by Nathan Hartswick

So today is the first day of school for most kids in Vermont.

It can be exciting, terrifying and nervewracking, and that’s just for the parents. Think of how the kids must feel.

In honor of the day, can I brag a minute?

Here are a few things a teacher recently told us about our 12-year old daughter, who starts 8th grade today:

• She wrote 15 articles for the internal school newspaper last year and we had no idea. The teacher said they were always interesting, well-written, and (this is big, for our kid) on time. We were floored.
• She was grounded multiple times from computer use, and each time when her friends pressured her – hard – to use the Internet for gameplay during a free period at school, she refused, saying, “Trust is a hard thing to get back. I want my mom to trust me.” She never gave in.
• She got very passionate about the issue of cyber-bullying last year, writing papers on the subject and even speaking to the class about the dangerous things it can lead to. The teacher told us, “I really only thought about bullying during the two times a year we’re supposed to talk about it in class. But your daughter was so articulate and knowledgeable, it made me want to learn more. I went out and bought 3 books on teenage bullying, just so I could become a more effective teacher.”

What do you say when you hear stuff like this? I suppose my mother put it best when I told her this story:

“Isn’t it great when your kids turn into people you really like?”

See those two people on the right over there? We’re both writers.

That’s what makes us good at marketing – not only copywriting and editing, but other things like strategy, communication and branding too. Being a writer means knowing how people tick.

We like this business, but it (like everything else in life) can leave little time for our personal creative writing projects. Recently, we were lamenting how long it’s been since either of us dedicated any significant time to that work. Then, opportunity knocked.

I was asked if I wanted to join a writer’s retreat in Lincoln, Vermont. One where for four days, your only job – from morning to night – was to work on your own creative projects. I roped Amy into it and we signed up together.

What a blast. We had the run of the place, a charming old inn with plenty of nooks to hide out with your laptop. We were welcomed into a wonderful group of artists who knew exactly when to encourage you, when to distract you, and when to leave you alone. We ate meals together, swam in the river, and shared work around a campfire at night. Some people even brought instruments, which provided nice background music while we worked.

After adjusting to the extremely foreign idea that there were truly no other demands on our time, we got in a groove. Amy got a few really sizable sections of her novel done (which is excellent, by the way), and I finished a new children’s play. By Sunday morning, although we missed our kids and our significant others and our pets, everyone had a hard time mustering the desire to return to the real world.

But we had to come back. The best part is, though, we have all returned with a little more spark to make these projects a priority in our lives. And for that (and everything else) our heartfelt thanks go out to Kevin and his remarkable group. We can’t wait to do it again next year.

Or hell, maybe even next month.

Link.

So, I’m back. You may not have noticed it, but I pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for about six weeks in June and July.

This is because: A) I was house sitting for some friends out in the sticks, and B) I had mono for a month and a half.

As miserable as the experience was, it forced me to be away from anything resembling work for a very long time, and as a result I started examining my lifestyle pretty carefully. In the last year, I’ve been taking on too many projects (paid and volunteer), and getting sick a lot more often.

So I took the hint, and made a half-dozen resolutions I thought I would share here, in case you’re struggling with stress and ill health too. I decided to:

1. Eat better. A major part of my recovery from this illness was due to a much healthier, nearly-all-raw diet I adopted. Now that I’m feeling better, I’m continuing the diet. Gradually, I’ve been replacing everything even remotely unhealthy in my house, from breakfast cereals to shampoos. Most surprisingly, I haven’t had – or missed – my morning cup of coffee in two months.

2. Take more breaks. Being on the computer – whether it’s for work, social media or just wasting time – is addictive, especially when your office is your living room. Nobody needs to be connected to the internet every waking minute – and I was. I’ve resolved to step away from it a couple times per day, and leave it off at least one day per week. And I’m going to adopt a similar restraint with the iPhone.

3. Meditate. I used to meditate regularly to center myself. As I became addicted to technology, I got away from doing it, and energetically, I’ve felt sort of rudderless. It’s time start grounding myself again. And to that end…

4. Get outside. I like to hike, bike, kayak and ski, and though I always intend to do these things, I never seem to make them a priority. I’m not going to become an outdoorsy person overnight, but I am going to at least make the effort to get in some more physical activity.

5. Say “no” more. There are certain things people need from me (my daughter needs time with her dad, for instance) that are non-negotiable. But doing free video projects for people, acting as everyone’s personal therapist, punching up friends’ resumes when my marketing plate is already full – I need to stop doing that stuff. It won’t kill me to start saying “no.”

6. Follow my passions. It seems so basic, and yet it’s always the first thing to be sacrificed. It’s never easy to carve out time to write a play when you’re in the middle of six other things, but I’m getting too old to neglect what I love any longer.

What about you? If a miserable, perspective-altering virus took you out of commission for six weeks starting tomorrow, what resolutions would you make?

