Marketing Your Creativity

Heather Morrow & Dr. Martha Beck (2010)

In January of 2010, I had the honor of meeting Dr. Martha Beck and hear her give an inspirational keynote speech at the Craft & Hobby Association Convention.   If you follow Oprah, you might recognize the name — Dr. Beck (call me Marty) is an author of many self-help books and is a regular columnist in O: The Oprah Magazine.

At the time, I wrote a brief article for my Creative Souls eZine.  I have been working on getting myself back on center with organizing the piles of piles and I came across the notes I had taken that day in this tiny little notebook.  So, I thought I would share them to maybe inspire you to Follow Your North Star.

As I took these notes, I felt as if she was talking just to me.   (more…)

In the commencement address given at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs spoke about his life and all that he had learned.  This was shortly after surgery to remove a pancreatic cancer tumor.

You can see the speech here, but I wanted to talk to you about one point that really resonated for me.  He spoke of connecting the dots and how all of his experiences (good and bad) led him to where/who he was today.

Without dropping out of college; taking a calligraphy class; building the first Macintosh computer in his parent’s garage; getting fired from Apple – the company he had created; (more…)

After almost a month of training my new puppy, Buddy, I have come to realize that there are similarities between dog training and marketing yourself to your customers.

It drives me crazy to have dogs jumping around while their food is being prepared, so I train them to sit and wait to eat until I give the command, “Say Grace, Amen”.  Buddy LOVES food, so this behavior modification has been relatively easy.  The food is coming nowhere near the floor until he sits and waits.  Getting it down to the ground without him jumping up again took a bit more time, I did have to hold him for the first couple of weeks, but he’s already getting this down, too.  What it took was persistence. (more…)