Patrick Swayze

Posted on September 15, 2009 by Scott Gould

I opened BBC News this morning to read the sad announcement that Patrick Swayze has passed away, no less than 20 months after being told he had only weeks to live. I remember thinking months ago that it would be a sad day when this day did indeed come, and now that it is here, I feel I must say something about this man.

I’m not one for celebrity. Hence I have no problem writing about Patrick Swayze – because he isn’t one of these new celebrities that clog up newspaper stands and gossips columns across the world. Personally I think glossy magazines are soul destroying material that promote fake lifestyles that no one can ever attain to, and spur a culture of ‘me me me’ rather than ‘we we we’.

Even in this photo above, on his face there is a smile of satisfaction – not a vain pout of pride. There is a distinct lack of gloss, and a notable presence of genuine joy. On his arm is a wife – his companion and life partner – whose hand he holds like the treasure she is to him.

Patrick was the antithesis of everything about celebrity that I despise and rather stood for what a man should stand for:

He was a man of hard graft
A man who used his talents and pursued his dream, despite the bullies who mocked his ballet dancing
A man of character who stayed faithful to his wife of 30 years – who didn’t need a divorce to order to gain new publicity
A family man, who raising his kids with morality, a sense of responsibility to society – not as brats with too much money and no little sense
A man who made mistakes and had issues, but overcame them, rather than wallowed in them
A fighter, who fought that ugly thing called cancer for 20 months

Today I genuinely morn his death, because there is now one less of those quality men in our world.

I just hope that in reading, this inspires someone, somewhere, to take his place.

Give Yourself To The Season

Posted on September 7, 2009 by Scott Gould

Let me begin by saying that this post will share with you something that has become very close to my heart. My story pertains mostly to church life, however, now in my mid-twenties I face similar lessons in business – and I am certain this post will be applicable to most people in most life situations.

As everyone knows, our childhood is spent wanting to be older. And as the more ambitious and aspirational of you will know, it often doesn’t stop after teens but continues throughout every stage of life. At some point, the pointer tips the other way, and our desire turns to a longing to be younger. Whether it’s a different age, location or station in life that we desire, it seems to be a dissatisfaction, either big or small, with the current season that we are in.

When I was 16 and beginning to discover my desire to be a pastor and a preacher, I was disillusioned with visions of grandeur – of being a world class preacher, with a giant church and miracles following me everywhere – all within a few weeks. My latter teenage years were filled with the continual frustration of never being where I wanted to be – always looking away to a future where I was fulfilling all my dreams – and not understanding why I wasn’t fulfilling them now. This frustration could’ve been useful and productive if it spurred me on to study harder, to help people more, to seek advice more, yet I found it was detrimental, for it only discouraged me. Rather than preparing, I’d spend my time agonising over the ‘why nots’ and reasons that my dreams were not being actualised immediately.

Of course, I wasn’t completely stifled. Perhaps I exaggerate when I say “it only discouraged me” – but we all know what it is like to be distracted by the future and not focus on the present. And I found that day to day it wasn’t a problem, but there would be particular times, particular pressures, particular issues, that would bring out this behaviour.

After a good while my Pastor, Michael, sat me down and gave what has been one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received or even heard. It went like this:

Scott, you are in a season of preparation and planning for the future. Give yourself to the season.

I don’t even know if he knew the weight of what he’s said, but it rang true in my ears the moment those words left his lips, and instantly I had a change of mind.

Give yourself to the season. You are never a teenager at high school again – don’t wish those years away but enjoy the life with little responsibility. You are unlikely to be at college and university again, and certainly not again in the strength of your teens and early twenties – so maximise your studying, suck the marrow out of the educational environment you are in, thrive in learning. As my wife and I celebrated our fourth anniversary in June this year I was reminded again that the season of marriage without children will soon end, and we will no longer have the dexterity and flexibility of time to give to business, church and spare-of-the-moment whims.

I recently celebrated the first anniversary of Aaron+Gould, yet amidst the joy of successfully navigating a start-up in the midst of a recession, again there was the frustration of not being where I want the agency to be. Yes, it’s good to have vision, drive and a good sense of ambition, but my reminder to myself, despite how much I’ve learned about ‘faking it till you make it’, I have to tell myself to give myself to the season of start-up – not the season of award-winning agency.

