Think Out Loud

It was my first ‘favorite game.’ Sure, I had others before it, and many after it. But Legend of Zelda was my first favorite, and I’ve often pondered why. Thinking about that today I came up with this idea — here’s a fun list of illustrated life lessons embodied in the game.

1. It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

We start out thinking we will single-handedly conquer the world, and the truth is, we’re going to need a lot of help along the way. From mentors to peers to the occasional nemesis, we’re never going to get where we want to go all by ourselves. And it’s dangerous to think we can.

The very first thing Link does in the game is meet and listen to this guy, and take along a trusty sword.

2. We Have To Work For What We Want

Effort is required. Nobody is going to simply hand us everything we need, we will need to work for it. We will have to put in the hours to develop our skills and to master our craft. And the more we invest in ourselves, our training and our expertise, the better we get. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it.

3. Choose Wisely

In this scene, Link can get instant health by taking the heart, or he can take the medicine, which he will probably need in the future. We too need to decide what things we want now, and what things we can wait for. Instant gratification often leads to regret later on.

4. Heed Advice And Listen For Clues

Clues and hints are all around us and we need to pay attention to them. Sometimes it’s our own gut telling us something, and sometimes someone flat out gives us an answer. So if you’re offered free advice, listen to it.

5. You Choose Your Path

You get to decide which way you want your life to go. Nobody else can choose it for you. Sure, you might regret your choice later on, but you can always come back or change direction later. It’s never too late. IN FACT….

6. Sometimes You Have To Go Backward To Go Forward

It’s going to happen at some point, you are going to have a setback, or have to make a move backward before you can go forward. But that’s ok. It’s how the game is played, and it’s how life works. Setbacks are part of life, but you can’t let it stop you. Go figure out what you missed and then move forward again.

7. You Have To Pay Your Dues

You don’t get what you haven’t earned. Do the work, walk the path, win the battles and then you get in. There is no other way. And you actually NEED all of the lessons along the way to solve the bigger problems later on. Trust me — you don’t want to go in there until you’re ready.

My Dad loved the game of chess, so I’ve played since I was little, though rarely very well. Regardless of my skill at the game, I was struck by the uniqueness of the Queen from the moment I first understood it.

For those who don’t know, the Queen has the most power in the game of chess. The King has the most value, yes. But the Queen — she has the most power. Unlike other pieces, the Queen can move in any direction, and overtake any obstacle in her way. She isn’t limited in direction, nor in distance. Forward, backward, diagonal, sideways —she can go as many steps as she wants to go in any direction. Power.

Power Gives You Options

I keep a single chess piece of the Queen on my desk at work, and in my office at home. I do it to remind me that when I’m in a tough place or facing a difficult decision, I have options. I’m not powerless, and I’m never stuck. I can always make a move.

Sometimes I need to take a small step backward and think about how I got where I am.

Other times I need to make a move to the side to look at the problem from a different point of view.

Still other times I need to move forward and put a great distance between myself and whatever it is I am facing. Regardless of what action I take, I am never immobilized, no matter how great the value that is placed on others around me, or how little I feel valued myself. I have the power to change my circumstances.

A Pawn Can Be A Queen

Another little chess lesson? The pawn has the lowest value, and the least power on the board. You start with eight of them because they will be sacrificed to save the pieces with greater value. But only a pawn can become a Queen. No other piece has that opportunity.

So it reminds me that it doesn’t matter how small or unvalued you are when you begin, you can be the Queen. It will take some thinking, some work, and some luck, but in any situation you can indeed become the Queen.

The Queen Has The Power

I actually started learning code in high school. I took a summer school class of my own volition, and my friends thought I was out of my mind.

The first thing I learned how to do was write a program that could calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle. Yeah I know. Not sexy. But by college I knew enough to be able to take over my friends’ computer screens in class with ascii character images. Hilariously funny when the professor walks by and someone’s screen suddenly switches over to a Playboy bunny. Completely embarrassed, they had no idea how it happened, and no idea that my giggling in the back of the room was because I was the one doing it.

Code requires you to think about cause and effect

Much of what we do every day isn’t really based on thinking about how our actions lead to an outcome. We simply do what we need to get done. Sure, sometimes we lament a task that we know will be fruitless, usually because someone else made the decision that we do it. But when you code, you are trying to make something happen, and you get pretty quick feedback that lets you know if you succeeded. It’s a constant back and forth for me, of trying things and seeing if they work. If not, I have to think about why it didn’t work and try something different. It’s a constant flow of hypothesis, failure, iteration and eventually success. And once you succeed, you know what you had to do to make it work, and you commit that to memory. It’s all about problem solving.

