Lately I've twittered a few links to my Flickr pictures titled, "At This Moment." The wonderful immediacy of communication on the web lets me share those moments with our friends. There's been so many immediate moments versus reflective moments in the past few months that sometimes I have to stop and remind myself to take a look around, see where I'm at, and make sure the ship is pointed in the right direction.
Zadi's recent blog post got me thinking about how to evaluate the past few months. I really liked Tim Shey's comment on Zadi's post that the reason some videobloggers are so hard to define is because they are really artists. At the beginning of any industry it's always the artists who set the tone, and it is the artists who show the way for others to follow.
Smashface is six weeks into its second production now, this one for Cyworld, the social networking site. We were very lucky to be able to partner with Next New Networks to give JETSET a stable base and a supporting team, and for now it looks like we will continue to work on a show-to-show basis to find the right partner for each concept. I really like the flexibility of this approach, and it keeps Smashface small and agile.
Building Smashface is going to be a multi-pronged approach. We will be doing niche market shows like JETSET, consulting/production gigs like Cyworld, and large-scale immersive entertainment produced in partnership with major studios. At the moment I'm only planning about six months down the road. In my opinion, it's unwise to plan beyond that for danger of filling the cement buckets around our feet. In the online world where things shift on a weekly basis, you have to be ready to adjust your thinking, pick up your feet, and march in a different direction. Being fast is far more important in this world than being big.
This is the third online business I've been a part of building. The first was with a company called NetCreations, a web 1.0 marketing company where I was lucky to be exposed to the business savvy of Rosalind Resnick and the marketing and programming smarts of Ryan Scott at a very young age. The second was with VisualMax, where I spent the past 3 years working with Steve McBride handling clients large and small, and also delegating authority.
Zadi and I—the artists—are the ones on whom the responsibility now falls for heading a company and doing the strategic planning. We have a lot of help with the latter from UTA, who we signed with back in December. The team is everything, and we feel very fortunate to be where we are right now.
So where are we? That was really the point of this blog post. Despite some misplaced energy (understandable), some financial pressures (expected), and some road bumps (unexpected), it seems to me like the choices we have made have been the right ones. What's interesting is that to reach a certain point you have to work like you have never worked before, until you push yourself so hard that you find out you can do things you never thought you were capable of. And once you get to that point, the "foot in the door" so-to-speak, you have to forget about everything you have accomplished and re-double your efforts to continue moving forward.
It's that re-doubling of your efforts when you're already at the brink of exhaustion that can really knock the shit out of you if you're not ready for it. That's where you find out if you can really persevere, where you really get to know who you are and where your limits are. The trick is just to stay focused. It's very easy to let things start unraveling and allow all that work go to waste. Maintain your perspective on things. Once you realize that life will go on and the sun will rise the next day no matter what happens, it's much easier to see things for what they are. That, to me, is the very definition of focus.
For a few days over the past week I think I lost focus, but today is a new day and I feel like the ship is pointing in the right direction. You work on building that ship until it is strong enough to withstand any manner of rough seas, and sometimes it just takes a little more time in dry dock than you want. You know, in re-reading that last sentence, I think George Carlin said it best when he wrote, "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."
See? Focus.
rox said:
I can certainly relate Steve. What I find challenging is balancing the desire to stay focused, with the desire to let big U (universe) deliver up stuff even better than I can imagine. Being agile enough to make a hard turn when opportunity calls from out of the blue takes guts, since life is still not offering guarantees. And it's why I focus on process as much or more than result. If I am enjoying the process, then even "diappointing outcomes" were fun trips.
Bill Cammack said:
It's interesting to me that Rox is the first response to this post. I've been "living like Rox", in a way, for the last month. My life is largely fun & games. I do what I want to do when I want to do it. Nothing more, nothing less. Recently, I've dedicated my "life" to understanding what it takes to output a weekly show. Making the show itself is a breeze. It's the pre-production, preparation and paperwork after the fact, including posting, tagging and "advertising" that blows everything out of proportion.
On top of that, I like to document places I go and people I hang out with. That leads to more paperwork on flickr or my other video shows. Then, there are blogs I like to read and post on. It got to the point where the paperwork was taking about as long as the hanging out did to generate the pictures and video in the first place.
I bring this up because of "re-doubling of your efforts when you're already at the brink of exhaustion". As 'exhausting' as my schedule became, I hung out with Rox for the day @ BlogHerBiz, and during those hours, she received a fresh batch of more than 80 emails! :O The re-doubling of efforts and pushing past exhaustion is one thing... but when you're "dancing as fast as you can", your own abilities necessarily peak and have to be limited by a completely different parameter.... Time.
Once you know everything's running like a well-oiled machine, there's still the issue of how many hours there are between now and your deadline. Travel has to be accounted for. Rendering time has to be accounted for. Sleep is a flexible parameter, but only to the point that you can still operate at maximum effectiveness if you deprive yourself of it. If not, it's actually better to cut bait and knock out for a few, wake up refreshed and get back to business.
