Nashville Storytelling Classes for Businesses

Someone emailed me asking how they could learn how to use the power of storytelling to strengthen their brand and sell their awesome stuff.

I usually don’t have time to take on new work or speak, but I can pass along some suggestions.

If you’re looking for someone in Nashville to come speak or teach this topic, I’d focus on looking for those with expertise in marketing, new media and content work.

Here are some recommendations. There are plenty of really talented people in town that could help with something like this. Here is the shortlist of who I’d trust to do a great job if it’s a good fit:

Individuals

• Nancy VanReece
• Laura Creekmore

Firms

• redpepper
• Paramore
• Flo
• Proof Branding
• Hammock (Thanks Dave!)
• Ethos3 (Thanks Dave!)

From Seattle to LA in 5 Minutes

4:55 | podomatic | mp3

Dave, Wes and I adventured down the West Coast last year. I brought my recorder.

Our trip was over ten days but I condensed it to 5 minutes of audio for you. Here’s what the West Coast sounded like to us.

We camped, hiked and visited breweries in Seattle, Portland, Napa Valley, San Francisco and LA. Actually, the only place we couldn’t find great craft beer was in the Redwood National Forest.

Oh and you get three geek points if you can catch references to the following:

1. Lord of The Rings
2. Settlers of Catan
3. Hoary marmot

Shout out to Richard and Summer for letting us crash on their floor in Seattle and showing us around The 206. Shout out to Josh for gallantly driving us through LA traffic. Shout out to Lasswell for the sampled song “beeKoo mix,” which is Creative Commons CC BY 3.0.

Did the sounds of our trip spark any memories of your own?

Analyze a Friend’s Photo Collage to Discover Your Friendship Tier

My Video Game Intervention

Look, here’s the the great hall I’ve been building.

Saturday night I visited the nether to gather glowstone for my new chandeliers. I sheered over a hundred blocks of sheep wool to build the white rug in the center there. I intended to stop playing at 11 but I didn’t.

I played Minecraft till 4 in the morning.

If you know me well, this isn’t a big surprise. For the last several months I’ve been playing Minecraft at least 10 hours a week.

When I finally got to bed Saturday night, I realized I would need to sleep through an event I had on my calendar for the next day. Write Fiction.

I forfeited my opportunity to rise early and get started.

Now, improper use doesn’t discount proper use. All I can tell you is I’ve been doing it wrong. What I’ve lost during these hours is greater than what I’ve gained.

When I play Minecraft: I’m given a canvas to create and a powerful dose of escapism that’s relaxing after a long day. When I play too much: my relationships with friends grow stale, I read less and I write less.

My creative goal is to finish the fiction story I started in college. The quicker I learn discipline, the faster I’ll finish my project. In my current station, discipline means more sleep and less Minecraft.

I would not be happy if a video game kept me from my creative goals, so I’m going to try something out. I’m now keeping track of how many hours I write a week. For each hour I sit down to write fiction, I’ll allow myself an hour in Minecraft the next week. We’ll see if that keeps things in check.

Creativity is a type of work. The more I invest, the more I reap. I know boundaries create freedom, but I’ve once again become lazy to this truth. This is my reminder to myself. No doubt I’ll need to hear it again.

It’s time to pull closer to the pain of leaving something behind. With luck the sacrifice will inch something distant just a bit closer.

I’ve been creating my world in the wrong place.

7 Observations on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [Guest Post]

By Jonathan Baker

My brother wrote this on Facebook and I felt compelled to share. Happy Friday!

Musings from watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the original series):

1. Apparently the word “mondo” used to be cool.
   
   
2. I have no idea why Shredder and Krang work together. They hate each other, and don’t seem to need each other.
   
   
3. Shredder seems to think the only thing standing between him and world domination is 4 teenage turtles. I think he overestimates his abilities.
   
   
4. You know the episode is about to end when everyone starts eating pizza.
   
   
5. Bebop and Rocksteady both wear turtle shells on their uniforms. Is that to signify how many turtles they’ve killed?
   
   
6. I’ve yet to meet a reporter who wears the same jumpsuit to work everyday.
   
   
7. I am a dork.

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Jonathan Baker

Today’s guest blogger is my brother. I agree he is a dork. Apparently he’s been watching TMNT lately. Among other things, he’s good at online marketing and started a brewing venture with his friends in Atlanta called Monday Night Brewing.

“After 541 Years in Nashville” (Letter Art Project)

Here’s the result of my Nashville Letter Art Project: “After 541 Years in Nashville.”

I asked folks to send me letters and answer the following question.After so many years in Nashville, what did you learn?

I added up the collective experience you mailed in and it came out to 541 years. I’ve been fascinated how letter writing contrasts usual writing on the web. Letters are one-to-one, intimate and powerful. I wanted to tap into this depth.

I was thinking I’d make a poster, but I wanted all the letters to be easily read in narrative form. All images are Share Alike if you want to use any for your own project. Thanks everyone for the letters!

Check it out.

Dear Nashville, write me letters so I can make you some sweet art?

I dreamed up this Nashville lettering-writing art project and now I need your help!

