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Your path to success can easily be littered with personally created self-defeating obstacles. A mouthful yes but essentially I am talking about the things you unwittingly do that will slow you down. And this is definitely something of a problem for myself at the moment. There are many ways to hinder your progress and so without further pun and pause this is your Ten Step Plan to Tripping Yourself Up.

This step is relatively simple. Forget the point of your enterprise and the main aim and goal. In fact try not to determine what this is. Instead spend hours tweaking and fiddly, fussing and fixing non-core attributes of your business. A simple example for me is this site’s design, I have spent the better part of two months working on a design. I still don’t have one. I had stopped writing, because I was just going to finish this task (urgent, supposedly, but ultimately not important). The problem being I can never decide what it is I need the site to look like. I read, learn, explore, search, and collect many ways and directions on site design and then have to many details to implement. So here I sit fiddling with this piece, trying out this new technique, all in the background while ignoring the core function of this website. Content.

Summary: Sweat the small stuff. Make sure everything little thing is perfect before you proceed.

Step 2: Never Decide on Anything

For this step, do nothing. Easy. Just keep going with whatever catches your eye, get distracted as often as possible, until you are buried under a mountain of options. Simply not choosing, is a great way to stall any business. People do it all the time (I am one of those, “people”). At the moment I can’t decide on an example… Each decision is like using the rudder of a boat, pushing either it left or right will change your course. Each choice will lead you to a destination. Not knowing where you are going, you don’t need to decide, no pressure. Life will decide for you. Luck will determine your success. A crappy option, but theres no pressure and its so easy to just be carried by the current. Unfinished task simply pile up, and become white noise in your busy world, a minor annoyance but peripheral to your existence.

Summary: Decisions determine direction. If you like wandering, make none.

Step 3: Create unrealistic expectations

Just daydream. Imagine the lofty heights of your future success, and then tell everyone or even just yourself. See the end goal without acknowledging the sub-goals in between. Race for the finish, and ignore the 10 000 m you have to cover. This is not to say don’t dream, have no big hairy audacious goal, or never reach for the stars. Its just that you should at least think about what is possible, probable, and what you are able to produce. Take this article for example, I started writing and thought 10 is nice number, lets make it Ten Steps to… That sounds great, okay lets write. So now you’re expecting Ten Steps. I only have three… hmm… isn’t this awkward.

Summary: Set yourself up for failure, by making success unattainable.

Step 4: Never acknowledge the end

For this step there is no end. Its up to you really. Is that task finished, can I rework that design a bit more, can I fiddle with this, fix that up a bit. I don’t know you tell me. Knowing when you have achieved what is necessary, to make a client happy or yourself in order to proceed is of course very important. So fall in love, get caught up, get sentimental, overly enjoy the process, and forget about deadlines. In the creative process whatever the application it is easy to get lost, in your own genius, the excitement of the moment, or simply stubbornly persist unnecessarily. Get the job done first, then improve on it as time allows.

Summary: Just keeping working on something, until the end of time.

So in keeping with the Ten Four steps above, this is the end of the article. Decision made, core message delivered with the realization that the creative juices have dried up.

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Have Potential

One of the most damaging statements in my life was “You have potential…” It can lead to unrelenting self-imposed pressure, nullifying my modicum of supposed talent with the obsessive compulsion to be perfect. To live up to your full potential.

Procrastinate

Believe it or not, a fear of failure can lead to not wanting to start. Being “productive” can simply be a delaying tactic. Finding urgent but not important tasks to fill your time until your deadline looms to such a malevolent degree that the pressure is high enough to spur you into action. Rather be effective.

A Failure to Plan

Creativity is chaos, and from this chaos is born the universe of possibility and innovation. But even the chaos of the Big Bang resulted almost immediately into some form of order, rampant energy fell into the restricted boxes of atoms, forces that became our laws developed, such as the far-reaching and insatiable pull of gravity. The human mind craves order, a sense of balance. Wanting to plan, knowing the merits, but failing to plan, is (however trite this may sound) planning to fail. Some creative types (myself the mascot of this doomed team) enjoy the chaos, the feeling of energy, and the lack of restraint.

To avoid success, avoid goals long term and short, avoid measurement and feedback, avoid structure and focus. Avoid planning.

Berate yourself

Criticize your every failing, suck the wind right out of your sails, rain in on your own parade. No-one knows better than you how to poop your own party. Build a mountain of could haves, should haves, insults and dismissals and then bury yourself underneath it.

If you start don’t finish

Clutter your life and mind with half started, half finished dreams. The undead leftovers of unsubstantiated vision, given only enough life to mindlessly dog your every move gnawing at the edge of your hoarding memory.

Fcuk the basics

Forget, circumvent, under appreciate, “Know better”. Nothing assures failure, avoids success or marries you and mediocrity like reaching for the stars while standing on hot air. Conventions, norms , tried and tested, the common theory, the rules waiting to be broken. Flaunt them, break them, resist them - while never understanding nor building on them is a great way to avoid success.

