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Posted: August 31st, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | 1 Comment »
In all the jobs that I have had and with everyone that I have worked with, there comes a moment when the folks who make the important decisions and who ultimately sign my paycheck ask themselves a variation of the same question, “How does this fit within our brand strategy?”. It doesn’t matter what it is they’re talking about; it could be a new brochure, an internal newsletter or something less tangible like a new service. The answer to that question usually leads to frustrating conversations about how many times a logo needs to appear on one brochure or that “the logo needs to be bigger”.
What makes these conversations so frustrating for me are not the decisions that are being made, but the fact that these decisions are being made on the inaccurate idea that a brand or branding begins and ends with a logo or a color scheme.
So for the record, branding is not your logo; it is not your color scheme or your tagline. Branding is the idea of who you are in the minds of those you come in contact with, and so, a brand is made up of every experience and interaction that others have with you or your service.
If this is true with companies is it also true with individuals? I suggest, yes! We all have our own personal brand and it is not just the labels that we wear in public (Artist, Musician, Christian, Muslim… etc.). These are labels that describe our character the way we see our character, but our personal brand like that of a company is not so much about who we think we are, but who others think we are, and it too is made up of every experience and interaction with us. It is not the label we use to describe our character; it is our character itself that makes up our personal brand.
I couldn’t help but think of several companies that have redone their “brand” in the past several months, some have been successful at it, others only time will tell, but like all of these should we examine if our personal brand needs a facelift?
What is your brand about?
Posted: August 25th, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | No Comments »
Every week or so I have to teach my students new words and discuss how they are spelled, suffixes, etc. I also practice reading sentences with the students for increased fluency. The sentences I am given are blah. So, I started making up poems to use instead. Here are some that I will use to start the year:
The bird, I’m afraid, was caught in the rope.
The cat, I’m afraid, stalked full of hope.
The bird, it is said, was crazily squawking
while the kind little mouse was franticly gnawing.
The first day I was feeling nervous,
some of the kids looked somewhat treacherous.
And the teacher, was she dangerous?
but thankfully, it all turned out marvelous.
I have to use certain words, so the subjects of the poems are very random. It has been kinda fun to be creative though.
Posted: August 23rd, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | No Comments »
Posted: August 21st, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | 6 Comments »
So can you tell the difference in these two pictures? Well, we are dressed differently, we are groomed differently, and if you said “beth is wearing an engagement ring” you guessed it. YUP! I asked Beth to marry me on Wednsday night and she said yes.
Beth and I have been dating on-and-off for about seven years and during that time we have had many opportunities to practice patience, trust, talking, listening, caring, being upset, laughing, smiling, being quiet and listening to God. We are almost avarage at some of them. We are good at others, and we need a lot of help on some. Still we are very excited to spend our lives together.
So now the engagement stats:
- When: Wednsday August 16th, 2006
- Where: Manhattan Beach
- Was I nerveous: Yes! – (i’d like to hear if this is true of other couples, were you nerveous when you asked?)
- What we ate before: Wienerschnitzel – Corn Dog, Fries, Ice Cream Sunday and a Coke.
- What we ate after: Donuts
- When is the wedding: June 30th, 2007
- Will I get an invite: yes — but we need your snail-mail address please.
- Where is the wedding taking place: We don’t know yet.
So as we get ready to join the ranks of married couples we realize how new we are at this and so we welcome the advice and prayers from all our married friends and family (if you are not married we welcome your advice and prayers too).
Posted: August 15th, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | No Comments »
I just got back from spending 5 days in San Jose with my family. My sister, Becky, is going to have a baby in a few weeks and my mom was going on a retreat, so I went up, just in case. The first day I was there, we went to dinner at my brother’s new house. It was just us kids, me, peter, his wife Stephanie, Becky and my nieces. (Stephanie should get a medal; she has an almost-3 year old, and an infant, along with most of their stuff still in boxes and no running water in the kitchen. And she still made a great dinner for all of us.) A couple days later, they all came over to mom’s house and I made dinner. I was thinking that it was cool that just us kids get together. I remembered another time when we all got together for dinner.
