Every Sunday, I re read a suite of blog posts that I collectively refer to as my rules of life. I hope that by re reading them weekly, I will absorb, and ultimately adhere to them at all times. Perfect practice makes perfect.
This post, by the infamous and awesome James Altucher, is my favorite. The final paragraph sums it up quite nicely:
"My only New Year’s resolution for 2013 is to dot the landscape of my life once more with question marks instead of periods. To turn judgments into queries. To turn “this” into “that?”. To make every problem a maze. To be like a six year old. The next time the President of Chile wants me to get run over by a tank I might say yes. Or I might ride away on my spaceship and french kiss the angel on the moon. “Lips are beautiful,” I might say, before finally falling back to Earth."
I often joke with friends (and girls) that I'm an overgrown child in a sandbox who just wants to play with toys and build sandcastles. I definitely have quite a few computing toys: Google Glass, Leap Motion, Oculus Rift, iPad, Nexus 7, Apple TV, Retina Macbook Pro, iPhone, and Fitbit Flex. By the end of the year, I'll have Atheer, Meta-View, and MYO too.
I love dreaming about what I could do if I were to combine these toys. Before I heard about Meta-View and Atheer, I duct-taped Leap to my head while wearing Google Glass to see if I could simulate Atheer and Meta-View. Sadly, it didn't work. Leap's sensors weren't designed to be moved.
I've been trying to apply that same framework to marketing and self-branding. What if I could reach a million people, what would I say? What if everyone that I know had an opportunity to wear Google Glass? What would they think, and what ideas would they have? What would they think of my ideas? What if I could spend $50,000? $500,000? $5,000,000? What would I do?
When I think about what I could do with that money, I start dreaming about big parties, big events, big everything. Big big big. I love dreaming. Once I think I know what I would do with that kind of money, I can translate that into a message. The what isn't important. The message, the feeling, the memory is important. How else can I get everyone else to feel, to remember me, my idea, or my insanity? Who else have I read about who invoked that same feeling? How did they do it? Did they have $5,000,000?
From there, I work backwards. I cut. I revise. I edit. And after enough thinking and iteration, I usually discover that I can achieve my desired result at 1/100th, and in some cases 1/10000th the cost. You don't need money to achieve big results. You just need big ideas. Ideas are cheap.