By Gini Dietrich
Welcome to the 44th edition of The Three Things, the weekly update of three links, podcasts, videos, or books you can’t miss from Michael Schechter (Honora, A Better Mess), Howie Goldfarb (Blue Star Strategic Marketing), and yours truly (I’m back while Lindsay Bell-Wheeler is on vacation!).
For those of you new to this series, The Three Things arrives in your inbox on Sunday mornings (unless you don’t subscribe, but that can easily be fixed if you hurry over and enter your email address or add to your RSS feed) so you have some extra time to spend perusing the obscure content we’ve curated for you (and one another) before your week begins and deadlines, meetings, and work takes over.
This week we look at manipulating the media for personal gain in a murder, brilliance in a moment, and hard work disguised as opportunity.
The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice
Michael on Creative Energy. Despite being very late to this party, I want to strongly urge every human pick themselves up a copy of Todd Henry’s phenomenal book on harnessing creative energy. I won’t lie, I shied away from this book at first. I don’t particularly self identify as a creative and often find these books can be more inspirational than tactical. I could not have been more wrong. While The Accidental Creative touches on inspiration, it also offers a framework (one that is clearly based in many of the tenets of David Allen’s *Getting Things Done*) for having better ideas and turning more of them into a reality.
Why We Should Fear Miami’s ‘Facebook Murderer’
Howie on Media Manipulation. This is for my friend Gini, who every day blogs about public relations, evolution in communications, and media relations. Imagine what the Son of Sam or the Zodiac Killer or even the D.C. sniper could have done with Facebook and Twitter or YouTube. Seems like we will be finding out sadly. But Gini will have lots of blog content.
Ashton Kutcher Acceptance Speech
Gini on Hard Work Disguised as Opportunity. The acceptance speech Ashton (Chris!) Kutcher gave at the Teen Choice Awards has been making the rounds so you may have already seen it. If you haven’t, I invite you to invest four minutes to learn the three things he provides to the teen audience. My favorite? He talks about how it may look like people have been lucky and given lots of opportunity, but no one sees all the hard work behind it. Amen, Ashton. Amen.
Now it’s your turn. Is there a podcast, video, book, or article you think we need to see?