Category Archives: Weekly Challenge

4 Steps to Making Your Ideas Happen Like Clockwork

Listening to How to be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life I ran across a story about how the animators of Disney’s Pinocchio undertook a challenge to build a clock like the one’s in Geppeto’s workshop. Originally spurred on by Walt’s comment on seeing the cartoon for the first time “It’s a good thing this is only a cartoon. It would be impossible to build a real clock that works the way they do,” they wanted to show Walt it couldIMG_0585.JPG
be done! The next steps were buying and disassembling two real clocks and seeing how they worked. Then they asked a diverse group of clock makers and electrical engineers if it’s possible. After all that time invested they couldn’t admit defeat and begin making the intricate parts and assembled them the way they thought it would work…and It worked. Walt’s final comments on seeing the clock “ I knew you could do it all along…I just wanted to see how long it would take you.”

This little story illustrates the following points:

  1. Make things visual. Without the cartoon the inception to build something creative would have never took place.
  2. Break things apart and explore. Dissembling the clock was educational and gave the animators insight on how the clocks work.
  3. Seek help; fill in the gaps with a diverse team of experts. The Disney team brought in several experts to assist their understanding of their designs.
  4.  Make it. Based on their best understanding they began building and assembling.

Challenge: Think of an idea or dream you want to make a reality use these steps and share with us how you accomplished it.

Weekly Challenge November 17, 2014: Russell Tripp- Visual Literacy: Encoding vs. Decoding

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Our challenge comes from Russell Tripp, CDO of Performance Posters, a design firm focusing on simplifying learning and development information .

Russell’s challenge follows our dialogue from last week of How we can convey Ideas through Art.

The challenge is that describing (and he purposely separated it as “DE”-“SCRIBING”) an image to someone who can’t see forces you to think of it in terms beyond just “What does it look like?” If you can describe what it says – and that can be anything from conveying the physical feeling of a texture to something as complex as an emotion or something as direct as an instruction – then you have understood it. It’s a way to practice and enhance your own visual decoding skills and, at the same time, learn ways of successfully encoding the same types of messages into your own visuals.

Challenge: De-scribe an image to someone who cannot see.

Weekly Challenge: Despina Yeargin- Live In Your Dreams: A Few Simple Steps

Got dreams? Take action. Oh, but where to begin?

We’re all familiar with the quotes about taking action, but how do we move
beyond the dreaming stage of an idea to the action stage? How do we get that
seed to geminate; how do we transform that dream to a living thing in which we
live, so that (technically speaking) we are living in our dream?

  1. Review the idea and turn it into a story—your story.
  2. Learn the story. Dream it in your bed at night.
  3. Wake up and write your story—pen to paper. No typing on a computer.
    Hold that pen in your hand and move it on the paper. Give it life!
  4. Read your story. Read it. Read it out loud and rejoice in it!
  5. Smile. You are halfway there.
  6. Look around you. Reach out to a few trusted friends. Tell them your story
    and ask them to join you; to help and support you.
  7. Smile. You are very lucky to have such friends. Give them a hug.
  8. Write down the first 10 steps that you need to take. Make them simple and
    make them real. Make them affordable. Make them sustainable.
  9. Put one foot in front of the other. Take that first step. Woo-HOOO!
  10. Smile. You are there. You have entered your dream. Really!
  11. Don’t stop walking.

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Way too simple, right? Yes. Exactly! Keep it simple and you will begin—you will take that first step and you will make things happen. Keep a child-like desire TO DO, instead of the learned habit of waiting for everything to be perfect before you begin. The people who don’t wait for that perfection are too busy making things happen. Join them. I will, too.

Despina Yeargin

Despina develops and maintains social media profiles for individuals and the heroes of small business. She also coach them on how to manage their social media presence and put their best foot forward.

Despina writes. She particularly enjoys the challenge of writing for others. I write copy for websites, marketing materials, and you-name-it. I also offer ghost-writing and editing services, as long as we can spend time and get to know each other, so I can represent you and your work appropriately.

2014, Despina Panagakos Yeargin, a.k.a. @DespiDoodle Find me at: http://despidoodle.tumblr.com/

 

 

Weekly Challenge 10/13/14: Paul Hebert, Why do we fail?

Fall

Quote:  “Why do we fall sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.”-  Alfred Pennyworth

Challenge: Everyone is going to fail sometime at something, the key is getting back into the saddle and continue to ride on!  How do we we gain this resilience? First make connections, just as Bruce Wayne had Alfred Pennyworth in the Batman mythos, we need individuals and groups who can listen and give us those small words that hold us up and keep us going when the times get tough!  You maybe already tough, but if you need a helping hand connect with a group or motivated individuals to help you build your dreams.

Napkin Doodle and Quote inspiration from Beer and Napkin Board of Advisor Paul Hebert

Paul is widely considered an expert on motivation and incentives and has been interviewed by the BBC, quoted in USATODAY, published in Loyalty360 magazine, published whitepapers and articles for HRM Magazine, is a contributing author on the Fistful of Talent blog, founding member of the editorial advisory team at HRExaminer.com, writes at his own company’s blog and is the Social Media Editor for the Enterprise Engagement Alliance.

Paul’s Digital Footprint: