I’ve talked a lot about making the most of every opportunity! I truly believe that this one key principal is the tell tale sign to success. You have to kick fear to the curb and allow yourself to think outside the box and always give permission to do something that’s, well… DIFFERENT! I know, so much easier said then done, but how bad do you want it? I want it bad enough to put myself (full vulnerabilities and all out there) to try, fail, cry and then try it better the next time. To demonstrate my point I have a little WPPI story that in a bizarre kind of way demonstrates exactly what I’m talking about.
Noelle and I were on the trade show floor checking out vendors and slipping in to listen to platform speakers. One such platform speaker we stopped to listen to was Jerry Ghionis. Jerry’s work is insanely fabulous!!! If you have never seen his work get ready for visual overload! I’m so excited to showcase Jerry for an upcoming Inspire Me Friday!! (Oops) Back to my story. So we stopped in to listen to his presentation (which rocked by the way)….
Can you find us? We are in the far left bottom corner.
After the presentation everyone was coming up and introducing themselves and asking to take a picture with Jerry. Well, Noelle and I decided that we didn’t want a picture WITH Jerry we wanted a picture BY Jerry. We wanted to say, ‘Oh you like that picture? Thanks. JERRY GHIONIS snapped that for us!” *huge smile!!* So we walked up, quickly introduced ourselves and said basically, “oh no, we don’t want a picture with you” (as he got into position for one more pic) “we want one by you!”
Here’s us chatting it up with Jerry. Look how tall I look! I’m actually really short. I had someone stop me at WPPI to say hi and tell me she thought I would be taller. Which made me laugh but I look tall in this shot or Noelle just looks really mini!
Jerry’s presentation was all about taking extremely ordinary and even downright blah environments and creating STUNNING works of art! It was fantastic. It always amazes me when you get to see pull backs and see the “real” surroundings. It’s never the glamour you anticipated when you saw the shot! Well the very cool thing about this topic was that you can’t just give a platform presentation on taking ordinary and making it extraordinary and then follow up with a plain snapshot while everyone is watching. (And Noelle and I knew that *hee hee*). As Jerry started to look around at what we could use, Noelle suggested we lay down on the floor… So we did.
Remember when I mentioned how “animated” (totally finger quoting here!) I am in photos – well this is nothing!
So there you have it… We saw an opportunity to stand out, to do something different and we took it. It meant we had to get over our nerves and ask. It also meant everyone was going to be watching us, never something that puts me at ease! The grand part being that they all had cameras! Thank you so much to Christine and Corinna for snapping the behind the scenes and sending them my way! I know this is a silly small thing but it speaks of a much larger idea. Keep pushing forward! We have to take chances, step outside of what is comfortable and let failure come, even welcome it! Because growth always follows failure as long as you’re willing to learn from it and try again.
I was trying to find a quote from Meet the Robinson’s (such a great movie!) but instead I found this awesome flow chart from here. So here you go… Yeah to failure! Yeah to different! And eventually YEAH TO SUCCESS!!
Want to know more about Noelle and I? Ask questions is the comments and we will do a special post so that you can get to know each of us better! BTW – in case you have not noticed, I comment to your comments all the time. So make sure you check back if you think of it!
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