That’s hot

It always makes me feel good to get a book for a gift. And one of the best books I received this Christmas is the self-help hardback, The Little Stuff Matters Most by Bernie Brillstein, the founding partner of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, the most powerful management and production company in Hollywood. It’s a good read that helps us assess the way we conduct our business and personal lives. It’s playing by the right rules, good manners, open-mindedness, being chic in our own way, truthfulness and counterintuitive thinking. Written in an easy-to-read and witty fashion, Brillstein puts together an anthology of 50 fundamental rules that can make living more exciting. In this New Year piece, I would like to share seven of my favorites from the collection.

• Know the difference between hot and good. The game these days in any business or life endeavor is built on what is hot. There are hot performers, hot shows, hot trends, hot decisions or indecisions. Hot sells, but with it comes a trail of questions: How long will the heat last? What do we do with our being hot? How do we stay in the game and prolong our supremacy?

We have to play by the right rules, keeping Miss Manners constantly in mind. Knowledge is power and the thirst for information must be endless to continue to play smart. Simply, staying hot is an interminable aspiration to do good work. The irony is that the more we worry about staying hot, the more likely we are to get cold. The trick is to keep doing exactly what we did before success arrived, instead of merely trying to protect our accomplishments.

There is a big market for hot because, beyond the heat, the hope is that hot will become good. This optimistic consequence happens mostly to people with talent, a good attitude and a compassionate heart. How do we tell? Ask these questions: Do they think they’re hot? Are they full of themselves? If so, chances are they’re not paying attention to the work and they’ll never get good.

• Success begins with being ourselves. Real successes don’t conform. We have to find some way to stand out. The best method is to work with who we are. We shouldn’t go looking for style elsewhere; we can find it within us. Style is not only the way we dress, but also the way we act. We owe it to ourselves to be ourselves, and see if other people can stand it. It’s not saying that we should be conceited; moderation is still the rule. But if we have a sense of humor, great intellect or immense good looks, we should show it.

Being different is not bad news. Challenge the conventional wisdom that if we stick out, we’ll court trouble. But if that happens, we can leave and start our own entrepreneurial adventure. There is a flip side, of course. We also have to know when to conform, when to shut up. There is a game we all have to play, but we can still play it creatively.

• Sublimate our ego for cash. Don’t worry about what we want to sell, worry about what the customers want to buy. It’s a basic marketing tenet. It’s important to get into the customers’ heads. We must listen instead of talk, and when we do talk we don’t say what we want to say; say what the other guys want to hear. If we follow their lead, they will help us along.

If we treat our customers fairly, think about their needs as well as our own, we will always be ahead. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with a little "I attitude" at times. I tell every client, "Give them two and you take one, and it will keep you in the business forever."

• When our time has come, success will find us. Good work leads to success. Sometimes, though, the waiting period seems endless, but if we believe in our talent, we don’t have to take the path everyone else takes. We can be different. We can change our course and take the road less traveled and discover our own hot buttons that can allow us to achieve the success we aim for much faster and with better satisfaction.

But if we have to wait, how do we stand the waiting? Fortunately, "making it" is not always synonymous with money or material acquisitions. It shouldn’t be. Personal satisfaction is primordial. We have to believe that what we’re doing and accomplishing is for the right reasons. With that mindset, perhaps we’ll be able to do better work. There’s emotional success as well. Like we were first with a business concept, a product concept or a service-oriented scheme. We knew we knew. It’s a good feeling. It will sustain us, rationally and emotionally, until the rest of what we want to achieve comes.

• The best way to take failure and rejection is to wallow in it. Who among us does not hate failure and rejection? We use various mechanisms to cope with it. Most of the time, we put on a happy face to disguise the ill feeling, which may or may not work depending on how we buck up. We all have intermittent bad days and a string of bad luck, but when they occur frequently and take root in our head, suddenly, we don’t care about anything – work, diet, family, relationships, sex. When these are not managed well, we go into a slump.

We’ve experienced slumps in our lives, and these sinking situations can confront us again and again. We can ward off the annoying sensation that they bring by counting our blessings – "At least we don’t have a serious illness." Or, "Be thankful we have a job." Or, "The family is there to support and cheer us up."

To get over slumps, we have to wallow in them, but quickly get out of the hole, stretch, take a deep breath, and start again. That means, as Brillstein suggests, accepting that we are in a slump in the first place. And to deal with any emotional challenge, we have to go through the fire, not around it. Don’t make a pain in the ass of ourselves, stop moaning, and don’t even try to make everyone else in our lives feel as pathetic as we do. Try to remember the times we were riding high, exercise, eat the right food, bond with family and friends, do positive activities, and wait for that click that signals that things are looking up.

• Don’t be afraid of fear. We all live in a climate of fear, from serious concerns like terrorism and calamities to ludicrous ones like losing our way or getting caught for some petty indiscretion. Those who say that they don’t live in constant anxiety are full of it.

Fear has helped make people successful. It’s potentially there in every situation, and we can use it to our advantage. It should not consume us, but instead push us to think on our feet, make our mind and heart work to craft a plan of action and overpower that sense of unease.

• Someone up there is watching. We all aim to build an unassailable reputation–personal or professional. It is built by the steadiness of doing the same thing all the time, and doing it well. It is shaped by being honest, not playing around with people’s lives, having our publics respect what we say or do, constantly working on the side of truth, and acknowledging that a Higher Being is watching. God (or whatever we call Him) has the dossier on each of us. As our spiritual upbringing has taught us, He knows if we do good things or bad, deal with anyone with malice, treat our fellowmen courteously, share our blessings or simply be an angel to people.

We have to believe in something greater than ourselves. It will lead us to the right path, put our pride in place, and help make our existence happier, however we define what happiness is.

Navigate 2007 with these basics. They are stark reminders of the oft-forgotten little stuff that matters most.

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E-mail bongo@cvasia.com or bongo@campaignsandgrey.net for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating.