Strands of Genius: Motivating vs Manipulating, Meditating When Everything is F*cked, Trishasode One
Plus: Orville Peck singing Pink Pony Club
WRITING FROM | Chattanooga, TN
WORKING ON | final design for The Advertising Research Federation Conference
LOOKING AHEAD
July 29-Aug 13 | Chattanooga, TN
Aug 15-18 | Charlotte, NC
Aug 18-?? | Chattanooga, TN
Sept 25-28 | New York, NY
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Greetings from a sunny Chattanooga, where we’re just starting to find hints of fall appearing. It’s cold enough in the mornings to be excited about the hot tub, but during the day we’re still getting those higher temperatures that feel like summer. My garden coach tells me that there is still hope for me and my tomatoes, but I continue to buy my heirloom tomatoes rather than harvesting the non-existent beauties I was expecting. Our cherry tomatoes are… producing. I was hoping to harvest a pint a day rather than a pint each month, buuuuut we’re not there yet. I’m remembering what it feels like to be jealous, whenever I see my sister’s bounty: eggplants for days, and enough cherry tomatoes to harvest in a mode of true abundance: one to eat, and one to save (then one more to eat, and one more to save).
The amount of “mature growth” we have in our backyard means that maybe our vegetable garden isn’t getting enough sun… It turns out that ‘full sun’ means something specific, and that 7am sun does not count towards the 6-8 hours of sun, so when I told my gardening coach “yes we have 6 hours of sun in that area,” I was wrong and we do not. Whoops. She can help with the soil, but she cannot help with the sun. And so, we continue to learn and experiment and grow and we adjust our language so that it’s not “$30 that we spent on failed cilantro” but “$30 that we spent on a learning experience.”
And despite the learning opportunities, we are celebrating some success. Our herbs are doing great. Our pineapple plant is fruiting, at the top of a large pink stem. It’s actually growing a bunch of individual flowerets (apparently that’s a real word) that will grow into one delicious fruit. I’m worried that the stem won’t support the fruit, but I’m trying to remind myself nature has far greater mysteries, and that there’s not much I can do for it besides waiting to see what happens.
With lower temperatures, we’ve been spending more time on our back deck, and we’re taken by the hummingbirds and hawks that like to hang out in our backyard. While it’s been harder to see the deer with all the green growth, we can hear them traipsing around in the trees just past our property line, and the raccoons and possums continue to enjoy all of our compost scraps.
As I reflect on all of the growth in our backyard, it’s hard not to reflect on our personal growth as well. It’s been a season of change, some of which has been difficult to navigate. After 11 years of being full time travelers, it’s been challenging to sit in a season with more stillness. But it’s also been season of abundance, in unexpected ways. Like the cicadas we’re shedding past versions of ourselves, and like the pineapple plant we’re radiating our full colors, reveling in the beauty of our fruity (and sometimes spiky) selves.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Alex&Collin&Lana, our backyard, all of the birdies, our slowly-but-surely-coming-together fire pit area, lamb chops from Publix, the excitement we’re feeling over trying new recipes, long walks, Wolf 359, Empire Pod, Coolidge Park, the soda stream for fueling our sparkling water addiction, Killer Acid x Liquid Death, House of The Dragon (we finally watched season one and omggggg!), Kaos, Slow Horses, & YOU.
On THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 26th Faris is giving the closing keynote at the ARF Creative Effectiveness Conference after a whole list of of heavyweight experts so he better be entertaining. His talk, Measuring the Unmeasurable, will (hopefully) absorb and reflect on all the days content while poking at the challenges and considerations in quantizing creative things and their effects on human emotion and buying behavior.
We’ll be around all day and at the cocktail hour and David Ogilvy awards in the evening so drop us a line if you will be there too, if you want to hang out or say hi.
:: THE LINKS ::
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTIVATION - OR WHAT JFK LEARNED FROM A JANITOR
One of my super powers has always been motivating others. The problem with being good at this as a woman is that you can often be described as manipulative, rather than motivating. But they are two sides of the same coin - it’s just that motivation is seen as a win-win and manipulation tends to imply the loss to one side. So how can leaders motivate, as opposed to manipulate? One passage I loved from this article was: “It required leaders, starting at the top, articulating the organization’s values and mission in a way that helped each person realize why their job had real meaning and value. It’s a difficult challenge. Too often leaders focus on overly tactical communication — the what, how, and when. They lead and manage through tasks, projects, and activities. They value people who are busy in the belief that this makes them productive.” When we lead for a project, we tend to manipulate. When we lead for the people, we can think more about how we motivate. As for the janitor anecdote, you’ll just have to read the article. (BigThink)
A MEDITATION FOR WHEN EVERYTHING IS F*CKED
Jeff Warren’s weekly newsletter is a guided meditation, based on an individual writing in. The headline caught me — because with the presidential race looming, more people out of work, the rising cost of… everything, combined with programs like Bridge (which provided free vaccines to people in the USA) coming to an end, it feels like there are inequalities abound, and it’s hard to get excited about the future. (Plants help with this, though.) I was surprised to open the email and find that this request came from someone with cancer, rather than just someone living in the USA. She wrote in saying that she felt profoundly tired, sad, and scared… powerless and lonely. I loved Jeff’s words and the guided meditation he created for dealing with hopelessness or despair, no matter where those feelings are coming from. It’s from February, but it found its way to me last week, on a day that I really needed it. I hope you’ll find it equally helpful for you, whether your worries are small or large. (Home Base)
TRISHASODE 1
There is so much polarized noise in the AI discourse at the moment it’s hard to come to an informed opinion, in our opinion. People seem to naturally sort themselves into evangelists or prophets of doom but why do we have to take sides in naive binaries? Clearly AI is going to change some things over time, and the true impact of any important new technology tends towards the unexpected. Regardless, this 15 minute episode by Eclectic Method (friend of GS, does awesome things) is both technically impressive and about itself, as a discussion on AI creativity. (YouTube)
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:: PLEASE ENJOY… ::
Orville Peck covering Chapel Roan’s Pink Pony Club. It’s the perfect way to start our day, we promise :)
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rockON,
faris & rosie | your friends over at geniussteals.co
(still want more? @faris is still “tweeting” while @rosieyakob prefers instagram stories)
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. We have a distributed team ourselves, an accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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