Rely on Midnight Memory

Great insights often come at mundane, sometimes inconvenient moments. Both buoyancy and relativity were supposedly born in the bathroom, in a bath and a shower respectively. When you relax and remove yourself from the situation, your mind often provides the answer that your were fighting for. This is why lying in bed, dozing off, idea after idea line up in single file and present themselves and their cases to your semi-slumbering consciousness. Great ideas can often present themselves, just after you’ve gotten into the bath, the shower, sat down of the toilet. Just after you’ve switched off the lights, stumbled into bed and gotten comfortable. But never fear, don’t write it down, you’ll remember it in the morning - guaranteed. To avoid success never keep a pen and pad of paper handy on your bedside table.

Get Addicted to Information

We live in a consumer driven world. We consume. Everything. Al Gore’s says too much. I agree. We also have become addicted to the consumption of semi-pertinent, semi-useful, free and boundless information. Become a constant Wikipedia surfer or rampant Stumbler if you want to avoid success. Abuse these wonderful tools to magical waste potential productive free time.

People say knowledge is power - Bruce Lee said “The correct use of knowledge is power.” We know he kicked ass. Information is not even knowledge yet, it’s 1’s and 0’s, on and off. No meaning without focus, purpose, context and application. So subscribe to the newsletter, and this free information service about that hobby that you thought you might try, or surf a few blogs and subscribe to 30 or 40 feeds. Read them everyday, along with your mountains of joke e-mail, print spam, download everything, never throw away any article. You might just re-read it. Or better yet save so much, that you get to sort it out so that it is manageable, making numerous well-thought out and ultimately useless little folders - filled to the brim with stuff you’ll never read.

A little bit of knowledge is dangerous but a lot of information is fatal.

Ride it till it dies

Don’t exercise, eat well, sleep enough or relax ever. Take any machine fail to maintain it, run it on inferior fuel, never let it cool down and always over rev it.

Its bound to succeed for a while.

Your creative mind is in no way connected or effected by the host which carries it, feeds it, protects it, cleans it or connects it to the world it wished to change. Balance is evil. Avoid it like the plague if you want to avoid success.

Be inconsistent

Be unreliable, unpredictable, non-committal, shatter promises, and never ever try to improve. Head in every direction at once! Multi-task till you can do 20 things at once and finish none. Under-perform, over-promise, under-deliver. Be an enigma, unto yourself and others. Trust is overrated. Zig and zag through life, detour from the yellow brick road towards every shiny object. Focus? Rather spread yourself too thin. Never say what you mean or mean what you say. Just do it, just be, different, every time.

Self-Belief

Last but not least, don’t believe in yourself, listen to your critics, they know you better than you do.

PS. This article was written from the stance that, I know more about “How not to succeed” than I do about success. I have noticed, from personal experience, the above ways to avoid success. The article is thus a guide to fail, written to inspire you to resist and try the opposite.

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This site has some really useful, and often neglected aspects of design, like this article about using black properly. This tut is quite a life saver!

A great site with tutorials on numerous creative disciplines, from 2D to 3D, static to motion. Free tutorial files!

Another great varied site, some great tutorials for After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop.

I haven’t used this site, finding it in PSDtuts web round up section.
On closer inspection they have some really slick effects that they’re teaching. Worth a closer look.

Have a look at these sites, let us know if you know any others, feel free to plug your own site. This is a do-follow site. We’ll follow this post with our Top Ten Feeds; the best feeds at the moment - with useful and great stuff.

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But never fear we are back!

We’re different too…

The theme has changed. I was going to design my own theme, but I’ve decided to stick to my knitting since I’m a terrible css developer / theme maker type person. No pictures. I got bored. So I found this really snazzy one.

Over the next few millennia it will undoubtedly develop, however the rational soul within my mind is beating the Obsessive Perfectionist Virgo with a big wet tuna, SO… I won’t be spending caffeine fueled hours making everything just right. I’ll rather focus on content and enjoying this blog. So that hopefully you will too.

Our content has broadened as well, I know we should focus on a single niche, but I have undiagnosed AD(H)D (Hyperactivity only sometimes…) and get distracted wanting to go off in numerous tangents whenever something shiny presents itself. So instead of making numerous blogs for film making, design and creative business. We are making a combined innovation themed site based on sharing finds, lessons and resources.

Feel free to comment, they are all read, we do take requests - Just nothing by Britney…

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This is an impressive and very intriguing competition, hosted by Pot Noodle.

The quick brief is that they want you to make a ‘tribute’ film (read: paraody/spoof/copy?) of one of your favourite films and feature a Pot Noodle. Great way to get some publicity or just have some fun.

Watch the video below for a much better description and the prizes.

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So I have lost all my posts, my settings, my modifications, my everything is gone.

Kung Fu Cabbage is getting a make over!

We will relaunch with some changes, and hopefully rise from the ashes a better, stronger, more useful blog. Some of the core posts will be back, and some of the videos, at the very least we’ll be leaner…

Please leave messages of condolences and sympathies as motivation for myself and the team to keep going.

Thanks

Zane (and all)

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