Below is a short video of Ralph Bakshi discussing entrepreneurial animating during tough times: He punches Disney in the groin for poisoning a generation of animation. Chastises young animators today for being "lethargic, uninspired, terrified." Instructs whippersnappers to get out there, band together, starve a little and create something new. Great stuff. (via: Fanboy)
Bakshi is the creator of such notable films as Fritz the Cat, Wizards, Lord of the Rings (animated version) and Cool World. Bakshi makes reference to Coonskin a couple times in the above video. It was produced in 1975 and was notable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was banned pretty much everywhere for its racial themes. It also innovatively melded live action, photography, and stylized animation.
I almost put T-Mobile in the same category as Charter Communications, insurance companies, and other monopolistic utility companies that maximize profit through, a phalanx of mouth-breathing customer service drones, labyrinthine technicalities, flimsy legal authority and general hassle.
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The new design for EventVue was just publicly released. Well, it's not that new. OrangeCoat delivered artwork and the templates in the summer months and almost forgot about the project until the redesign was announced yesterday. It still looks sharp to me, even after languishing on the shelf for months. I really dig the sliding effect applied individually to the logos in the footer -- even though that wasn't specifically part of the plan. Happy Thanksgiving America!
I think we've been tricked by the veneer of lucky people on the top of the heap. We see the folks who manage to skate by, or who get so much more than we think they deserve, and it's easy to forget that: (a) these guys are the exceptions, and (b) there's nothing you can do about it anyway.
And that's the key to the paradox of effort: While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don't get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.
Seth's post ties in with one of the key points made in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled by Randomness -- a book I recently devoured and highly recommend as a mild antidote to The Tipping Point. Taleb points out that we tend to see only the exception -- the black swan or the winner -- and are largely blind to the losers when assessing risk and probability. For example, if there was a coin flipping tournament with 1024 contestants, one guy would necessarily win 10 consecutive flips. You'd be tempted to think that he's endowed with some special gift of foresight. Heck after the 10th win in a row, the flipper might actually start to believe he's untouchable. But it's just random chance combined with a large pool of coin-fliping automata. Same goes for a lot of other luck-driven sucess stories. "I owe this success to my passion determination and vision. I am goal oriented and never take 'no' for an answer." Sounds like something an exceptional CEO might say when his company gets purchased for $70 billion? The trouble is, there are probably thousands of similar CEO's who fit the same mold and lost. You never hear about them because no one writes best sellers about Tommy Bowden people who had a good run but things never fell into place. Furthermore, this line of reasoning also casts a lot of uncertainty onto someone's track record. So what if you had 10 successful coin flips? Does that mean I should invest my life's savings on the outcome of flip 11?
I think with the gloominess of the current economic mood, it's good to be reminded that effort is something we can control and often profit from. Luck is random and not bankable (banks are hardly bankable these days). Work smarter and prepare for luck. Effort isn't a myth, and I hope karma isn't either.
I don't care if Neil Diamond has a rough voice these days, I wouldn't walk out of his concert. Unless there were packs of ravenous wild dogs with bees in their mouths and when they barked they shot bees at you. That aside, Neil Diamond felt he delivered a poor performance in Ohio recently -- causing some people to leave in disgust. What happened next? Neil refunded all 11,000 people and gave a personal apology. That's probably about 750 thousand dollars in tickets. And I'll bet the stage crew, promoters, and others didn't work for free. So, my guess is that Neil just ate about 300k or so.
Let this be a lesson to anyone about how to treat your fans, customers, clients, and friends. His legend, along with that of Jimmy Carter, continues to grow.