Also, the advice wasn’t just enjoy the season or make it through the season; it was give yourself to it. Dedicate yourself to fulfilling the requirements, getting the right outcomes, to gain from this season what needs to be gained in order to move on the next one, and not have to waste time by returning to it.

As I said in starting, this is close to my heart, but this is only my experience over 25 years. I’m keen to know how you’ve found this to be true, if not, whether you disagree and why, and if you have any tips on giving yourself to the season.

Photo courtesy of ViaMoi

A Work In Progress

Posted on August 26, 2009 by Scott Gould

Yesterday was great fun. My post attracted plenty of heated debate and controversy, as well as some great discussion.

But what stood out to me was the criticism directed directly at me, because in my post I was confronting behaviour on Twitter that I used to partake of myself. So let the confession begin: I have retweeted myself multiple times in day. I have spent all day on Twitter. I have created noise in an attempt to cut through the noise. And I have followed over a thousand people in the attempt to get more followers.

Hands up. I did it.

The point is, as everyone will recognise, doing things wrong is part of learning to do them right. Take my doodle on the left. Moving towards the destination isn’t a straight line. It is one of going off track less and less, learning each time you curve away how to recognise it sooner and get back on track quicker. It is about staying balanced in your motivation.

That’s why as a husband, a blogger, a marketer, a friend, a pastor, a business man, as I was as a child, as I am as man, and one day will be as a father, I am:

A work in progress.

Is this a cop out? No. Being a work in progress isn’t license to do what you want without consequences, nor is it an escape to avoid responsibility. What it means is as you press as hard as you can towards the goal, take responsibility as man (or woman), and carry the consequence – as you do these – you know that there is room for growth, and you give yourself this room. It also means that you don’t take yourself too seriously.

Integrity is being who you say you are. I have been outspoken about clarity and action, and now about noise. I’ve made my commitment to you as part of this community. I’ve already said I’m winging it. Now I’m telling you I’m a work in progress too. Are you?

5 Steps For Making Quality Decisions

Posted on August 16, 2009 by Scott Gould

Last week, Olivier Blanchard, inspired by a post from Amber Nasuland, posted a great piece on ‘What Won’t You Compromise On‘. Having written about the same thing myself last week with practically the same title, it was very pertinent as the ideas were fresh in my head and I was still molding my thoughts into some kind of written model.

Suffice to say Olivier has motivated me to take something that has been in my drawer for a few weeks and map it out.

Let me begin by saying that life has inherent value, and no matter how a person chooses to live their life, they are still valuable and precious. The person who drives themselves to be as much as they desire to be, and the person who happily goes through life in simplicity, are both equal in their inherent worth. One may add more value to others (and I’m not saying which one, because driven people often live for themselves), but this does not diminish their worth, and if someone is content to live where they are living at then this also does not diminish their worth. Of course, the issue of opportunity and exposure is another thing altogether that I will address at another time.

Where are you heading?

It is the case that an individual is like a ship on the seas of life, and if they do not purposefully use their rudder and manipulate the natural conditions to move in a decided direction, or use the anchor to stay fixed in their current position, they will be subject to the wind and waves of life and end up wherever they take them.

I have long lived by making what I call ‘quality decisions based on personal convictions’. In other words, I make decisions about what I will do and won’t do, and where I will go and won’t go, long before I ever have the opportunity to enact my decision. I am of the opinion that if one does not decide in advance that they will not compromise an area of their life that they have made a quality decision about, then when the time comes, your emotions will make the decision for you and generally you will find it hard to stand up to your inner conviction. Quality decisions are like boundaries that mark out our land and make intangible convictions into tangible and measurable markers

Amber asked the question, “what won’t you compromise“, and whilst Olivier gave a very eloquent and thought-through answer, I want to examine the process that we go through in order to establish the compromisbables and uncompromisable – in other words, how do we make quality decisions?