Not just big problem solving, but small problem solving. If I’m trying to code a small animation, let’s say, I might make the actions I want, but it might not look the way I want it to look. I now have to solve a new problem, and break it down into smaller ones to tackle them one at a time. And you can’t solve the big problems without solving the small ones. You need to prioritize, organize and think. And the kind of thinking I need to do when I code is much different from the kind of thinking I do in my day-to-day job. Which also means I am building new neural pathways that will keep my brain healthier longer, and make me better at other things, too.

It’s fun — and it’s free to learn how.

It had been awhile since I had coded or made anything, so last fall I started taking an online coding class to catch up. Let’s be clear– I am a novice. I created full websites back in the late 90s, but that was a long time ago and quite a bit has changes. So I set aside an hour a day for a week to get back into it, and I had a blast.

Yeah, it gets frustrating. But who cares? It’s not my day job and I can fail all I want without consequence. But when I complete a lesson and I see my success, it puts a big smile on my face. Some people build model cars as a hobby, others knit. I code.

People are impressed and envious. And most are afraid to try.

I almost giggled at his reply. After all, it was absurd. I had just told my creative director I couldn’t think of a good headline, and his advice to me was to go write one hundred of them.

“If I can’t write ONE good one, I asked him, “how am I going to write 100 good ones?”

“I didn’t tell you to write 100 good ones. I just told you to write 100 of them. Most of them won’t be any good at all,” he replied.

I didn’t believe him. But he was right.

I sat down and started typing out 100 of the worst headlines ever. Some were pathetic just because I was resenting the fact that he didn’t help me (I didn’t realize yet that he had.) Some were bad because I kept rearranging words from my original bad headline to fill space. Some were bad because I had to get them out of the way to get to the good ones waiting behind them — and there it was.

Good headlines were just the other side of bad ones. Suddenly I had one I thought I liked. I grudgingly admitted this to myself as I typed a few more, and a few more. Somewhere around 85 I started getting some really good ideas. And I finished strong — I had 105 headlines and at least 10 of them were pretty darn good.

It’s a lot like making meringue.

If you’ve ever made meringue (or Kraft Macaroni & Cheese for that matter) you know there is a time where you keep stirring and mixing, but you look at the evidence in front of you and doubt it will ever be like the photo.

My first meringue was a fail because I thought I knew better than everyone who had ever come before me and made meringue. I doubted my own grandmother who told me “just keep mixing.” So I didn’t keep mixing. I thought I had mixed it enough, and I stopped before it was actually meringue and added it to the recipe. It did not work out at all. Rock-hard brown lumps are not what I was going for.

Write, and trust.

You have to trust the process, and keep writing them. Once you have the right ingredients, just keep mixing. Suddenly you will start to see the results of your effort take shape, and before you know it, you’re there. It’s honestly the best advice I can give on how to write a great headline. Just keep writing them.

I try to pass this wisdom down to my writers today, and they give me the same face I must have given back then. “Are you serious?” or “Yeah, right” are common replies. But years of experience have given me the faith to look into that murky bowl — or at that blinking cursor — and know there is greatness on the other side, even if I can’t see it yet. I trust in the process because it has never let me down.

Who sees commercials in an ad-blocked world?

Quick! What was the last great tv commercial you saw? Hard to answer, isn't it? I even find myself straining to remember what spots I loved during the Super Bowl (which really wasn't many, if any, this year!)

Ad blockers. DVRs. On Demand. Cord cutters. There are a lot of ways to get content without actually getting the ads these days. So are the commercials and ads we create being seen by anyone anymore? And if not, then what are we getting paid for? (Ouch, right?)

Eric Wahl was the keynote speaker at our Epsilon Symposium today, giving us a thought-provoking look into how we need to unthink our way to being more creative.  Even as a card-carrying creative, who knows quite well how creativity has been ‘schooled out’ of most people, I was moved by his presentation, and his insights.

Did you know, for example, that the mere scent of crayons can help lower our blood pressure by 10 points? How amazing is that?  As he proudly showed us his box of 64 Crayolas (with the built-in sharpener, of course) I smiled and thought of my own box of 64 sitting back in my office in Chicago. I loved that this guy saw the same magic in that box that I do.  

