Three Things I learned Saturday Night

Posted by Rowland on May 11 at 6:00 PM Three thoughts I had after a very pleasant evening exchanging our projects:

Get out of the echo chamber. We all have one. The people we go to most often to get feedback on ideas. Overtime, we begin to get used to the type of comments, criticisms and direction from those sources. We even start to gear our ideas to those close friends and colleagues; this becomes our echo chamber. For me, I tend to speak to other marketers, executives, or at least those in the business arena. There is a type of dialect that is used in this context. Listening to academics, artists, scientists or students is a great way to step out of the echo chamber.

Go back to unfinished projects. The ideas you had a few years back, dust them off, and bring them back out. See how they hold up after being away from them for a bit. Get new feedback. We often like to think we’ve evolved from those projects to something better, but often they age well, and with some distance, you are ready for some new feedback.

Questions are better than opinions. When confronted with something new, or a project underway, asking the right question—something you truly don’t quite understand—is better than the knee-jerk opinion.   Sounds obvious, but asking a writer, designer, photographer, illustrator, or musician why they approached something the way they did can lead to something much more interesting than telling what you liked/disliked.

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