The 5 Steps

1. We begin with content. Any decision we make is based on the available content, not necessarily our desire. With many decisions in life, our desires often bow to our knowledge. As a child at school I had no desire to learn maths but the repetition of the lessons gave me content to at least know how much I could spend on penny sweets at the end of every school day. In order to secure not only more knowledge in our content-base, but also experience, we need exposure.

2. Content, however, is not enough for a quality decision. Clarity makes content relevant by realising requirements, responsibilities and return. Lack of clarity produces ignorance; there is an understanding of content but it has not been fleshed out with reality. When I, in arrogant ignorance, made decisions about my ability to perform Shakespeare, I had content, but no clarity. I vastly overestimated my own ability, basing my perceived capacity to perform solely on a pound of knowledge, where an ounce of experience would’ve faired me far better. Graduates face this problem all the time; whilst they may have astounding content, they often lack the reality of clarity in comparison to their peers who have work experience.

3. The next step is conviction. This is far deeper than feeling or emotion, both of which change over time, in accordance to circumstance, and also depending on what mood you are in and how under-caffeinated your are. The conviction to love my wife runs deeper than the emotions of anger and frustration, which if they had their way by themselves, would ruin the marriage. A conviction, then, may take years to build. But it also may take seconds. What I do know is I have experienced both. The love I have towards my wife has grown over 8 years, whilst my conviction regarding the relevancy of the experience economy happened over the course of 20 minutes as I watched Joe Pine at TED communicate his thoughts with crystal clarity. Of course the former is a greater conviction than the later. As in the instance of a fight in a marriage, a conviction runs deeper than temporal emotions, but it also is a highly emotive thing and can inspire you to great things. When I consider all the great people I look up to, they were filled with conviction. Thomas Edison said he tested no fewer than 6,000 combinations to create the lightbulb – I bet he had depressed days, but his conviction was stronger than those temporary emotions.

4. In order for conviction to be sealed, a quality decision must be made. A quality decision takes the intangible conviction and makes it tangible. My conviction that I love my wife informs a quality decision I have to consciously not turn my head to look at an attractive woman. My conviction and belief in Jesus informs a decision to pray, read my bible, and write down notes in my diary everyday. My conviction that people are precious results in my conviction to spend time pastoring and mentoring certain people every week without fail – as I have done with hundreds of people over the last 9 years. Decisions that are made without conviction are fine for everyday activity where no conviction is needed. But life decisions that are not based on this process lack a spine and will gleefully change when the circumstances or emotions do. A businessman with passion but without conviction is a dangerous thing, because passion will fade, but conviction runs deeper.

5. Finally, a quality decision enables that most precious human resource, action. Not only does action solidify the decision, but also assists in the negotiating and tweaking of your decisions. Action, then, acts as a review tool. The reality is that we will compromise on most things, not necessarily because we weaken in our conviction, but because we learn about ourselves as we act and therefore can adjust our decisions to be more effective and efficient. It is better to act upon our decisions and adjust them, than wait for the perfect set of convictions and decisions.

So to wrap it up:

Content –> Clarity –> Conviction –> Quality Decision –> Action

This isn’t just something I’ve pulled from other bloggers onto a page. I have lived this message for over 12 years and tested its worth. It has served me well and I hope it does the same for you.

Photo credit Kyknoord

A Time For Peace, A Time For War

Posted on August 10, 2009 by Scott Gould

In running Aaron+Gould, and in a leadership role at my church, I have a fair few battles to deal with on a weekly basis – all around people. People are the most wonderful thing in life, yet they are also the most complex. Whether it’s work, family, marriage or friends, there are always battles in your relationships. We all have critics, complainers, contenders and competitors.

Battles aren’t wrong. Disagreement, fall outs, and then making amends is like breaking a bone – when it heals, it makes the relationship stronger.

What I’ve been pondering this weekend is how do you decide what battles to fight, and which to leave? Is leaving a battle the same as loosing it? Or do you only loose if you fight and don’t win? Furthermoor, what makes a win?

I’ve always considered that you only go to war when the spoils are worth the endeavour.

That means you need to assess the scale of the battle and the potential scale of the outcome. Battling to get my wife to stop buying more shoes probably will take a lot of my emotional energy, and doesn’t have any spoils in the short term because she just doesn’t see the hundreds of shoes in the closet! However the potential long term outcome of the battle could cost me thousands of pounds over the coming years.

