#andy sparks

[howtallcelebrity-blog]

All about Andy Sparks : height, biography, quotes

How tall is Andy Sparks

See at http://www.heightcelebs.com/2015/12/andy-sparks/

for Andy Sparks Height

Andy Sparks's height is 6ft 2.5in (1.89 m) Andy Sparks is born: May 27, 1980, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Andy Sparks is best known for "H2O" Best Known For Movie: H2OHeight: 6ft 2.5in (1.89 m)Born: May 27, 1980, Ottawa, Ontario, CanadaFilmography: H2O (2004).Astrological Sign: Gemini

[memphiswill]

Up and coming new talent Andy Sparks! Andy is an indie artist that is relatively unknown, I just love his new song “The Difference.” Check him out!! Modern day Elliot Smith.

[memphiswill]

(via https://soundcloud.com/andy-sparks-8/the-difference?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=tumblr)

Great new song by Andy Sparks THE DIFFERENCE!!! Andy is a indie artist that has a unique sound. He is a great musician and songwriter. He reminds me of a modern day Elliot Smith!!!! 

[cyclopsfixed]

Andy Sparks | DREAMS at Cyclops Fixed

http://cyclopsfixed.com/2014/07/andy-sparks-dreams/

Andy Sparks | DREAMS

Color me impressed! More HERE!

[muxe]

[realandysparks]

Losing a Battle, and Focusing on Winning the War — Part IV: Recovery

Part I  Part II  Part III

Once I realized the jig was up, it was time to tell my team, pick up the pieces, and figure out what else I was going to do with my life now that LaunchGram was over.

Telling my team was no small task. In fact, I think it was the scariest part of the whole thing. I was afraid I’d lose my friends. Not only did I want to prevent that from happening, I wanted to make sure create the best outcome possible for everybody. It was my responsibility to make the transition out as smooth as possible.

Closing down a company is a lot like a breakup. Sometimes the circumstances dictate that you can be friends, other times they don’t. I remember getting lunch with my mentor, Christian, a month or so ago when I was in the thick of this decision. He told me, “When the nights get hard, double down on the people in your life.” So that’s what I did. I doubled down and focused on turning my co-founders back into friends.

I wanted to wait until after New Years’ Eve so everybody could enjoy their holiday, but after who knows how many glasses of champagne, vodka and whatevers, and a few PBRs, the emotional side of me came out and spilled some of my conclusion with my co-founders. I could have handled that better. I took each of them on a walk the next day to talk about next steps. Everybody knew it was coming to a degree, and there was an odd sense of peace mixed with turbulence in the air that’s hard to describe. We were simultaneously afraid, but confident we’d figure things out. Throughout the whole process, I had a number of off-the-charts incredible mentors, advisors, and friends who helped me through the process. Despite feeling awfully alone at times, I was tremendously lucky to be surrounded by support. Each individual had a [very] different opinion on what to do, but at the end of the day it was up to me to make the call (see: Feedback Fatigue). After the decision was final and I slowly filled each of these people in, a couple even offered temporary employment as a bridge to help us figure out what sort of future we intended to build. To those of you - you know who you are - thank you. When a dam breaks, the village below does not simply stand up and rebuild. It takes time, and the village is really never the same afterward; some things are broken. Similarly, when you lose a battle, you come out on the other side changed. There’s a tendency to come out with a higher aversion towards risk and there’s a high likelihood you’ll feel lost. I sure did. But I also came out stronger and smarter - able to read the battlefield and see things coming before they hit. That said, I questioned what my role in the business world was: was I a product guy, a marketing guy, a sales guy, or something else? For so long, I had identified with being a founder who wore many hats, some of which fit better than others. Then I remembered the beauty of The Avett Brothers’ line, “Decide what to be and go be it.”

The beauty is that you don’t get to decide what to be just once. You have to repeatedly revisit the act of deciding what to be over and over again. If you’re really going to do what you love, you have to be vigilant in making sure you know what you love doing each day. I saw a TEDx talk in Washington D.C. a few years back that talked about this idea. The speaker called it, “prototyping your life,” as a way of figuring out what you’d like to be so you can get on with being that. In his recent NYT bestseller, The Social Animal (which I HIGHLY recommend), David Brooks said,

“the truth is life is about producing failure. We only progress through a series of regulated errors. Every move is a partial failure to be corrected by the next one.”

Losing the battle with LaunchGram was a “regulated error.” I’ve emerged battle-hardened, entirely more mature and significantly humbled, but not knocked down. What I really learned is that life isn’t about fighting one battle. It isn’t about throwing one big hail mary pass. It’s about a series of focused and purposeful battles.  It’s about knowing each battle is part of a larger war to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. “Deciding what to be,” “doing what you love and doing it more often,” and “enjoying your work,” are all things worth fighting for, but fighting is hard. It’s emotionally draining, and it’s even painful at times. But it’s possible. You just have to fight. And people only win battles when they’re fighting for what they love. So fight the battles, because the war is waging, and it’s one worth fighting for. It’s a war for a better future and after all, the future is ours.

Thanks so much to Danielle Morrill, Nick Seguin, Jarrett Klingbeil, and my Mom for reading drafts of this post.

