Ball State Reminder and Advice From Jerry Seinfled

I've been busy preparing for my talk at Ball State University this week so I haven't had much time to write posts. But the good news is that I've generated some new material that I will post here after my talk. As a reminder, I'll be talking about how the Story process works at Disney, what qualities make a good story sketch (and story artists), and about the making of the story of "Tangled".

I did an interview with Payne Horning from WCRD (the Ball State Radio station) that will be airing tomorrow morning, for anyone interested.

There's a new preview of my graphic novel here.

We all know how difficult it can be to work on our own projects in our spare time and how easy it is to let our projects fall to the bottom of our priorities and then usually into oblivion. I found this article that suggests a simple technique from Jerry Seinfeld to help provide motivation for working on your project every day. At first it seemed too simple to work, but the more I thought about it the more I realized it sounded pretty effective. Basically his technique is to get a giant year calendar and - for every day you work on your project - you get to put an "X" over that day. That's it! The secret is that, as soon as you have a few days under your belt you'll have a nice string of X's. The longer the chain gets, the more you'll want it to grow, and the more reluctant you'll be to "break the chain". If you focus on keeping the chain going, you'll force yourself to work on your project a little each day, and that, over time, can turn into quite a lot of progress.

The reason I think it'll be effective for me is because - once I take one day off, it becomes easier to take the next day off, and the next, and the next....for me if I can force myself to work every day and see the satisfaction of progress piling up, I'll become even more motivated over time.