Powzot

I had a brilliant idea today, and I thought I’d share it with your so we can all run into the future as rich, successful, sexy people!

So here’s what we’re going to do at our new company. Using the awesome power of the internet, we’re going to get a bunch of lawyers, management geniuses, accountants, you know the brains of any goodoperation. Now these people are all highly trained and really good at what they do, and we want them bringing their expertise to our new business so we can do awesome work for our customers. So what we’re going to do is get as many of them as possible in the pool. (This is called statistics.) Then everyday we’re going to post what we’re doing that day on our website, and let them all compete to come up with the best management strategy, accounting, legal advise, etc. The lucky winners will get big prize money (up to 33% of what our client pays us!), and everyone will get a chance to show just how talented they are to us and our awesome big name clients. The promise of making a name for themselves will keep them coming back, also they could win the prize! Sure, not everyone will get paid for their hard work, but the cream will rise to the top and we’ll get the best ideas possible by leveraging a huge talent pool. Best of all this is going to make our costs drop drastically, (because we only have to pay the winners) which means we can pass the savings on to our customers and of course the 5 people it takes to run this company. Man we’re going to be rich!

This is the business model of the future people. Get in on the ground floor now because that’s the only place a living is actually going to be able to be eked out.

If you’re not a writer (or if, say your mother ,or other family member, isn’t a writer like mine is) then you probably don’t know about NanoWriMo. The NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth (get it?) event that takes place in November. (If you want more info on the event check out www.nanowrimo.org, this ends the plug and lots of parentheses segments of our show… ok, really just the plug part of the show.) Even if you did know about it, you may have thought “I’m not a writer, this is a writer thing. I’m going to go draw pictures and play with colours.” Well there Jack…or, um… Jill, I submit to you (I had this awesome college professor my first year who always prefaced all his questions with “I submit to you…”, I don’t think it sees enough play in our modern times.) that writing a novel,  or even a few short stories but more on that in a minute, is one of the best things you can do to keep your designerly skills sharp.

Crazy you say? Well maybe, but lets think about this. Being a designer is more than just making things “pretty” and having mad photoshop skillz. Being a designer is about telling a story without words…unless there’s typography involved, then I guess it’s about telling a better story than the words could tell alone. Whether you believe it or not our picture-centric brains can actually benefit from trying to string words together to tell a story the same way we arrange things on a page and pick colors or fonts. Your story telling skills are just as important as your photoshop or drawing skills, actually they’re more important because you can probably teach a monkey how to manipulate photos and we all know it takes 1000 monkeys to write Shakespear, so you do the math.

Now, speaking as someone who is going into his 3rd NaNoWriMo and has yet to write a novel, I’ve adopted some alternate rules, because they’re not the boss of me!! This is my plan, feel free to try it out if you’re totally overwhelmed by the idea of writing a novel. You gotta walk before you crawl, right? So go write something this year, even if you only commit to write 5,000 words of non-fiction, take some time in November to work on your story telling skills, you’ll be better for it. If you want to discuss NaNoWriMo strategy, plan a meet up in the Seattle area, or want to tell me I’m a total idiot, feel free to do so in the comments.

Tony’s 2009 NaNoWriMo plan (Steal and use as needed):

• Write 50,000 words.
• Tell a story via multiple short stories, maybe with an overall theme or a few reoccurring characters, or maybe not.
• Tell people who don’t like it “You’re not the boss of me!”
• Rise, Repeat as needed for full body and silky shine

If you want to watch my novel’s progress using the above strategy you can so so at my NaNoWriMo page