Long Live the Hustle

Casey E. Palmer ⋅ Blog, Designs, Fish 'n' Chimps, Logos, Mansformation, Photography, Thoughts, Websites ⋅ drawings, keeping busy, logos, photos, projects, works in progress ⋅ 2 Comments

Sometimes you just gotta whip something quick up to test your skills.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the work that we never actually hustle to reach the goals that we set out in the first place.

What’s Your Dream?

It all starts with a dream. A notion. An idea.

After work I caught a quick bite to eat with Sean Ward, an old buddy of mine, and he told me the big secret to getting where you want to be in life. To paraphrase:

Keep throwing things out there into the world, and eventually one will stick.

When he’s working on his projects, he’ll share shots and videos of the works in progress so people can get a good idea of what he’s been up to and where he’s going next. It’s not so much a humblebrag or anything of that nature, but rather it gives him the fuel he needs in order to keep producing and moving forward.

The Dangers of Thinking Too Much

Which connects right back to the original point — we might have amazing ideas. We might have entire lists of things that we want to do, but never get around to actually doing them. Why?

At dinner, I called it an “idea backlog”. I’ve said countless times now, but life is the sum of our experiences. And the more experiences we have, the broader our understanding of the world around us grows.

Here’s a look at mine:

You may have seen this photo I took start to pop up on different sites I use, but I felt it was a good representation of how I’ve grown (see this photo from 2007 for reference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doomz/1372047510/)

This is the sketch I made to illustrate my idea behind what the Mansformation logo would represent — the transition from a man being hateable to being dateable; uncouth and unrefined to polished and desirable.

Sometimes you have to be a one-man army to get things done, and for me that meant blowing the dust off of my graphics tablet and working on the logo for Mansformation in Adobe Illustrator. After a lot of tweaking and input from my wife and good friends, I was able to come up with this — something that I think I’m going to be pretty happy with for a good while!

Also, I wanted to have a longer version of the Mansformation logo that could be used for things like Facebook Cover Images and business cards. Still needs to be rendered in Illustrator, though.

When I was trying to come up with a good idea for a Mansformation mascot, this is the first thing that came to mind — a guy looking a little aloof as he displays what and what not to do. But his bulbous head was making it hard for him to interact with others….

Dusting my webcomic idea off, I decided that I really needed to have a sharp logo to represent the title I’ve been dreaming about for the last decade. A stylized chimp’s head with gills seemed to do the trick for me :)

Also, I wanted to have some cool text for the header of the site I’m building for Fish & Chimps and some tooling around eventually led to this, which I think is completely AWESOME.

Right now, CaseyPalmer.com is very plain-looking and I wanted it to have some more “oomph” to really speak to who I am and what I’m all about. So I started sketching out some header ideas I want to use in order to really let my personality shine through on the site.

The Project category header sketch.

The Gallery category header sketch.

And of course, when I’m not busy working on all of this, you can find me playing Words With Friends and taking my friends to school. Find me at “CasePeezy”.

So what do you think will happen to an idea that you’ve just left sitting around in your head without having done anything to make it more real? That’s right — it will only grow in scope and scale until it seems unattainable and leaving you too overwhelmed to start!

And no one wants to be stuck with a great idea but no hope to ever make anything of it, do they?

And So, We Hustle

In the end, you need to be less worried about where you should start and about people stealing your ideas, and more about never starting in first place.

Don’t know where to start? Start somewhere. Doing something is countless times better than doing nothing.

Afraid someone’s going to steal your idea? Take what they did and do it even better. These days, the one who did it first is rarely remembered — it’s whoever did it best.

Stop giving yourself an easy out. Stop giving yourself excuses to rely on and just do stuff.

Get your hustle on. What’s the worst that could happen?

–case p.