Getting to Be the Anti-Naysayer

For the second time in the last year, Mike and I had the opportunity to do a tag team guest lecture at Western Michigan University on entrepreneurship in the arts. It’s such a fun thing to do, as we often get so consumed with the day-to-day drone of our jobs that we forget, until we say it out loud to people, that we are living pretty super cool lives.

Both times we’ve gone in prepared to give students a glimpse of the daily grind that goes into making a living in a creative career, and both times, I’ve been so surprised by the reactions of the students, which are, overwhelmingly, variations on how we inspired them to follow their dreams. Oh. Okay.

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Nobody Has Any Idea What to Do Anymore

If you live in Michigan or anywhere Michigan-like, you know that the weather has just given up. We had the polar vortex and then five winters worth of snow and warming and then snowing and then raining, and now the world is covered with something that isn’t really snow or ice, but more like a white Slurpee with gray highlights around the mangey edges. Oh, and it comes in urine flavor too, which is in great supply in my backyard.

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Making Your Mark: How do you know what you’re doing matters?

This tweet floated past me earlier today and caused me to pause mid-scroll:

https://twitter.com/FastCompany/status/428570261605351424

The full quote from actor and comedian Aziz Ansari, which I found when clicking through to FastCompany is, “I just want to produce one movie that makes a mark–like Will Ferrell with Anchorman, or Judd and Steve Carell with the 40-Year-Old Virgin–so no matter what happens, I can say, ‘That really captured my voice. That’s the kind of comedy I was trying to do.”

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