He asked the audience how many people can draw, and only about 3 hands went up. (Part of that was probably because nobody wanted to be part of an audience participation event where they had to get up in front of 300 people and draw, but part of it is absolutely that they’ve “learned” that they cannot draw.)  When he asks high schoolers that question, as you might expect, a lot more of them raise their hands. And when he asks preschoolers? Every hand is raised. Of course they can draw.

<img src=“When we’re young — when we’re beginners — we believe.   And we haven’t yet been told what we can’t do, and what we’re not good at.  For Eric, it took decades for him to come back to being an artist, after being told, and him believing, that he wasn’t.

It isn’t easy to swim upstream, but for some of us, it was likely made easier by parents or teachers who championed our creative talents.  I was told I was creative my whole life.  And my parents knew I was a writer way back in the third grade.  So did I.

Twenty years into this amazing career, I realize how lucky I am that I have a creative talent that was supported, and nurtured, because frankly, I can’t imagine having missed a single moment of it. Creativity is everything to me, in many different forms: from writing, to drawing, to solving business problems, to selling my ideas — there are endless outlets and avenues.

Having just finished judging the North American Effies in New York, I can't help but feel inspired by the work, and confident in the future of our industry

The work always inspires. Every show I judge introduces me to new ideas that make me envious, and eager to do increasingly better work for my own clients.

But it's the discussions with other judges that inspire my confidence in the future of our industry. Packed with CMOs, CEOs, presidents and a wide range of other senior leaders across clients and agencies, every point of view is represented. Client. Planning. Creative. Media. And at the end of individually reviewing the work, we all discuss it.

Some things we were all in violent agreement on. Others brought passionate and opposing points of view. But all of it brought robust and intelligent conversation that added to the experience.

We don't all define "great creative" in the same way, but we do all recognize that good work should WORK for the brand. It should move the needle. The beauty of the Effies is that the effectiveness of the work outranks all other variables.

What was perhaps most interesting is that great creative work didn't always work the best. But the things that worked the best? They always had great creative. That's a brain twister to think about, but essentially great creative is always a critical component of great work, but not all on its own. Of course we have award shows for great creative work, too. And we could all point to the things we knew would win big there. But a bit more alchemy is involved in creating campaigns that also actually make a difference for a brand, and therein lies that beauty of the Effies.

Yes, I know. To you it might seem almost ridiculous for a grown woman to admit loving Snapchat. You see your kids poring over it with their friends, so it might seem akin to admitting I like playing with Legos. But that's only because you probably have no idea what Snapchat really is.

For starters, Snapchat is a pretty handy way to visually capture a story. Take this "My Story" I created on a recent trip to Salt Lake City (forgive the twitchy quality, it looked much better when live.) It's fun to make, and it's fun to view.

"My Story" is a beautiful encapsulation of an entire day.

Truth is, I can think of countless things I wish I had "My Story" downloads of. Plenty of trips I took with friends and my husband would be much more enjoyably remembered with My Story downloads instead of just photos and individual videos. Not only does it let me capture what's happening, it lets me add commentary and, in this case, a bit of sarcasm. I also like viewing my friends' Snapchat stories, especially when they travel or visit cool places and events. It's like I get to be right there with them while they walk through the Coliseum, visit Times Square or head out on a sailing boat in Maui.

Secondly, Snapchat has a Discovery section on it where I can view daily videomags from some pretty great publications. Food Network, CNN, ESPN, Tastemade. Every day they present an entirely new series of articles and videos, all in snackable size and format. I'm hooked. As my data overage for last month certainly supports.

Add to that the Live events. Imagine watching Monday Night Football from the seats of a dozen different fans who are capturing things as they happen. Things that make being at the game more fun than just watching it on tv. And now imagine you can do both -- watch it on tv while you view the Live Snapchat feed. It's more fun that you'll want to admit. And if you're at the game, adding your snaps to the story lets you participate on a national scale. This year I had a front row seat for Lollapalooza and never left my office.

Local feeds are also fun. Not only can I see what is happening around Chicago, I can 'visit' other places all around the world with the swipe of a finger.

There's a lot more to love about Snapchat. From geofenced filters and fun lenses that help me personalize my own snaps, to the fact that I can step into the lives of my family and friends and see what's going on in their world no matter where I am. Trust me, it's addictive, and not nearly as 'millenial' as your kids might want you to believe. The Tastemade and Food Network Discover feeds alone are worth the time.

