Just Play Baseball! A Lesson in Effective Communication
As a father of 4, including 2 boys, I have found myself attending a Little League baseball game on more than one occasion. Sometimes I am simply a parent spectator cheering my child on and trying to stop myself from giving too much advice from the bleachers. Other times I’ve allowed my guilt to get […]
Define Your Brand with a Positioning Statement
Did you ever play MadLibs as a kid? The fun of it might have worn off once you learned that “stinky” wasn’t the perfect adjective for any situation. However, here’s a MadLibs that could actually benefit your company: a positioning statement. A positioning statement is used in marketing to define where you stand in the […]
Can You Nurture Creativity?
I may not be a full time illustrator or graphic designer, but I think you could consider me kind of a creative person. I write full-time here at Gravitate; I dabble in photography; I’ve done work on the side as a graphic designer; I fully designed the look of my blog and continue to design […]
How to Keep Yourself Sane as a Writer
So I was doing some calculations, and it looks like that as a writer here, I put out about 2,000 words of polished, fact-checked content on a daily basis. It’s kind of like writing an eight-page (double spaced) paper every day. That basically means that when I’m not in planning or strategy meetings, or trying […]
5 Tips for Surviving a Snow Day
Seeing as it’s been a wild weather day here in Utah we figured it was a good time to share a few tips on how to survive a Snow Day. Stay Up on the Weather Every night before work I try and remember to check the weather and get an idea of what I should expect […]
The Art of Juggling at Work
Whether you work in a job where your have clear-cut, defined tasks or you are in the in-house “jack of all trades”, it is likely you will find yourself needing to do a little juggling at some point to ensure all the work gets done. This can lead to stress and worry as you may […]
Five Things I Learned as a Small Business Owner
When I am not writing for Gravitate Online, I am off running my own business, Character Booking. We send costumed characters to birthday parties, corporate events, city events, Salt Lake Comic Con, etc. It’s a fun little gig, but unless you too, run a business, you would never guess how difficult it is. At any […]
Email Outreach – You’re Doing it Right
Whether we like it or not a lot of our business lives are based on communication and in today’s busy world a big chunk of that communication comes from emails. So the big question is – how do we make sure we aren’t sending emails that are just getting tossed in the junk mail folder? […]
What Makes a Compelling Image
They say that good design is invisible, and that design really only becomes apparent when it’s done poorly. And while I wholeheartedly agree with this, I’m pretty sure that any designer would agree that there is something to be said for truly compelling design—design that simply captures you and leaves you trying to determine what […]
Is Is it the Coach or the Talent?
What makes a football team great? Why are the Seahawks on their way to the Superbowl for the second year? Russel Wilson? Richard Sherman? Pete Carroll? Or how about this one: how did Ohio State beat Oregon to be the national champions? Given the same team, but replacing Urban Meyer, would it have happened? This […]
Focus @ Work: The Tyler Durden Approach Part 3
3. Specific Defense Ideas Okay. We’ve identified the ideal and labeled some of our distractions. How do we minimize these so we can get more work done? Most times, we can’t just eliminate the distractions, but rather have to redirect them, minimize and organize them. Doing so requires forming new habits. I’ve got several ideas […]
Focus @ Work: The Tyler Durden Approach Part 2
2. What is the Reality? Okay, in Focus @ Work Part 1 we had our heads in the clouds and talked about the ideal, lets take a look at reality. re·al·i·ty [ree-al-i-tee] 1. resemblance to what is real. 2. a real thing or fact. 3. real things, facts, or events taken as a whole; state […]