Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

Taking the first step in anything in business or life itself is concurrently the easiest and most difficult. It’s also the most important. After the first step, you will naturally move to the next step, as the initial hurdle is always the highest, and things will begin to flow.

Learning to overcome the roadblocks in the beginning phase of something new is vital to getting into a proactive mindset and diving right in. As Tim Jahn sagely advises:

“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful is the acknowledgment of weakness. Bring your weaknesses to the front of the line, acknowledge them, and learn from them. Think of them as a valuable tool rather than trash to take out.”

Let’s first map out the roadblocks that may be stopping you from taking the first step on whatever is next for you – whether it’s a new business idea, marketing strategy, form of art – anything you’re considering. After, we will go through some activators.

Writers block, unsuccessful brainstorming sessions and other creative stopping points generally occur from one of two things: stress or overthinking. Stress I’ll leave you to handle on your own – but overthinking is something I can help you with.

It’s a problem that happens to the best of us, but it’s curable. The first step is a brief understanding of the physiological reason why overthinking is harmful:

A recent article from Scientific American outlines some interesting research:

Trying to concentrate on monitoring the quality of your performance is counterproductive because the cerebellum, which controls complex motor tasks, is not consciously accessible.

I have a theory about creative individuals – that they have infinite potential reserves, if they figure out how to access them. It’s difficult to see this sometimes because while we have incredible moments of inspiration and flow experiences, we also have plenty of downtime where we are seemingly unable to extract from our inner creativity. The thing is, if you’re a creative person of any sort, your internal inspiration is perpetually available if you know how to access it. What I mean by this is even on days you’re feeling stressed and/or unproductive, you still have reserves you can tap at your whim.

In the beginning of 2009, I compiled 22 smart, inspirational quotes from bloggers to share with you. Today I thought it would be fun to mash-up the quotes with visuals to make them come alive (be sure to view full screen):

Sometimes we get caught up in trying to create ideas that are truly, 100% original. And yet this can prove difficult due to the very nature of the web, where on some days it seems as if everything possible has already been done (even though this is not true). There are an incredible amount of Facebook, iPhone and other platform-specific applications churned out daily. There are even more e-commerce businesses, blogs, newspapers, and niche-specific social networks vying for your attention.

Saturation in terms of raw numbers is an understatement.

image credit: aussiegall

Both personally and professionally, I’m a huge fan of Creative Commons. It actually goes beyond being an advocate – I license all my art under Creative Commons and encourage other artists and creatives to do the same, at least for some of their works. I’ve written up some of the tangible benefits before, and for it that post received coverage on Techdirt (which has more than 800,000 RSS subscribers) as well as on the Creative Commons official blog.

All the great imagery I use in my blog entries is from talented people adding their works to Flickr under a Creative Commons license. It’s all free PR for those artists taking advantage of the open nature of the system, and concurrently helps my blog content be visually appealing – it is a symbiotic relationship where everyone wins.