Once in college we had Thanksgiving dinner together when my parents went to my grandmother’s funeral in Wisconsin. Peter and Becky made everything: turkey, stuffing, potatoes, etc. (Peter stuffed the turkey the night before, and then had to un-stuff it so we didn’t get sick.) They were so excited that it was the earliest dinner we’ve ever had. And it was really good.
I feel really blessed and happy to have a family that likes to be around each other, even when mom didn’t say we had to be. I love them a lot, and I know that they love me too.
Posted: August 14th, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | No Comments »
I saw ‘World Trade Center‘ a couple of days ago and thought that Stone did a pretty good job considering the eggshells of controversy he had to walk on to film it.
My only fear going into it was that it was going to be another ‘Flag waving God Bless America good old boy gung ho tearjerker of a movie’ and was pleased to see that it wasn’t any of that. There were no political undertones, no conspiracy theories, and no sensationalism; there is even a brief montage of world citizenry glued to television sets displaying looks of concern as they watch on the reports of the attacks on CNN. Stone knows full well — he pointed it out during the famous Alice Tully Hall panel in October 2001 — which a large swath of humanity, from Greece to Gaza, erupted into a spontaneous dance party upon hearing the news of the hit on America, yet Stone omitted these scenes.
The movie took me back to the morning of September 11. I walked to work and even after hearing about the planes crashing into the towers, I went about my normal tasks. I didn’t feel very affected by the crash or the crumbling of the buildings; everything seemed so far away from me. I don’t aim at downplaying the horror of the event, and the pain that went far beyond lives that were lost that day, but it was the stories of individuals who should have been in the towers, but were not that really resonated with me.
The story of a woman who felt devastated after being fired from her job in the 64th floor of tower 1 the day before the attacks, the man who was never late to work and on this day for the firs time his alarm didn’t wake him. There were dozens of barely-missed saved by chance stories, and I have heard some people say that these folks were very lucky. I happen to disagree with them, see I look at luck in the same way an atheist looks at God. I believe that these people were not saved by luck, but by the stealthy workings of God. I can already hear the cynical ask “does this mean God decided not to save those who died?” I can’t really tell you for sure what God was doing or not doing in the lives of all those who tragically died. However, I can tell you from witnessing lives touched and transformed as a missionary and from events like these, that God sometimes does intervene in peoples lives in dramatic ways, other times in subtle ways, and sometimes what we see as misfortune is really a blessing — as cliché as that may sound.
I have to reflect on how many times I have felt like life handed me the short end of the stick after whacking me around with it a while and how many times I have cried out “Woe is me”, not realizing that my misfortune was a way of God keeping me from danger, either spiritual or physical. I suspect that someday we will know how much God intervened in our lives, I also suspect that we will feel humbled to know how much God was involved in much of what we attribute to “luck” or “misfortune” and how blessed we are to have a God who loves us in spite of us.
Posted: August 7th, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | No Comments »
This week my girlfriend turned…well we celebrated her birthday. She spent the previous day figuring out what she wanted to do. We thought of the circus, Downtown Disney, a play, but in the end we settled for dinner at CPK, a trip to the bookstore and a short walk to the beach to see the last minutes of the sunset and the arival of another night.
It occured to me that this is the second year we have dinner at CPK on Beth’s birthday. The restaurant is probably one of our favorite, we don’t even need a menu to know what we want. Beth has the Thai Chicken pizza; I have the Jamaican Jerk with no cheese, a pepsi and some water. From time to time Beth will break the pattern and order something diffferent, but it has become our tradition to order the same thing every time.
In the past we have tried to create other traditions for ourselfs and I’m sad to say that we haven’t been very successful at it. We tried making lunch at Souplantation on Saturdays one of them, but that only lasted until we were too lazy to drive or coulnd’t afford it anymore. Earlier this year we had started to make a tradition of meeting on Thursday nights for an early dinner and some good conversation before my classes at West L.A., but as soon as school was over that tradition ended as well.
