Absolutely loved Glug @Spotlight. It's the perfect mixture of socialising, learning, eating and shopping for some quirky treats at the same time.
TALKS - short & sweet
Intern Magazine ( Issue nr. 3 has an incredibly lovely cover ) The creator, Alec Dudson, gave a lovely insight into his experience of being lost, couch surfing and creating a job for himself. Most definitely inspirational speaker, who told the truth about getting started. Intern is definitely worth getting involved with if you're a student/recent graduate or simply want to help.
Marylou Faure giving insight into having a style, developing a style and keeping your online presence cohesive. She also showed that moving to London and not knowing anyone is a struggle that can be overcome, you just have to try!
Mr Bingo is most definitely the funniest and maddest creative I’ve ever met. His talk was more of a stand up comedy gig. Creating a show is definitely amazing, because how many boring Power Point talks have we seen in our lives? MANY.
Mr Bingo Most definitely took a better approach and thought us not just about collaboration with other people, but also how to create a rap song... Thank you Mr Bingo!
Also Digbeth Dining Club made the whole of the back yard smell like a summer BBQ which was an added bonus and there were few artists working & selling which created a lovely buzz.
Keep it up guys, awesome way to spend a Thursday night!
Want to succeed in creative business? It seems the secret is failure. Loads of life affirming failure all over your face. Fail hard, fail better, fall down nine times, get up ten. You know the deal, we’re supposed to learn from our own bad experiences. Or, perhaps (and I’m about to get meta-as-heck) from other people’s fail tales, writ large across Medium and the speaker circuit.
Ted, and particularly the SF startup scene, have made failure their own and I consume these fail tales like Dim Sum on a hangover. But just like said glutinous balls of indistinguishable crimson meat, I’m left wanting at the end of every meal.
We consume failure as a benchmark against our own abilities. There are more self employed creatives than ever before. In the absence of a Creative Business Rule Book, we’re all off searching for guidance, advice and a bit of insider knowledge wherever we can get it. That’s what makes fail tales so popular and we’re all beginning to realise that popular content is good for business.
And the fail tales work. They increase links to our site, they get us RT’d across social media, herald invites to speaking engagements which eventually (please don’t ask me exactly how) result in new clients.
However, after months of consuming other people’s failure, I learned little, if anything at all.
I’ve learned that founders back out and employees lie. I’ve learned that markets crumble and big brands rip off the little gal. I’ve learned that talented people are expensive and relationships don’t always go the distance.
After hours of consumption, my only take away is how unhelpful it is for speakers to claim ownership of these failure-contributing symptoms. That doing so implies some governance of factors far outside our control.
Ideas fail because of external forces and internal cockups. Either one or a combination of both. By all means, list the external cock ups; the cultural and economic shifts that rendered your idea invalid. The wage bills required to attract staff to a city with a housing crisis, the emotional cracks exacerbated by financial concerns. But don’t pass them off as failures you could have avoided.
I want proper cock ups. I want to know what happened when you tried to fight your investor. I want to know why you spent your savings on office furniture. I want to know why you deleted poor online reviews and then publicly argued with your customers.
I’ve made failure a ‘thing’ at Well Made. And while we didn’t want to ever build a reputation as bumbling incompetents, we did realise that to do it well was to do it with complete honesty.
http://vimeo.com/104527785
I can’t watch this video of myself because it still feels raw. The repercussions of borrowing money we couldn’t afford to pay back were felt for a long time. However, the lesson - don’t use the past to predict the future - is an important one. That’s why I wrote the talk.
I share our failure stories because I need to hear them myself. I need to know what real failure looks like, so I can distinguish it from a painful blip. Fail hard, fail better only works if the fail bit is genuine.
Sometimes it takes a while to spot the lesson. Some are as basic as ‘Google it first, divvy’. Others shake our foundation, re-writing our business strategy. When we share our fail tales (and thankfully they a rare breed these days) we do so because there’s a lesson to be learned. And a lesson to be shared.
My entry to the #glugbrum poster competition will be available as a limited print at the actual event this evening at Boxxed in Digbeth! Theres a limited run available at £15 each. There will be a bunch of other lovely prints there too - take a look at the entries here. See you there tonight!
Glug competition submission #2 : A Spoonful Of Creativity
Similar concept to the cake one just that this one is all out art nouveau. Parfaits have layers too! #GlugBrum
New print "irreversible". I will be selling prints and stuff at the awesome @glug in Birmingham on Thursday night. @inkygoodness @createdinbrum #glugbrum #prints #illustration #design
