Stay on Target… STAY ON TARGET!

I have a serious problem with staying focused. It’s not the outside distractions that cause me the biggest trouble; it’s the internal ones. My mind races at about 160,000 miles per hour, and if I were to stop and pay attention to any one stray thought, the entirety of our little business would come crashing down around us.

I really don’t think Rachel would like that much. And being that her staying happy with me is a pretty large part of what gets me through the day, I try and stay focused.

But it’s so hard! I’ve had about fourteen ideas for things we could do since I started writing this! And they’re all really good ideas! Monster nesting dolls? Genius! Back up the armored truck and let me swim in all that money!

Better get it in check. In the past year alone, I have managed to convince myself that we should branch out into ACEO cards (trading card sized original art), greeting cards, customized coloring business cards, downloadable paper environments for Squidleighs, finger puppets, and monkey versions of every pop culture icon we have ever loved. Keep in mind that all of this was supposed to happen while we increased production levels, enhanced our website, and maximized our internet footprint. Oh, yeah. We needed to do all of that while we work our day jobs.

I am a rational(ish) person. I am aware that we all have limits, and I married a woman who will remind me of just that when I forget. With a frying pan, if necessary. And it’s not like all of the brilliant ideas that slipped past the “filter” set the world on fire, anyway. The ACEO cards were fun, but they might have been too weird. No one seemed to want to buy a trading card of a hammerhead on a tricycle. The greeting cards were great, but Santa in a tutu might have been a bit much. The downloadable environments were cute, but they took a really long time to design so production started to suffer. The coloring business cards have been a hit, and so have the finger puppets, so we’ll consider those a success. And we’re still pushing our production limits. One of us even managed to keep the day job!

After the smoke clears from each of these little “experiments”, I realize the same exact thing. That energy should stay on target. We make a lot of people happy selling our creepy little monsters, and we should focus on making even more people even more happy doing the same. That means more production. Sure, we need to keep enhancing the website and maximizing our internet footprint, but that all comes with time. The big picture is in staying focused on what the picture WAS in the first place!

Of course, that’s easy to say right now. I’m tired and optimistic after a weekend of shows. The future is wide open, our prospects are bright. All we have to do is keep on the straight and narrow, and all we can do is succeed.

Of course, that would be a lot more fun if we had a Grimmleigh’s comic strip…