The deadline looms, and the ideas aren't coming. It's happened to all of us at one time or another, and the stress it creates? Well, that's a self-fulfilling cycle of repeated failure and stress.  So what to do? Here are three things that have proven helpful to me over the years.

1. Walk away.

This sounds counter-intuitive, but it is a valuable way to break out of an idea-less rut. The more you focus on the problem, the more elusive the answer, so stop thinking about it and simply go for a walk.  

Fortunately, my office is across from the beautiful lakefront and Millenium and Grant Park of Chicago, so I can walk amidst the beauty and energy and find lots of things to enjoy.  The Art Institute is another favorite hangout. Walking among the art takes me far away from my problem and helps my brain spark in completely new ways.

The hardest part? Stopping your brain from rehashing the problem back at the office.  But fight the urge to think about it, and repeatedly focus your attention on anything else around you.  After an hour or so, you can effectively "reset" your brain and head back to take another stab.  Another way to do this? Go take in a movie.

2. Sleep on it.

I am a huge fan of 'sleeping on it.' Our brains solve so many problems for us in our sleep. Research from Dr. Sara Mednick at University of California, San Diego indicates that REM sleep enhances our brain's creativity and problem-solving abilities.  Certain parts of our brains, like the hippocampus, shut down during REM sleep, allowing memories and experiences to reach other parts of the brain that create different associations and ideas. Mednick says that is when the creativity begins to happen.

She suggests that we prepare our brains for sleep-time inspiration by writing down the problem or challenge we are facing right before we go to bed.  And as soon as we wake up, write down anything that has come to mind. Even a 60-90 minute nap can help us do this, as long as we reach REM sleep.

3. Isolate yourself.

The fact is, our lives are filled with repeated interruption and distraction.  That kind of constant short-circuiting doesn't help our brains wander to the places they need to for us to be fully engaged in any creative endeavor.  So turn off your phone, put away your laptop, and go to a secluded place with no distractions, no phones and only the people you need.  I know this is hard.  We've become addicted to our technology.

An article in Enterpreneur last year actually suggested that some of us are addicted to distraction. We crave the repeated interruptions in our day and even cause them to occur more frequently.  But if we're trying to fire our brains to come up with new ideas, nothing can harm us more than repetitive distraction.

Our creative lounge here at the office is on a different floor, and the windows are frosted so passersby don't distract us. We can hunker down in there (sans cell phones) with pads of paper, markers and comfy chairs and simply focus on the project at hand.  It's amazing how freely ideas can flow when you are absent the constant ding, buzz and hum of cell phones and other electronic interruptions.

Our brains need space, time and peace to fully function.

In the end, we need to know that the more stress we put ourselves under, the harder our job is going to be.  By finding ways to give our brains the peace, space, time and sleep they need, the greater our chances of focusing them on delivering creative brilliance when we need it.

Another wonderful new business win has resulted in another wonderful client for us over here at Epsilon. And with it comes an exciting new product launch!

Primadophilus® Fortify™ from Nature's Way gives you 30 billion live cultures in every pill. And what I've learned about probiotics would amaze you. Did you know that  cultures in yogurt are tested at the time of manufacturing? Which means they are then packaged, shipped, stored, put into store coolers, your shopping cart, your fridge and finally your mouth. And THEN the ones who don't die in transport are killed off by your stomach acid. (Thanks to my buddy Curt Munk for THAT education!)

At any rate, the beauty of Fortify is that they deliver 30 BILLION live cultures, guaranteed, in one simple pill. And why do we need probiotics? According to the Mayo Clinic, there's encouraging evidence that probiotics may help:

Treat diarrhea, especially following treatment with certain antibiotics; 

Prevent and treat vaginal yeast infections and urinary tract infections 

Treat irritable bowel syndrome Speed treatment of certain intestinal infections 

Prevent or reduce the severity of colds and flu 

As a tracker fan, this brand has been a lot of fun to work on.

Having been through a series of trackers myself in the past 2 years (UP, Fitbit and Shine) I have weathered the failures of many of them, enjoyed the benefits, too, but have always known they were designed by and for men.

So finally, a fitness tracker designed for women, and inspired by women. From the design of the beautiful bracelet to the fun spunkiness of the Boosts you get from the companion app. Mira is everything a woman wants and needs it to be.

Glad to see the press is recognizing this gap in the market as well, here is a great article from the Chicago Tribune.  Learn more at MyMiraFit.com

Love this infographic from the folks at shutterstock!