Coud you write me a letter? I’ll write you back in the form of digital art you can print out and hang on that blank wall in your bathroom. The prompt is:

After [number] years in Nashville, I learned _______.

The above image is a quick example of how I’ll build the art. I’ll add up the years from your sentences to name the work. So it might be called “After 324 Years in Nashville” if y’all decide this work needs some love.

I’ve been thinking of ways to encourage a deeper level of dialogue on the Internet. In the world of sharing for hundreds or thousands at the speed of a tweet, sometimes depth gets lost.

I wanted to engage in something personal, direct and rare: like letter writing. 

Letter writing is the new jam like vinyl. Turn off Facebook for the night, light a candle and feel the creative freedom. When you write in a new way, you’ll learn new things about yourself.

You don’t need to currently live in Nashville, as long as you’ve spent at least a year here. Just tell me something that’s true to you. Write as many of the sentence prompts as you’d like.

It can be personal, dark, funny, general or about whatever you’d like. Below are all the details you need. If you have a question, post it in the comments.

Please and Thank You!

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How to Participate

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1. Write me a letter!

Please send me a stamped letter by Friday 9/30 to participate.

1. Include one or more sentences in this format: 
   
   After NUMBER year(s) in Nashville, I learned _______ .
    
2. Write in your own handwriting on white, line-free paper.
3. Sign your name only as you’d like it to appear publicly.
4. Send your letter to:

Nate Baker
1414 17th Avenue South
Nashville, TN 37212

2. Tell others so the art is super sweet.

Please consider re-posting this on your blog and/or sharing this on facebook/twitter/diaspora/qwikster so I have a decent stack of letters, and therefore a sweet looking piece of artwork to share back with y’all. Something like…

RT @nathanTbaker: Dear Nashville, write me letters so I can make you some sweet art? http://natene.ws/letter-art

3. Get digital art.

I’ll license the work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. It’ll likely be a poster-sized pdf you can print out.

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UPDATE: Here’s the result of my Nashville Letter Art Project: “After 541 Years in Nashville”

Should I join Google+?

The new social networking site from Google, Google+, promotes segmenting shares and potentially lowers your reach to smaller audiences, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on your goal.

On Facebook or Twitter, most people share to all their friends or even the world. It all depends how you use the tool, but as a general rule, Facebook Lists are inferior to Google+ Circles as far as the functionality of sharing to specific groups.

Google+ as a medium can encourage intimacy and depth by restricting reach. What is your goal of being on a social network? If you don’t have a goal, then don’t join. If you can pinpoint a goal, join and try it out.

If your goal is to share a message with as many people as possible, the answer is easy. Join Google+ and all major networks that allow you to broadcast your message.

Do you want to keep up with your family and friends? Then see where your friends are and try out a place with the best features. That may be Facebook for now (unless you invite all your close friends to Google+). Wink.

What’s my goal? I want to explore online connections with fewer amounts of friends in a deeper, more contextually way that throwing my random thoughts out to the masses. I see a trend towards over sharing and we’re loosing the power that comes from a private one-on-one connection. A letter. A circle of 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1.

That’s why I’m still on Google+. The reason may change of course as it often will, but that’s my current goal.

Weekstart comes after the Weekend

I’ve been playing with the idea of “Weekstart.”

Just as the weekend is the last two days of the week, weekstart is the first two: Monday and Tuesday. During the weekstart I block out any commitments after work for both Monday and Tuesday night.

See, I’ve been asking too much of my weekends. During the week I find peace in knowing I have time over the weekend to do item A, and then I add item B, then item C and D and E…

When the weekend rolls around, my expectations are that I can draw energy from alone time, spend tons of time with friends, exercise, catch up on sleep, go to church, work on chores, work on creative pursuits and catch up on email all in the same weekend.

Although this is all possible to do in one weekend, when I place unreasonable expectations on any chunk of time, my energy is divided and I’m left defeated and wanting by Monday morning.

It’s time for me to set manageable expectations for my weekends. Since a majority of my friends are available on weekends, it makes sense to make people a priority then.

So when do I expect to do the rest of the things that are itching the inside of my head? To answer this question, I created Weekstart.

If someone wants to watch a movie while I’m doing laundry over the weekend, I can watch a movie and still know my laundry will get done during my upcoming weekstart.

If someone wants to watch a movie on Monday night during the weekstart while I’m doing laundry, I can set expectations and already feel tied to my friends after fully engaging over the weekend.

During Weekstart I can work on the most pressing things I need to do to stay zen for the upcoming week whether it’s…

• laundry
• my weekly beard trim
• prayer
• planning my week
• kicking off the week with great sleeping patterns 
• remembering who I am
• grocery shopping
• cleaning my room
• walking
• my inbox
• knocking out a project
• drawing energy from being alone

Productivity writer David Allen recommends a time for upper-level planning tasks in what he calls a “Weekly Review.” I was a fool for thinking I could just add this as another task for my already booked weekends.

Setting expectations for my time doesn’t need a fancy name of course—it’s just more fun. I’m finding anything that’s a priority needs a home.