It all comes down to focus, prioritizing, project selection, understanding how much time you REALLY have to do things, and knowing "when to say when". Overscheduling leads to overextension. Sometimes it's better to do your best on 70% of your opportunities than to do an ok job on 100% of your opportunities.
Steve Woolf said:
Rox -- all we can do is make a plan and leave room for change. :)
Bill -- where is *really* gets interesting is when you have business and creative partners that rely on you, your work takes you away from your home base, and you realize you've reached a point where doing it all yourself is no longer an option. That's a whole different set of skills that have to be cultivated beyond the creative ones that got us to this point.
Illus -- *unsticks foot* -- looking forward to seeing what you put out there...
Rick Rey said:
This is one of those insightful, reflective posts that makes me take a step back and look at the big picture. A lot of people can learn a lot from your experiences, Steve, and I hope you continue to write pieces like this as Smashface grows.
I agree with you about the importance of staying focused. It's so easy to get distracted, especially in the online sphere where so much is going on simultaneously. By some accounts I've had a lot of failures in my life... dropping out of grad school, starting an ecommerce biz that dried up, a frustrating stint in the real estate industry. Each time I refused to settle for mediocrity and I pushed forward to the next challenge. My old graduate advisor used to say "the winners are the ones who lose the most --- they just keep trying until they get it right."
Chuck Olsen said:
This is the kind of under-the-hood, behind-the-Twitters post I was hoping for. :-)
I've been to the brink of exhaustion and beyond quite a few times, too. It does have a payoff and take you to the next level.
Right now I'm trying to find balance. I don't want to be 110% consumed by any one thing now. In a way I'm glad Lori isn't so immersed in this world, because I have to pull out of it and spend quality time in the backyard or going on photo walks.
I'm also realizing I need to work on saying "no." There are too many projects, and it's important that I spend as much of my time on what I'm passionate about and enjoy. As long as money is coming from somewhere. Yeah, that always complicates things.
Steve Woolf said:
Rick -- there's no way of knowing where you'll wind up without trying different things. So few people in the online video world come from a filmmaking or entertainment background. We're artists, developers, designers, psych majors, you name it. That's one of the reasons this stuff is so eclectic and richly varied right now. It is art that is being informed by life experiences. On TV and in film, it is art being informed by art that came before it. A very different aesthetic.
Chuck -- sometime with both Zadi and me invested in this stuff night and day, it's really easy to forget that actual life takes place while you are tapping away on a keyboard. We've had some trouble with balance, though it's something we are aware of and have been choosing to allow to slip out of balance. Means to an end, I suppose. Saying no is real power, you're right. I think it was Chris Brogan who said to me that saying no is really sayng yes to something else. I think that's a great way to look at it.
Bill Cammack said:
** D.I.Y. **
Interesting point about expansion past foreseen boundaries. Something as simple as "removal from home base" removes you from the ability to be 100% efficient. Even if you bring everything with you that you need to work on projects, your environment's different, things look different, things sound different, your mood could be different, there's travel involved where you might have to drive during the time you would have been concentrating on something....
On top of that, depending on what you expand into, it could call for another round of learning. I'm waiting for FCP6 to come out, because their new "Color" application is so completely different from adding the filter "Color Corrector 3-way" and clicking a couple of buttons that I don't have the first idea where to start. The only way to achieve the level of proficiency I'd like to have with that app is to spend the time to jump in and work with it, which means displacing time I would have been spending on other projects.
It's completely different, repetitively producing the same thing, or at least the same format within 'the known'... and producing something progressive while concurrently stepping into 'the unknown' and trying to make it happen in both realms.
** Failure **
Failure isn't so important as long as you learned something. That was then, this is now. It's today. Today is your chance to do something. You can't do it yesterday. As long as you're ok, and you have the ability to think, take action and apply yourself, there's always another chance for success.
** Balance **
From what you've posted, I see where time and expansion constraints can pressurize 'balance'. The video-creation (or whatever you want to call it) industry isn't 9-5. There's no whistle at the end of the day. You have a deadline, and your plan is to "make air". Period. You might spend a lot of time with someone that you like, but all of that time is focused on the business. I think it's better than doing everything by yourself or working with people you don't like in order to get work done, but again, you've given us unique insight into potential futures of present actions and "the perils of success".
Justin said:
In my opinion, staying focused is easy, its getting started and then continuing is what is hardest. I'm lucky enough to have Microsoft word at Eye Key Ah . So in between customers I can write is I choose and I know that once I start writing the day will go by so much faster. But usually I don't. But, on those few occasions I do write I tend to give shittier assistance to customers because I need to get back to the story before I lose it.
Now at home, when writing, you have the online world just saying "click me, click me". I'm beginning to think one of the only ways around that is to get a typewriter... It tends to help Mike a lot. (Shout out to Mike)
Well I guess all I spoke about was writing. Obviously this post wasn't just directed at that but, well. I'm too distracted by the online world to to go back and re-write anything.... Oh cool someone just twittered
