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Keep going. Embrace your prison.
Hi, I’m Brian Pombo welcome back to the Brian J. Pombo Live. We’re here live again. You’re in Grants Pass, Oregon. Coming to you today, live from the Orange Office in central Grant’s Pass proper.
And I wanted to talk today about this book, Austin Kleon’s book, Keep Going.
I’ve reviewed Austin’s books before. This one just showed up in the mail. I’m already a chapter in. I got a couple books for Christmas, so I got it. I got a couple, Amazon cards and so bought a few books, so I’m all giddy with excitement that these are great because they’re so quick to read, Austin’s books.
I spoke before about Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work. Two of my favorites. I’m already into this one and I love it. It’s 10 ways to stay creative in good times and bad.
It’s all about creativity.
And when I was growing up, creativity was always described for artistic people. So anybody that was creativity had to do with art or music or things of that sort. It was never meant to mean everything.
For me, creativity is everything.
Creativity is communication. It’s doing what we’re doing right here. It’s putting out content, it’s developing marketing, it’s helping people to create the life they want using business, which is what I do as a business strategist and you might notice I’m dressed a little more formal today.
I had a presentation earlier today with a bunch of my friends. Hi there. If any of you are watching, this book is good for everybody though. This book across the board, whether you’re in business or not, if you want to be more creative, if you want to keep your creative juices flowing, this is a great way of doing it.
I’m going to review. I’m going to tell you just about the first chapter that I read here. The first chapter is all about Groundhog’s Day.
If you remember that movie and he says, every day is Groundhog Day.
I’m not sure if this is showing up backwards to you. On my side, it looks like it’s right. So that’s all that matters.
Every day is Groundhog Day. And it’s a great concept because the whole idea is that routine is a constant anyway. So if you remember in the movie Groundhog Day, he has a day that’s repeating over and over and over again. And he’s the only one that realizes that he’s going through all the same motions every single day.
It’s an analogy for life.
It’s really neat how it comes about throughout that movie. If you haven’t seen in a long time, go and watch it. It’s one of the classics and one of the things he starts doing is building up a routine to be able to survive it.
He has certain things that he does every day and he knows what’s going to happen. He knows somewhat what’s going to happen. So he starts taking advantage of them and starts building up a routine for himself just so he could survive without going crazy.
In the same sense, we all kind of have to do that because we’re kind of all put into motion in our lives of having certain things that happen at certain times. That, you know, we’ve got days of the week and on certain days we have work and uncertain days we don’t have work and we’re all tossed into this world and we kind of have to have routine in some way.
Even if you’re self employed, even if you run things on your own and can kind of have your own day to yourself, you still need some type of routine just to keep things moving along.
He talks about this, it’s a little bit like having a prison that living will really, I mean, living the life we live in work, we’re stuck to certain laws of physics and everything else in a sense that there’s a prison like thing to it.
But what happens when you can design it yourself?
What happens when you decide when you’re going to exercise, what time you’re going to get up, what time you’re going to go to bed as an adult, you should have a relative amount of control over those things. And I know I can speak for myself. Growing up, I always resented having to be told what to do. What to say and meeting deadlines for school and everything. And so when I went off on my own, started doing my own thing, I bristled against deadlines, I bristled against routine and fought it every chance I got.
What I started learning is that I needed a routine.
I needed some type of routine to kind of capture things. And he says it really nicely here. He says a little imprisonment if it’s of your own making can set you free rather than restricting your freedom or routine gives you freedom by protecting you from the ups and downs of life and helping you take advantage of your limited time, energy and talent.
A routine establishes good habits that can lead to your best work.
Also the other way around, if you think about habits help you to create routine and it continues to go and go. And he also mentioned that, it gives you a chance to be able to step away from it once in awhile you can always step out of your routine and you have something to step away from.
But if you’re under control, if you take responsibility for your life and really take hold and develop your own routines, you can help maintain your creative juices in a sense, so great book.
Keep going by Austin Kleon, at least so far I’ve read the first chapter but I have no doubt the rest of it’s good too. I’ll let you know if there’s anything I disagree with it in it, but so far really great book.
Hey, if you are looking to help establish a routine, it’s the beginning of the year right now and if you’re really looking to get a jumpstart and start taking control of your business and taking control of where you’re going from here on out, leave everything behind from last year.
Then I applaud you and I recommend you do it with as much gusto as possible. If you are looking for some help in any of those areas and you think I might be of help, go to BrianJPombo.com and go and check out my options for you there.
And hopefully we can chat some time. If you are in the self-reliance field, I have a very special offer for you. It’s a free concept I call the Dream Business Transformation. You can find that at DreamBizChat.com the link is in the description, regardless of where you’re watching listening to this, it’s DreamBizChat.com though, you can just type it in, go and check it out and come back tomorrow.
We’re back here every day, probably not here in the Orange Office. We’ll probably be back at the headquarters, but in the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.