Here’s hoping you “revolutionize” your industry this year. (Hopefully you won’t need muskets & bayonets.)

Click the pic to the left for a fun video, and thanks to Jib Jab for the fun tool.

- A&B

“So, I gotta ask. What does it feel like to get tased?”

“Hurts like hell,” the wiry policewoman replied.

I was bartending an awards ceremony for the South Burlington Police Department recently, and took the opportunity to ask a question I’d always wondered about. The woman continued:

“Of course I had to be a big shot. They only require you to get the one-second hit in the training, but I went for the full five.”

“Wow, that’s hardcore.”

When I asked about the scene in The Hangover, she just shook her head at me, muttered, “Yeah, that wouldn’t happen,” and ambled away with her Pepsi, chuckling.

It got me thinking. If something requires a certain amount of pain, why would you ask for five times the amount?

We all do this in our daily lives, I think. I’m sure the policewoman could have justified the five-second hit, saying it somehow made her stronger, wiser, a better cop – but there’s a line between pain that causes growth and pain that just causes – well, pain. Isn’t there?

What about you? In the work you do, do you bring unnecessary pain upon yourself? Ask for more projects than you can handle? Take on more than you need to? Justify it as unavoidable or important?

And, why the hell do we do this, anyway?

We’re all going a million miles an hour these days, and many times our friends, family, clients and partners can get lost in the shuffle.

Take a cue from the tortoise in this video. First, slow down. Then, look around.

Notice somebody struggling.

Finally, give them a hand. (Or a head. Whatever they need.) You’ll both have a better day. We guarantee it.

So I have this buddy John. He has two adorable little boys who could not be more different from one another. One, the 5-year-old, is intellectual and wise. Sarcastic and acerbic. The other, the 3-year-old, is a bulldozer, a prankster, and a force to be reckoned with. Put them together, John says, and it’s like living with the Blues Brothers.

I hung out with the boys over the weekend recently, and watched as they discovered that game kids have been playing ever since there were grassy inclines on which to play it: rolling down a hill.

(Side note: you’re never too old for that, by the way. My girlfriend says she fell in love with me when I pointed to a hill we were walking by and said, “Let’s roll down that.” We did, and the rest is history.)

John’s kids quickly invented a variation on the game of rolling down the hill: rolling down the hill together. In a single, hugging mass of flailing arms and legs.

There was plenty of concern surrounding this activity among the adults (“Hey, don’t grab his neck when you roll, buddy, okay?”) and a bruise or two, but the two of them never stopped giggling the entire time. These two kids clearly have a lot of fun together, no matter how different they are.

Are you starting a business with a partner? Making a new friend? Courting a girl? Ask yourself if you could roll down a hill with that person. Depending on your situation, that might be a literal question or a metaphoric one, but the point is we don’t get a lotta time; the people you choose to share it with should make everything you do more fun.

And I think you’ll agree: playing a game this way makes it way more fun…doesn’t it?

In our department there was this 19-year old kid named Jeff, a graphic designer who would come in, knock out his work in about 10 minutes, and spend the rest of the day swilling Starbucks and messing around with his own projects. He was so young and undervalued that he was the only designer there working on a PC laptop instead of a Mac. He was a glorified intern.

I always liked the guy, probably because he used to laugh at all of my jokes, so I kept in touch with him after I got fired from the spam company. (Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t even have the satisfaction of quitting.) Maybe I can get him a job somewhere, I thought.

How charitable of me, right?

It turns out that, uh, he didn’t really need my help. Jeff soon went freelance and started doing some of the most insane 3D work you’ve ever seen. When I needed a designer on something and called to offer him the project, the answer increasingly became, “Man, I’d like to, but I have this deadline for Mountain Dew…”

The lesson? Just because someone is young, or inexperienced, or seems lazy at work doesn’t [necessarily] mean they’re worthless. Like a prodigy in a classroom full of average kids, Jeff was just bored. Little did the spam company know he was using their time (on the clock, of course) to hone his craft – so he could leave them in the dust later on.

So if Jeff has the time (many times he does not) and you can afford him (I certainly can’t), I encourage you to hire him. As you’ll see by his site and the ridiculous 3D demo reel below, that kid I sat next to turned out to be one helluva designer.

Although he still can’t spell for shit – so I have that on him. And in my book, he’ll always be a snot-nosed little punk.

We stopped to read it. As you can see by the photo, it said “Big Lots.”

Unless that’s slang for a Winooski-based gang or some fat white Vermonter’s extremely lame rapper name, I assume the artist was referring to the department store.

The words are accompanied by a smiley-face, but it’s hard to know whether this graffiti was intended as praise or derision of the Big Lots brand.

I guess there’s always the chance the phrase was spray-painted there by the marketing department at Big Lots. In which case, nice job, guys: it reminded me I need to pick up some cheap plastic lawn furniture for my porch this summer…