LTieu-30dayscreativegenius

This month I decided to watch the video interviews on CreativeLive by Chase Jarvis and get some daily inspiration, motivation and wisdom. I’ve decided to blog about the series, logging my thoughts and takeaways…

Day 20 creative genius – Brandon Stanton.

Humble creator of the Humans of NY, Brandon Stanton is a photographer, writer and speaker. Even if you don’t know his name, you have probably heard of or come across his work. He has so many followers and he is really straightforward about always focusing on his work, the stories of others and not himself. It’s not self-promotion.

Definitely an interesting perspective and a bit different for those of us who do personal work and have a lot of our identity in our business, so it’s difficult to be so behind the scenes.

One thing he said about social media that he dislikes is that it seems as if people are promoting themselves by showing how great their lives are… or how much better their lives are, because it’s all curated in social media. That is a harsh yet true statement, that often what we see is just a small window of the person’s life. Perhaps looking at someone’s social profiles is just like the new way of flipping through magazines and books of what people choose to publish.

On the flip side of things, I know that we all don’t want to share everything about our lives, impossible, right?

The big takeaway from this interview was when Stanton emphasized outworking people. As with others in this interview series, he talked about how your effort – how much you work – is what you can control. So he vowed that he would work hard. He also talked later about how following your dreams is about working hard. It’s not an excuse to not work…

Just enough… not enough.

Stanton was talking about how you have to work hard and obviously spend your time on your dream… if that’s what you claim to be following! True dat! In way, it’s like tough love, to really drill in the point. I totally understand that it’s easy to slip into excuses… so we need to be checked.

You can watch this interview by signing up for FREE – 30 Days of Genius at CreativeLive. Enjoy!

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