So why are traditions so important anyways? I hear people say that Mexicans are very traditional, and being a Mexican myself I thought I might have a chance at figuring it out; but the more I thought about it the more I realized that I am either oblivious to my traditions or just don’t have any. After all what is a tradition anyways? Is it simply things you do and are known for? If so, then what is the differnece between a tradition and a habit?
It appears that the task is going to take a bit of research. I will keep you posted on what I find.
Posted: August 5th, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | 2 Comments »
how much do i love my love? a little more now, i think. have you seen the previous post? its a bunch of star wars links. (it turns out i am obi-wan kenobi, ha!) he stayed up to find star wars all over the web. he bought me the next 3 star wars books for my birthday. and he listened to me go through all the books at the book store telling him which i’ve read and which i haven’t. he asks what happens in the stories and listens as i talk and talk and talk and talk giving him the story and my interpretation. he doesn’t do this to impress me, he does it because he is really interested. i love that about him.
Posted: August 5th, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | No Comments »
Posted: August 2nd, 2006 | Author: nedandthefrog | Filed under: | No Comments »
Over the last 10 years I have developed an interest in teaching, but not teaching in general. I have specifically become interested in teaching some type of humanities topic or even more specific religion/ous topic. I have had opportunities to do this as a co-teacher for sunday school, but not in the scale that I would like. I have also taught the “teacher development” class, which is a class that is suppose train the up and coming sunday school teachers, so I have a tendancy to I sit in church and size up whom ever is teaching at Newsong and Westdale. This brings me to what I have been thinking about lately, and that is teaching and what techiniques “good” sunday school teachers employ to be “good” or even “great” teachers. I’ve noticed that every “good” sunday school teacher consciously or unconsciously uses the classical hero pattern in presenting their lesson. This is actually very easy to do, and sunday school lessons, or sermons would be a whole lot more interesting if they followed this pattern. So if you are teaching or delivering a sermon this coming sunday, consider formating your class or words as follows:
1. You have to start out with “me” in mind. You have to make me the hero of your talk or lesson, otherwise it isn’t going to be relevant to me and my mind is going to wonder why I’m wearing a tie. In the classical hero pattern, the hero starts off innocent in his village/home doing everyday things. So remind me of the things I do everyday that make me innocent—a better word might be naive.
2. The next part is for you to find a way to lure me into the adventure. I find that the most boring lessons or sermons are subtle in this part. You have make sure that I am completely lured and that there is no way for me to remain where I am (naive). Most good sermons and lessons typically go back to Eden and the fall, lets face it, once the fall took place there was no going back!
3. Somewhere along the way I need to be confronted with the “shadow presence”. You have to be very tactful here to not make room for justification. You can not be relative here, I have to know without a doubt that I am face to face with the enemy in the story. You mustn’t confuse this part with the climax, this part should only give me an insight into how weak I am and how strong the antagonist is.
4. If you have brought me this far, you are doing pretty good and its pretty much downhill from here. Now you need to bring me to the climax of the story, beyond the threshold. This is the part where I am beaten and I can not see anyway out and the “shadow presence” has the upper hand. Now if you are a good teacher you will bring me this far making me think that I am the hero of the story, and that something supernatural beyond me will soon happen that will suddenly turn things in my favor. However if you are a great teacher you will find a clever yet subtle way to teach me that unlike the classical hero; I really am beaten. If you are a great teacher this is where you will link Christ into the story and teach me that he is the real hero and how the ordeal he overcame is the only thing that will help me overcome.
5. The last part of the story is the “return”. Tell me what lays on the other side of the ordeal. Tell me about the reward, but mostly tell me about how I will have changed. You have to bring me back to the same place I started; to the mundane little things that made me naive, but with the added wisdom I have gained.
If you can get this under your belt, I can almost guarantee an improvement in your audience attention span.