Advice

Convention Idea – Involve your attendees

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The continuing series on ways to add career elements to convention is here.

Putting career oriented elements in a convention is challenging.  There's time, equipment, and of course – guests.  Finding someone to speak on voice acting, graphic arts, publishing, and more means taking time away from other activities guests can do – and possibly sinking your plans for career panels.  You can't get everyone you want to do all the career events you want.

Turn to your attendees.  I've seen this done with great success.

Of your attendees, no small amount of them are probably involved in professions and careers that the rest of the attendees would be interested in.  You've probably got a huge amount of potential "guests" right there, or at least panelists who can get a discount on their membership.

Many conventions do this, but I'd advise going one step further and actively engaging people.  Find out who's attending with particular skills and backgrounds.  Ask them at the dead dog party.  Put posts in your forums.  See what you've got.

I've found attendee-run panels like this can be great successes because the pool of potential people can be huge – you can find all sorts of interesting experiences, specialized skills, and more.  Most people will jump at the chance to help out at a convention anyway.

Over time, I'd recommend building a list of potential "attendee contributors."  Court them, keep up with them, engage them.  They can provide you great panels and events, and help out in other ways.

– Steven Savage

Freedom and Passion

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You want to live your passion like all of us.  You have dreams, you have ideas, you want to bring them out.  There's something that burns in your heart to be born.  Yet, something constrains you . . .

Or perhaps you don't have that burning.  You're passionless.  Something was once alive in your mind, inspirations grew and prospered, but it's gone now.  Life is dull and drugery.  What happened?

In both cases, I'd lay pretty good odds that what you're experiencing is a loss of freedom.

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Done Right Or Done On Time?

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I encounter an interesting issue when coaching and speaking on self-organization:  which is more important, finishing something on time or doing it right?  I think it's a question important enough to address on the blog.

The answer, as you may guess, is "it depends."  However for your career, indeed your life, it's very important to know when "on time" is important and when "done right" is important.  Some tasks (perhaps many tasks) force you to confront these choices – including ones affecting your career.

My rules of thumb are this:

DONE ON TIME: Things that need to be done on time are those things where time is of the essence and whatever is dependent on said task won't happen unless it's done – even if it's not done perfectly.  An example myself is preparing presentation materials – I know I can take far, far longer to get them perfectly, but since I'm there at the presentation, I can make up for any issues – and I CANT take forever to get them right and miss my deadline.

DONE RIGHT: Are things that have to have a certain level of quality or there will be failure, and where quality is more important than a deadline.  This would be things that are vital to proper functioning and where you can't easily correct failure – a lot of software deployments fall into this area.

Learning to make the call between "do it right" or "do it on time" is a challenging part of life and career – but worth doing.  It also requires you to accept sometimes you miss a deadline – and sometimes you don't do things perfectly.  Then again, that's part of life.

Of course the WORST things are those that must be done perfectly right and done on time.  In that case . . . good luck.

– Steven Savage