Determining long term spoil from short term spoil requires you to play the ‘what if’ game. What if we carry on spending money on shoes every month? What if I continue letting my child have their way even if it’s a small thing. What if I continue letting my critics go unchallenged, even though no ones listening now? What if I stopped that bully at work always forcing their opinion?

Playing the what-if game requires you know yourself and your goals pretty well. You don’t need to be precise, but you can’t be vague.

What do you guys think? How do you decide what to fight for?

Life Never Closes Its Doors

Posted on August 4, 2009 by Scott Gould

I loved reading Leonard Speiser’s words on TechCrunch on Sunday: “Business hours are dead. 24/7 is the new 9 to 5.” As an often too-connected individual, I must say I am glad that I’ve embraced this principle and moved my agency from time constraints to a non-geographically bound entity with international clients.

Whilst I’m only beginning to grasp what this global village is all about, most of us know that life, unlike business, never closes its doors. Putting your feet up at the end of day might mean your colleagues aren’t watching you, but your partner and/or kids certainly are. And whoever it is that you are in a position of influence with – children, friends, colleagues – the fact is that they always have their eyes on you.

George Ambler put it this way: Leaders live in a fish bowl. There’s always the human, or the cat, looking in to see what you’ll do next. Life doesn’t close is doors.

Now I think we need down time. And for sure, we’ll let people down because no-one’s perfect. But that doesn’t make me shun or despise the fact that people are watching me. To be given influence in that way is a privilege, and I’m of the opinion that if someone wants to watch me, then I want to make it worth their while. For me? No. For them. Because if they’ve granted me the honour of their attention, then I want to give them the honour of mine.

Leading 24/7 is hard. But if I have something to give, then I want to give it. If I can add value, then I want to add it. Like Roosevelt said:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…

So, whether people are watching you to see how you succeed, or are watching in the hope that you’ll fail, decide that you’ll give them a good show. Or, should I say ‘a great experience‘?

Switching Off

Posted on August 3, 2009 by Scott Gould

I’m currently reading The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and amidst the mixed reviews I’ve received, I’ve been enjoying it and found this gem while I was skim-reading last Saturday:

An abundance of information has created a poverty of attention

Now being a marketeer I love ideas that spread, so a saying that rhymes like this is right up my street. But I also find it overwhelmingly true. In my rant last month on the commoditisation of content, I made the ascertion that we are drowning in content. Tim says it far more beautifully, and reveals the consequence of our high level of media consumption: attention poverty.

So let me get down and get real. I wake up at 6am every morning and, as you know, pray and read my bible. But recently at 6am, I wake up and I’m thinking ‘blog’. I actually have a rule for no work between the hours of 11pm and 7am which I call the ‘eleven-to-seven’ rule – but last month I have all too often worked during those hours. When I’ve picked up a book to read, or fancied going for a calming walk, I’ve ended up flipping open the laptop and going through my to-do list.

In short, I’ve found that I’ve been unable to switch off. And it’s because I have so much information during the day, my mind is buzzing when I want to rest.

The whole point of me blogging is to sharpen my thoughts by using them to help others, and I know that you learn just as much (if not more) from the scars as you do from the successes. In exchange for my vulnerability, and the jabs and pokes I’ll get for my honesty, I’m asking a favor from all of you who read this – whether by RSS, as a note on Facebook, by email, or if you’ve stumbled here by mistake…. I want you to leave a comment and share with me how you switch off.

So if you’re not on my actual website, then click here, and let’s talk about this!

The Measure Of A Man

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Scott Gould

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVp-5Zq9iJ0

Richard Branson posted this video at the beginning of the week and I immediately retweeted it. If you don’t know who Archbishop Desmond TuTu is, he was instrumental in the pulling down of apartheid in South Africa. I have all the respect in the world for this man who has stayed the course, and in his old age continues to speak out against Mugabe, was well as against the western countries that do nothing to intervene.

