Strands of Genius: Why Zoom is Exhausting, The Never Ending Rave, COVID Strategy Worksheet
plus: our thoughts on...intention, attention and tension
WRITING FROM | Greenville, SC
WORKING ON | a project for Rosie’s hometown, Music City, USA
LOOKING AHEAD
April 16-May 22: Greenville, SC
GENIUS/STEALS OUT-OF-OFFICE HOURS
May 1: 9-10:30a PT / 12-1:30p ET / 5-6:30p GMT | via ZOOM
TOPIC: How Improv Sets The Stage for Creativity & Collaboration with special guest, Jared Grant
Email Ashley@GeniusSteals.co if you’d like to be included on the calendar invite.
**IMPT: We will be playing a game, and you will need your video. If you are not comfortable using your video, we recommend skipping this one, as it won’t be an enjoyable experience for you to call and listen in.**
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
It’s Monday again! Weekends have always been confusing for us nomads who run our own business. Often we might choose to work on weekends because that makes sense for the project and also you get way less email on Saturday and Sunday. Punctation matters, but it also reminds us who out of sync we are, with usual rhythms of life, with ourselves.
Monday. Harbinger of work but also new beginnings.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
quarantine cohabitation, yoga, handstands every two hours, Devs on Hulu, dogs, mountain escapes, sunrises and sunsets over the Blue Ridge Mountains, classic daiquiris, thunderstorms, MarioKart, gardening, supportive and patient friends and partners, compost, families, walks and telemedicine.
Social Media Week was one of the first ever speaking gigs I had (says Rosie), and we’ve long been a fan of founder Toby Daniels and his crew. We’re excited to be partnering with #SMWONE, which will bring together marketers from around the world to confront the emerging challenges of today.
They’re offering a Buy-One-Gift-One pass program. For every pass purchased, they’ll gift one to a small business, nonprofit, professional, or student facing financial hardship resulting from COVID-19. (Have we mentioned that we’re proud to know ‘em?!) ️️
At a glance, a #SMWONE pass includes:
Access to all sessions live via an interactive experience or OnDemand. The program will feature 300 speakers and over 100 hours of content across 11 tracks.
The ability to join session breakouts and video hangouts throughout each day, and network and connect in live chat conversations with over 10,000 registered participants.
Access to reports, session recaps, and speaker presentations available for download post-event.
Join virtually May 5-28 via the #SMWONE website.
If you buy your ticket through us, you’ll get 20% OFF with the code GENIUSSTEALS and you’ll be doing us a solid because we’ll get a referral bonus for sending you.
:: THE LINKS ::
WHY IS ZOOM SO EXHAUSTING
Too much of a good thing is usually a bad thing. Friends of ours who lead agencies are spending 5-7 hours a day on Zoom calls, and they are of course useful, individually. Seeing faces, being present, and working relatively robustly have all drive Zoom’s incredible growth - but fatigue is setting in. Lots of aspects of real life interaction don’t digitize without significant changes in grammar. From context collapse to face on conversation being adversarial, learn what we are learning about Zoom. (Nat Geo)
THE NEVER ENDING RAVE?
Covid has trapped a number of European ravers at a festival in Panama. Some have been camping on the beach for 80 days, some are stranded, some are trying to make the most of it. (The Guardian)
ICYMI: WARC WEBINAR: COVID WORKSHEET
We had more than 3,000 registrants for our recent Warc Webinar — Push, Pull Pause or Pivot: Strategy in the Time of COVID. Thanks to all those who joined us live, and for those who missed it, Warc will be sending a link to the recording for registrants. We have a companion worksheet which is available for download here: COVID Strategy Worksheet - School of Stolen Genius. If you’re prompted to pay, enter WARCWEBINAR. (School of Stolen Genius)
:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT - THE TENSIONS BETWEEN INTENTION AND ATTENTION::
How are you faring? Where we focus our attention will ultimately change who we are, and all of our attentional contexts have been radically altered, regardless of our particular situation. Attention leads us, we follow. Communication and behavior need various levels of understanding, from language to transmission, with intention being seen as the key. “I didn’t mean that!” decries the partner, or the president.
Does intention matter? Or what was said, or what was heard, or the consequences of that? The gap between what we think we are saying and what they hear is not simply about fidelity of transmission, it’s about the inherent and insurmountable space between your interiority and the world, the actions you take, and how other people understand them. You can never know what it’s like to be someone else, things that seem obvious to you are not, and there is an inherent tension created, between the impact we want words to have and the impact they do have. In the gap is literature, and criticism, and fights, and therapy, and advertising.
Companies want to be clear and unambiguous in their communication, especially nowadays - we sell this it does this please don’t take offense - but that’t not how effective communication works. It’s in the ambiguity that emotions are generated, it’s in the ambiguity of a tagline or line of poetry that meanings open up, multiply and can be made relevant to every individual context. It’s why pop songs say nothing specific - so they are about everyone and everything. Conversely, country music, as Gladwell observed in his podcast, is powerful because of its specificity. Every song is about a particular situation, with specific names, and that gives them the power of story. Humans understand things across a spectrum, from abstraction to anecdote, and those modes are equally reflected in advertising. From a tiny personal vignette to loud, abstract statements and dynamic typography.
Be intentional about what you pay attention to, and we hope you are managing your tensions.
:: AND NOW… RUPERT IS IN A STRANGE PLACE ::
We’re still here, on the other end of this email, but forgive us if it takes a little longer than usual for us to respond. We appreciate you, and hope you are staying safe and as sane as possible. We’re sending you big hugs from Greenville.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob & @ashley hang out on instagram
Know someone who could use some inspiration in their inbox? Send ‘em our way!
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. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, 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.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)