, listen to music, watch plays.  Look at blogs, people’s Flickr feeds, design. Read more articles, go to speeches, watch TED videos ad nauseum.

2) Start thinking of strategy ideas.

3) Marinate.

4) Think some more. Work on other projects.

5) Develop full strategy.

6) Deliver strategy and listen to applause and general adoration.

Though my marinating is far less silent than Elizabeth’s it is still an incubation period of sorts for an idea.  Sometimes an idea marinates for 5 days and there are some I’ve been marinating on (like opening a coworking space) for years.   During the idea incubation process I do all sorts of other things like work on other projects, write content, or develop new processes for my business but it’s still in the back of my mind.  “If I were this or that brand’s audience…..  what would I want to see them writing about?”  This idea of incubation isn’t new but it is frequently skipped because, well, people are busy and being busy to the point of insanity is important at a lot of workplaces.

Sometimes I walk into an office where everyone is uber busy and think “how do people come up with good ideas here?”.  You can tell people are just totally stressed and running from meeting to meeting (sometimes actually running).  In some cases, this busy-ness seems more of an “if you have time to lean you have time to clean” type of thinking where people feel like they have to be insanely busy or they are a complete failure.  I know lots of business owners that feel this way.  They would feel incredibly uncomfortable just “marinating” on an idea and maybe they already have good ideas.

So why is it so important to incubate?

Because coming up with good ideas isn’t really that hard.  Developing them to the point where they are right for the situation, the timing is correct, the resources are there to complete the idea, and a million other factors takes time.  There are so many examples these days of a decent idea in social media strategy and I can tell the team was probably pressed with a 5 day deadline.  No one was given time to draw from their reading, their experience, something they saw that made them connect dots, etc. and it was put out into the world and was unremarkable.   Ideas that are rushed out the door tend to be the most obvious idea and can be full of rookie mistakes.

If you want to try the silence bath, incubation, marinate start by giving yourself two deadlines.  Make your first deadline where you would need it to be if you hurried the process and then make the second one 5 days later.  Don’t use this extra time as a way to procrastinate the project.  Use the extra days to add in some thinking time and maybe you will add some features, an extension of the idea or a partner that will pop into your mind as a perfect fit.  During these 5 days you can and should work on other things but build in an hour or two for your idea and go to a thinking lunch during that time or spend it explaining your idea to someone who isn’t part of the project to see what kinds of words you are using to describe it and what kind of questions it garners, you will inevitably come out with a better strategy.