This video, whilst on one level speaking in regard to the much publicised Islamic treatment of Women in Sharia Law, for me speaks about the measure of a man, because multitudes have watched and will watch this video, and smile as they know they do not hit their wife, or hurt women, and therefore feel justified. But I want to ask every man in the world a question…

How do you treat women?

I know many who will not hit their wife, but they will cut her down with harsh words, belittling her so that this poor excuse for a man can have some feeling of power. I know other men who will not harm a women, but talk trash about her at the office all day and gossip behind her back.

Some men will treat their sister with respect, but treat any other women as if she were an inanimate object to attain and throw away. Our magazine racks and television screens overflow with women paraded as animals who live only to fulfill lustful desires, men ranking them solely on their ability to gratify their insatiable quench for pleasure, as if they lack any other inherent value such as personality, strength, tenderness and warmth.

I see and hear men talk about women like they are chickens crammed into some coop in some battery farm, harvested for their bodies, and their well being cast aside as collateral damage and an unfortunate side product. My own cousins tell me they have lost count of their ‘conquests’, laughingly and arrogantly confessing that somewhere, in all likelihood, is a child they’ve unwittingly fathered.

Oh, they don’t hit women, but the bruises left on the women of our nation are clear. The broken bones of our fractured society are not accidental. The nine and ten year old girls in miniskirts, hunting around the shopping mall for boys, are no coincidence. I’ve seen single mother after single mother come through our church, and despite all the hurt than men have inflicted her, cannot imagine any other way that men would desire her than for her body and what it can do for them. And I have seen with my own eyes that their children, in turn, grow up with the same impression.

And it is with unbelief that, that when I ask and seek to bring understanding, not one of these men considers they have done any wrong.

How do you treat women?

Keeping Your Head When Everyone Else Is…

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Scott Gould

This week is busy. We have two new interns in the office at Aaron+Gould, and Women In Touch (my client and church initiative) big yearly conference this week.

It’s weeks like this, where you have to manage multiple things at a high stress and time pressure, that easily break your daily routine and to-do system. Normally at this point I’d have scrapped my system in favour of trusting no one with any delegated tasks and therefore working 48 hour days to get everything done. The house becomes messy, the office a tip, and I obsessively cut out everything else in order to check off every last task.

Not this year. Thanks do an integrated GTD system, and more specifically, Remember The Milk.

A big part of GTD is context. The idea is to create lists based on context – office, home, phone calls. Now because I list every project with a hastag and then the task, i.e. ‘#Touch – Print off posters’, I have set up a smart list that searches every task with ‘#Touch’. The result is I have a list dedicated to every task for this project, rather than sifting through my ‘Next’ or ‘Waiting For’ lists. I can see everything I have tagged as ‘delegated’, who I’ve delegated it to, as well as ‘video’, ‘dtp’, etc, so I get a great 20,000 to 30,000 foot view on the project.

Along with Evernote as my external mind, I have found my system (I’ll share more details with you later) has stayed solid and helped me delegate and manage far better. Did I tell you I’m also writing a viral campaign proposal this week?

The Most Precious Human Resource: Action

Posted on July 1, 2009 by Scott Gould

Content is a commodity. Take your pick of entertainments, places, ideas, tinned foods, holiday destinations. The thing with content is it can be digested very easily – most often like soft porridge oats that require no chewing – and requires little action.

Action. The most precious human resource in the world. It is the people who have acted upon social injustice that have changed our world. Those who started with doing just something that have shaped our history. It those who acted upon a dream, a vision, who pulled what was previously thought impossible into the realm of realirt.

Amidst the commoditisation of content, the measure of clarity is its ability to provoke this invaluable resource.

If I could say one thing to every person (and particularly, every blogger) in the world, it would be this: you are educated above your level of action, and before you learn or blog another thing, I want you to simply use the information you already have and unleash your actions.

But because I can’t, I’ll share with you how I have learnt to help those around me activate action. It’s all about an IDEA:

Inspire – show them what part they can play, not necessarily in the whole world, but in their world.
Decision – help them see it starts with a decision to do.
Example – point them to a great example. Better yet, be the example.
Action – ask them write down right there and then the next step… and commit to do it.

As one wise man succinctly put it two thousand years ago, “don’t merely listen: do.” Here’s to a generation of acters.