Tag Archives: inspiration
1. What is your role at CM? How do you spend your days?
I’m an Account Manager on the Nissan USA account based in Nashville. I spend my days equally divided as a quarterback, cheerleader, referee, defensive line and offensive tackle. I’m never on the sidelines. (Sorry for the sports analogy).
2. What is the greatest thing about CM culture?
I think the greatest thing is you’re really able to chart your own career path. If there’s something that interests you, I’ve found management is pretty open. You can go to them with an idea and they’ll say, “Ok, make it happen.”
3. What drives you? What are you inspired by?
I’m driven by passionate people. People who zig when others are zagging. I love it when people share my philosophy of “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission…”
4. What was your greatest accomplishment of the past year?
1. What is your role at CM?
I am a Front End Developer on the Infiniti account in our Toronto office. On a day-to-day basis we are either expanding the current system to accommodate all the nifty things the clients want or fixing bugs (doh).
2. What drives you? What are you inspired by?
I love programming. It’s as simple as that. Being able to tweak a tiny little line of code and instantaneously see the results that it brings to the screen is inebriating. Programming is a delicate mix of science and art, requiring perseverance and creative thinking to be successful. Being a programmer is a constant strive to optimize, refactor and make the solution perfect. The thirst for perfection drives me.
3. What are your passions/interests outside the workplace?
My interests outside of work all mostly have something to do with music. I play in bands, play solo, produce music, whatever I have time for. Other than that, I just love spending time with my cats, my family, my girlfriend and my friends. You know.. the usual!
4. What is the greatest thing about CM culture?
People talk to each other. At a lot of other places people will bang their heads against the wall trying to find a solution to a problem, instead of simply walking over to their coworkers and asking their opinion. At CM, no one is afraid to ask a question and everyone is willing to lend a hand.
Read More
“I went to a talk that really inspired me today” was the sentence heard around Austin for the duration of the SxSW Interactive conference. Conversations overheard offered glimpses into the emotional rollercoaster of inspiration taking place. Dialogues turn philosophical when privacy or the implications of the great WWW on children are discussed and career paths are questioned. Outside of the philosophical, excitement is built in this really cool way when sentences start with, “What if I …” and end with a new idea.
I went to a talk that really inspired me the other day. The brains behind the3Six5, 6 Items or Less and Victors and Spoils held a panel on crowd-sourced projects that ask a community to be creative, but within the project’s parameters. I’ve been rolling a project like this over in my brain for about 5 months and came out feeling energized and excited. Inspiration is personal and can feel like you’re being pinged by the universe to do something awesome. The voices of the inspired rang throughout the conference locations, so I know I’m not alone.
On the way back to wherever we all came from, moving from inspiration into action is the tough part. My father, always quick on the draw with his words of wisdom, used to say, “It’s really easy to do nothing,” but why waste this kinetic conference energy on taking the easy road? Harness what’s making you tick, whether at SxSW or not, to help you get over the action-hump with a couple of intuitive, but useful tips.
1. Do something to put whatever it is you’re dreaming about into action immediately.
If your creative juices are flowing and nothing is there to catch them, you’ll likely lose your momentum. Do anything to move towards your goal and you’ll be closer than where you were before you were inspired. If you’re going to start a Web site that compiles Twitter photos with the same hashtag, buy the domain name. If you’re going to start a blog, register your Tumblr or Posterous. (By the way, is it P-oe-ster-us or P-ah-ster-us?) Make some sort of commitment to yourself via the Internet that you’re going to follow through.
SxSW = Free sh*t everywhere!!! That is what they do here at SxSW, give out free sh*t (and talk about interactive stuff). If you’re uber-lucky, it’s a new Mac Air or Limited PS3, but if you’re just simply happy-go-lucky it’s free beer, corn on the cob and a slider.
I realized this almost instantly and made a personal, executive decision to abandon my inconvenient and uncomfortable 10 lb bag of free t-shirts, stickers, books and buttons for the much more ergonomic 10 lbs of Tex Mex and beer in my belly. Once I made that decision, everything became so much clearer to me as I moved through town. No longer was I distracted by people trying to hand me paper and product. Weighing the option of a free poster was no longer a decision that I had to make, because behind every person holding a poster, there were the sights and smells of BBQ (and the guy with a giant billboard strapped to him reading ‘Free Food’).
FedEx trucks handed out Fed Ex branded Pizza boxes, MapQuest filled 6 buses on a Roadtrip to Saltlik, Firefox had a free ice cream truck, PlayStation opened a bar with gaming stations and free beer, Hot Mmmpanadas courtesy of GroupOn, Free Breakfast and Bloody Mary’s at EBay Hangover Party, The CNN Grill, Squarespace, FourSquare, Pepsi…. the list went on and on.
If for some reason your nose, eyes or maybe even your two legs failed you in finding one of these stops you could always use your two thumbs… #freefood, #freedrink, #sxsw, foodspotting.com, sxswfreenoms.tumblr.com, etc… there was no shortage of information on the true food network.
Sexy digital. Those 2 words don’t really pair together very often. We hear about sexy adverts or sexy product design all the time, but digital isn’t really thought of that way. It’s often functional, it’s sometimes fun, it’s frequently structured- but it doesn’t have that va-va-voom s-e-x-y of the more obvious creative mediums. And if you think about it, from a tool, personalisation and possibilities POV, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
When I think about all the places digital could go I think of the Never-ending Story. Vast kingdoms, mind-bending experiences, Sebastian realising he was in the story all along…Oh, the possibilities! Experiences that can be so much more surprising, charming, authentic and emotionally in-tune with the individual than nearly any other medium.
Sexy doesn’t come from a spray of cologne or a pair of cufflinks, nor does it come from a place of desperation to be liked. Tarting something up with a new logo or colour scheme does not cut the mustard, nor does a social media campaign for a brand that needs bigger help. Sexy is a way of carrying an attitude–a swagger, an elegance, a charm…and those things start from within. They start before the wardrobe door is opened to dress the body; they are built on a foundation. They’re built on everything we do, from the ground up.
The newest Apple Store that just opened in Austin on March 11 will be closing in 2 weeks… as planned.
It’s no surprise that the company that ‘thinks different’ thought differently about how to position themselves (and the new iPad 2) to the 13,000+ temporary SxSW residents of Austin. Once again, they did what now seems obvious… they found a great retail location, installed hardwood floors, painted the walls white and put oversized product hero shots in the windows… and they created this ‘pop-up’ store in 3 days.
What resulted was what we’ve now come to expect from the launch of any new Apple Product (read as slight upgrade): long line-ups, sold out product and lots and lots of conversation. The interesting part however was being there to witness the process of how that conversation radiated. From pre-opening tweets about a possible store (due to unusual amounts of Apple hooded employee sightings) to the posts and critiques about how Etsy had an even better temporary store, the conversation about the Apple Pop-Up moved like a wave into the presentations of keynotes and material of stand-up comedy and podcasts.
