You’ve got a book. It’s a simple self-help tome. Maybe one of the best covers you must own. It is called 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 assess the way you conduct your business and life. Generally, it’s all about playing by the right rules, good manners, open-mindedness, being chic in your own way, truthfulness and counterintuitive thinking. Written in easy-to-read and witty fashion, Brillstein puts together an anthology of 50 fundamental tenets that can make living more exciting. Read the book and agree with my favorites from the collection.
Play by the right rules. The game these days in any business or life endeavor is built on what is hot, what’s in, what’s in everybody’s grocery cart. There are hot performers, hot shows, hot trends, hot decisions or hot indecisions. Hot sells, but with it comes a trail of questions: How long will the heat last or how long will you be on top? What do you do with your hotness? How do you stay in the game and extend your domination?
Keep 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 you worry about staying hot, the more likely you are to get cold. The trick is to keep doing exactly what you did before success arrived, instead of merely trying to protect your laurels. 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 can you tell? Ask these questions: Am I hot? Am I full of myself? If so, chances are you’re not paying attention to the work and you’ll never get good.
Work with who you are. Remember that success begins with simply being you. You have to find some way to stand out. The best method is to work with who you are. Don’t go looking for style elsewhere, you can find it within you. Style is not only the way you obey or disobey fashion trends, but also the way you carry your act. You owe it to yourself to be yourself, and see if other people can stand it. It’s not saying that you should have or show an excessively high opinion of your own qualities or abilities. Moderation is still the rule, and if you have an overflowing sense of humor, great intellect or immense good looks, flaunt it.
Being eccentric is not bad news. Challenge the conventional wisdom that if you stick out you’ll court trouble. But if that happens, you can leave and start your own entrepreneurial adventure. There is a flipside, of course. You also have to know when to conform, when to shut up. There is a game that needs to played out, but by all means, play it creatively.
Follow what your customers want to buy, not what you want to sell. Sublimate your ego for cash. Don’t worry about what you want to market, worry about what your target market is willing to pay for. It’s important to get into the customers’ heads. You must listen instead of talk, and when you talk, don’t say what you want to say; say what your audience wants to hear. If you heed their lead, they will walk with you. Treat them fairly and think about their needs as you think of your own. With this mindset, there is no doubt you will always be ahead.
Waiting is a virtue. Believe that when your time is up, success will find you. Good work travels and it leads to success. The waiting period seems eternal at times, but if you are confident of your talent, you can be more adventurous and take the road less traveled. Be different and change your course and discover your own hot buttons, which can allow you to achieve the victory you aim for much faster and with better results.
But if you have to wait, wait patiently. “Making it” is not always synonymous with money or material acquisitions. It shouldn’t be. Personal satisfaction, however you define it, is primordial. You have to accept that what you’re doing is for the right reasons. With that mindset, there is no mistaking you’ll be able to deliver great work. And there’s emotional success as well, like you were able to help somebody with a project idea, a product concept or a service-oriented scheme. It’s always a good feeling that will rationally and emotionally sustain you, until the rest of what you want to achieve comes.
Wallow in your failures and rejections. Yes, you read that correctly. The best way to take malfunctions and rebuffs is to immerse and swim with them. Who doesn’t hate failure and rejection? Various mechanisms are used to cope with these twin downers. Most of the time, you put on a happy face to hide the ill feelings, which may or may not work depending on how you get your stakes on. Intermittent bad days or a string of bad luck is a part of life, and when they attack and get into your head, you expectedly go into a slump. Suddenly, you don’t care about anything — work, diet, family, relationships, spirituality — which when not managed well can bring you to a crooked, painful place.
You’ve experienced slumps in your life, and these sinking situations can confront you again and again. You can ward off the annoying sensation that they bring by counting your blessings: At least you’re not terminally ill, you have a steady job, well-meaning friends and a family to support and cheer you up.
To get over slumps, you have to wallow in them, but quickly get out of the pothole, stretch, take a deep breath, and start again. That means, as Brillstein suggests, accepting that you are in one in the first place. And to deal with any emotional challenge, you have to go through the fire, not around it. Don’t make a pain in the ass of yourself, stop moaning, and don’t try to make everyone else in your life feel as pathetic as you do. Try to remember the times you were riding high, start a regular exercise routine, eat the right foods, bond with family and friends, do positive activities, and wait for that click that signals that things are looking up.
Be not afraid. Fear is a common emotion, but don’t get defeated by it. We live in a climate of fear, from serious fears — like terrorism and calamities — to the ludicrous, like losing your way or getting caught in a petty indiscretion. If you say that you don’t live in constant anxiety, you are lying and are, in fact, full of it. Fear has helped make people successful. It’s there in just about every situation, and we can use it to our advantage. It should not eat you up, but instead push you to think on your feet, make your mind and heart work to craft a plan of action that can overpower that loathsome unease.
Someone up there is watching. You aim to build an unassailable reputation on both personal and professional levels. 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 you, and as your spiritual upbringing perhaps taught you, He knows if we do good things or bad, deal with anyone with malice, treat our fellowmen disrespectfully, share our blessings with the less fortunate or simply be an angel to people.
You have to believe in something greater than yourself. It will lead you to the right path, keep your pride in check, and help make your existence happier, however you define what happiness is.
These are stark reminders of the basics that are most often disregarded or worse, forgotten. They matter most and you must bring them back online.
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E-mail bongosorio@yahoo.com or bong_osorio@abs-cbn.com for comments, questions or suggestions. Thank you for communicating. The Little Stuff Matters Most is available at National Book Store.