[realandysparks]

Losing a Battle, and Focusing on Winning the War — Part III: Panic

Part I   Part II

Around Thanksgiving I panicked, and I don’t panic often. I decided to spill my guts to my Dad, who I’m lucky enough to be able to count as both a mentor and a friend. He helped me realize I had two options: close it down, or double down and give it another shot. I convinced myself afterwards that I was just hallucinating, I would go back and set some goals for numbers, and we’d figure this thing out. 

But as I said in my last post, doubt is the disease of the determined, and now it had infiltrated my confidence on too deep of a level. I expressed my concern to a mentor, and was advised to bury it, put it back behind the dam, or at least to make sure my co-founders didn’t smell my fear. Keep it to yourself lest the disease shall spread, I was advised, at least until I was sure. Loneliness doesn’t begin to describe what I was feeling. My two best friends, the people I needed the most, were the ones I couldn’t talk to. It was somewhere around this time that a good friend from my past sent me a message saying that he had quit his job that he hated, found one he loved, and finally felt confident to talk to me again. I was completely perplexed. This was a guy I’d pick up the phone for at 4am, despite having not seen in a couple years, and he was telling me that “since I was doing what I loved, he felt embarrassed.” It was life’s ultimate ironic sucker punch because I was going through mental and physical agony. Sleep was basically a cruel joke I taunted myself with by telling myself I was in control of it. I kept up appearances and told everyone I was fine. If men don’t cry, CEOs definitely don’t. At one point, I would even go into my room and turn off the lights after a certain point in the night just to convince my co-founders I wasn’t an insomniac who was about to break down. One day before Christmas, I decided to take a step back from the whole picture. I asked myself, “If you could be doing anything, regardless of money or time, would it be this?” I had asked myself this question before, but then the answer was no on both counts, and I really panicked. All of a sudden, every single doubt, every single tiny inclination towards this being the wrong battle to be in just rushed in. It felt like I was getting waterboarded by negativity, fear, and self-doubt. The dam just utterly collapsed. I wanted to cry, but out of some stupid BS macho ego mindset, I just couldn’t. I felt empty, exhausted, and isolated. I tried to make sense of it all. I tried to pick up the pieces and see if I could salvage the company, the product, and the team. Not only did all doubt permeate my every thought, all the people I would let down rushed crippled me from making decisions and having important conversations. Previously this fear of letting down my peers, parents, mentors, advisors, investors, and friends were hidden behind the dam under the pretense that I was going to succeed and damn anybody who said otherwise. I realized that I had investors. I had co-founders who were best friends who I’d be letting down. I had put my life-savings into this company. That was supposed to be a down payment on a house. My friends moved across the country for this. I sacrificed some really great relationships for this. My Mom and Dad told their friends and my Grandparents I was successful - some “whiz-kid” in Silicon Valley - and somehow managed to become independent despite a generation plagued with a lack of direction. But really, I just felt like a fraud. “What to do if you think your company is failing or going to fail,” is not a class Ohio State offered in their Entrepreneurship minor, so I sucked it up. I woke up the next morning, made coffee, and tried to hold it together. Part IV: Recovery will be published tomorrow.

[realandysparks]

Losing a Battle, and Focusing on Winning the War — Part II: Distraction

Part I

Distraction is the enemy of progress and ambition. It happens when we take our eyes off the prize and start letting other people’s goals dictate our own. Distraction happens too often and it happens because we let it. When I look back at LaunchGram and why I failed my team, my investors, and myself, I see a story with distraction at its source.

The honest truth is that I started LaunchGram not because I cared about movies, tv shows and video games coming out in the near future, but because a mentor threw out some statistics that lead me to believe that it could be a lucrative opportunity. I looked into the data on what was then a Facebook ad arbitrage system and it looked like we could print money. 

Our Facebook ad arbitrage system got “Zucker-punched” when Facebook’s ad price increased. We should have seen this coming, but the fact is that we didn’t. It happened right when I had convinced my team to pack their bags and move from Ohio to Silicon Valley. We were in too deep to quit, so we had to find a way forward. We hunkered down on building an alerts mechanism for video games, movies, and tv shows that aren’t out yet. We encountered competition. We hustled down relationships with phenomenal advisors, mentors, and now friends. We got our first investor with 500 Startups. I started and built LaunchGram because I thought it was a lucrative opportunity - not because I deeply cared about the problem - and that started to become a problem. When you’re an entrepreneur, you hear a massive amount of “no,” “that’s stupid,” “that will never work,” “you’re out of your mind,” “you’ll fail,” and other warnings reeking of risk-aversion. As a self-defence mechanism, you start to build a dam. You put all the things that make you afraid behind this dam because there is no other way to keep your enthusiasm. Doubt is the disease of the determined, so you dam it up. That dam only works if you care about the problem you’re solving and believe you’re going to solve it. Right around Thanksgiving, three investors told me that they liked me, but they just couldn’t invest in this idea. That was when I realized it was because I wasn’t emotionally invested in the idea. I was not fully engaged. I was distracted and they could see right through my manufactured confidence. So the dam started to break. Part III: Panic will be published tomorrow.