Imagination And Success

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You're a fan.  You have imagination.  It's what led you to make the ultimate historical fantasy baseball team.  It's what let you make Steampunk Avatar: The Last Airbender fanart.  You are a person that gets into information, plays with it, and shares it.

That imagination is not a waste of time.  It is critical for your success.

I've come more and more to the conclusion that success – we're talking career here, but really in anything – is dependent partially upon having a good imagination.

If you can dream, you can solve problems.  If you can imagine, you can find new ideas.  If you can speculate, you can create.

If you have your imagination going, you also feel alive.  When your mind is able to come up with new ideas and have fun, you're enjoying what you do.

Imagination gives you the power to do.  Imagination also makes what you do fulfilling and enjoyable.

So cultivate your imagination.  Enjoy it.  Play with it.  Apply it.  Enjoy and indulge all those strange fannish, geeky activities from fanfic to fanart to web pages and more.  This keeps your imagination healthy and pumped and exercised.

Then, in your career (and indeed all your life) you have this active, powerful imagination to provide you new ideas.  To drive you.  To play with and enjoy all aspects of your life.

All those seemingly useless Role Play games and LOLArt?  That's exercise for the imagination.

Imagination is key to success.

– Steven Savage

Superheroes, SF, nostalgia – and no one caring

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As soon as the whole Disney/Marvel mess was announced, there was talk of Fox doing a new Fantastic Four film.  Of course I suspect that was a case of wanting to assert their current rights, but it has had me thinking.

The second recent Hulk film was sort of sequel, sort of reboot.  There's talk of a new origin-of-Superman film.  A new Fantastic Four Movie doesn't seem unlikely.  We just had a GI Joe movie.

I've wondered if the recent rush to superheroic/SF-ish movies, the desire to maximize properties, and the fact only some of the big superhero/SF/nostalgia properties have big name recognition means that past a certain point people will stop caring.

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News of the Day 9/24/2009

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Career:
Not-to-do's in Social Media – A nice simple guide.

A nice guide on telling hobbies from passions – I approve.

A (sad) roundup of health insurance issues and freelance writers.

Economics/Freakonomics/Geekonomics:
Decline in weekly unemployment rates – Doesn't mean we're out of the woods, but there's SOME good news. For now.

Media:
Judy Sims, formerly of the Toronto Star Media Group, takes a look at how newspapers can re-invent themselves – A nice read that's probably extensible to many businesses related to information.

Have we always been hung up on vampires? It seems they keep coming back and burning out.

Social Media:
Twitter's recent venture capital also comes from T. Row Price – I think this is the last round of funding – they now go public and profitable (or get sold). Seismic shift coming soon in social media – watch out.

An unofficial Twitter App store? Yes, apparently so. A central place for the huge amount of twitter-tools. I get the intuitive feel that we're seeing something big happening here, but I'm not sure what – the idea of a simple service people build onto, universal app availability, etc. Could Twitter become the foundation of entire services? Or tools? (a $99 Twitter-gizmo with wireless?).

Technology:
Nvidia will make Chrome OS devices – So we've already got people heavy into Chrome OS. That puts a bit of a bite on Windows and Microsoft (and continues the Everything Wars).

Video Games:
Console status report – Sony's PS 3 Slim has sold a million units worldwide, and Nintendo confirms the Wii price will drop to $199. I want to see the effect the Nintendo cuts have on prices – as one possibility I foresee is that there's nothing past this Nintendo can do to move systems.

– Steven Savage