I took a week off writing last week. A few things put me in the absolute mother of all bad moods and I just decided to keep quiet.
But I’m back this week, and I saw this print on the wall while eating Manchester’s nicest sausage and egg barm (or roll, or bap, or cob, or butty or whatever you call it)…
Work hard and be nice to people.
And I sat there, savouring each mouthful of my barm… yeah it’s that good… feeling quite zen, looking at this print thinking yeah, that’s two of the coolest things to boil your existence down to.
But then my cynicism kicked in a bit. And I thought yeah but is that enough these days?! It doesn’t often feel like enough! And is that especially enough in a world where lots of people don’t do the second thing especially.
We live in a world of tactics and ego and attention and every-person-for-themselves.
We live in a world of ‘do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t’… whether that’s making more money, gaining more followers, getting more bookings, increasing your popularity or fame, going viral…
Well ok, maybe not a ‘world’ of those things, but the world we live in as small creative business owners. It feels like it’s all about tactics.
And with the current market conditions of what feels like less work to go round, it’s easy to abandon those two rock solid principles of life because, well, stress innit.
I don’t want to waffle on about all the reasons I think people aren’t nice or choose not to work hard, so I’ll skip to where my brain ended up after the cynicism subsided the other day and I decided yeah it’s enough to build your personal and business existence around those two things.
Work hard.
Be nice to people.
When times are tough, and when they aren’t, just keep doing those things.
With work, nobody knows what works so just keep doing stuff. If you try too hard to listen to all the stuff you should be doing, you’ll do nothing because of overwhelm.
It’s mega, mega cheesy, but I like the quote that on days when you only had 10% to give and you gave 10%, you gave 100%.
And just always be nice to the people you know and the people you don’t, just for the sake of being a nice person.
The world needs more nice people.
Thanks for reading.
Adam
PS – I call it a barm. What do you call it where you’re from?
