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Stephen Pickering

Category: 1 Minute Tips

  • The Best Productivity Tips and Life Advice for Making It.

  • How Women and Men are Different and How This Awareness Can Help Your Life

    Women are born multi-taskers. Men are built to focus like a laser on one thing. By multi-tasking women bring forth their clarity of purpose, and by focusing men bring forth a sort of ability to “do it all” and “be many places at once.”
    It’s completely ironic and none of it is conscious. It’s emergent from leaning into accepting their strengths (one might call it their calling) and most importantly not expecting anything else. Not needing anything else.

    Hey Whitney, I read Joseph Campbell all the time, and I can’t remember if it was his idea, or he got it from Jung or even something more Eastern and ancient but the idea of turning your weaknesses into strengths was looked at as the right track and not something to be ashamed of. It’s almost as if we’ve been brainwashed with this idea of being the perfect “all-around” person (College both academically and socially re-enforces this mode almost psychotically) as the goal when ironically that is the perfect exact recipe for schizophrenia, inauthenticity, and not bringing forth your true self and or creativity. Also, back in the 90’s when I had a retail store and thought I wanted to be a business tycoon, I read this guy Peter Drucker. He’s considered like the greatest consultant ever. I remember him saying you don’t want to hire the perfect “all-around” individual. He said, “The people with the greatest strengths have the greatest weaknesses.” Oh, and another famous quote of his is, “Stop solving problems. Instead pursue opportunities.” People get so literal, of course it doesn’t mean don’t call the plumber when the shower doesn’t work. It just means, in the bigger picture, focus the majority of your mental energy on opportunity instead of problems. Of course, I should have said this first, I’M OBSESSED WITH YOU AND YOUR SHOW! I think I’ve watched them all and thoroughly enjoyed. And that thing ya’ll mentioned about “Friends,” if I’m panicking, I can turn on your show, and it it’s so soothing in that way too for me. I totally understand that thing with parents and “Friends” but with me as an adult it’s like I need something current as well as having that soothing nature of your voice and your take.

    ME!

  • Three Pieces of Great Life Advice I Gleaned From Twitter Today

    Sounds weird right? Twitter is the negative capital of the world it would seem. It seems almost like a magnet for negativity and arguing. Boy, I spent too much of my life during the last decade engaging in both, and still do at times, although I’m much more conscious of it.

    #1 Chase Jarvis. I swear there are days, and today was one of them when I said to myself, I need to unfollow everyone on Twitter except for Chase Jarvis. He’s all you need! He’s like Bob Proctor 2.0 except he specializes in the Creative career. If you really wanted to turn your life around, and especially if your dream was to be a creative (artist, writer, painter, photographer, movie-maker, actually in today’s world creativity can be applied to any career) I think listening to Chase Jarvis non-stop would do the trick. I’m certain it would.

    #2 This was an unlikely source and for an unlikely and controversial reason, but I thought the main point he made was so golden. It was from Tim Brando, a former Sports Broadcaster, who was really pissed off about the way the leadership in Athletics at the collegiate level has been so poor in the face of COVID-19. At any rate, and I do trust his judgement on such issues, but I know that point could be debated, but I thought his immediate cure was self-help gold:
    “Do what you love. Get your mind off what pisses you off!” It may not sound sexy, but it works!

    #3 Dolly Parton. Actually this one isn’t from twitter. I heard it last night, but I can’t remember from where, but I thought it really hit home. “Find out what you are good at, and do it on purpose.” It sounds too simple to be true, but that one sentence is almost all you need to know to not only be happy in life (if you are good at it, it’s usually something you enjoy in and of itself) and also make a good living that provides at the very least for your food and shelter and more than likely for a whole lot more.

  • How to Fix a Spotify Embed That’s Too Tall or Stretches Too Far Down the Page

    I just released a new single last week, and when I created a new post about it, which included a Spotify embed of the single, even though the embed only contained two songs it stretched all the way down the page. When I google searched for a solution, I came to this page: Spotify embeds have large blank space at bottom on WordPress.org, but their solution, a bit of CSS code added to your Appearance >> Themes >> Customize >> Additional CSS didn’t work for me. As of this writing I’m using the TwentyTwenty WordPress theme.

    At first I thought I found the answer simply by adding px after the height number the Spotify gives you for the code. In their code it’s just the number 180 in parentheses. I added a px at the end of that number, and that seemed to solve it, at least as an individual post, but on the main page of the blog at the domain level (as of this writing it is my most recent post), the problem still persisted.

    Somewhere along the line of my search, I found someone had wrapped the <iframe> tag that Spotify gives you in a <figure> tag which I had never heard of, but that didn’t help either. What finally worked (at least it seems so at this moment, is keeping that px addition (to the height not the width) and then wrapping the whole thing in a div tag. Here’s what the final code looks like:

    <div><figure><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/5r5zBUsuM7tsJtDC3x0AE9" width="300" height="180px" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe></figure></div>

    You can see I went ahead and left the figure tag in there. I don’t know if that makes any difference or not. But the above code seems to have solved my problem as of this writing at least in WordPress and the particular TwentyTwenty theme I’m using at the moment. Just replace your own Spotify code within this nest and add px at the end of the height value and see if it works for you.

  • The Best Romantic Relationship Books According to Whitney Cummings

    • Getting to ‘I Do’ by Pat Allen — [Google Search Link]
    • Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix [Link]
    • Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow by Marnia Robinson [Link]

    This info was shared from Whitney’s appearance on Nikki Glaser’s Sirius XM show “You Up,” which is a lot of fun to watch in and of itself.

  • Inspiring Quotes for the Creative

    “Don’t be afraid to be obsessed.”

    Annie Leibovitz – from a Masterclass.com commercial just now (19:32hrs CST July 11th, 2019).

    “You become a writer by writing. There is no other way.”

    Margaret Atwood — from the very same Masterclass commercial as mentioned above.

    “I look for a tone. I look for that spark. Oooooooo! That’s dope!”

    “There’s no thought process. It’s about having fun.”
    “If you love it that much, it’s gonna happen.” – Timbaland#quotes #quoteoftheday #quotesaboutlife— ??????? ????????? (@Pickering) June 21, 2019

    I recently heard this from Timbaland in a youtube ad for a new Masterclass he is teaching about music production. But I think the jist can (should?) be applied to any creative activity or maybe even life in general.

    “Creating for yourself should always be first, before anything else.” https://t.co/SqVZecRiL7#quotes #quoteoftheday #quotesaboutlife #Creative #creativity— ??????? ????????? (@Pickering) June 24, 2019

    An article I happened upon today at theverge about the illustrator D’ana Nunez

    I’ve always let the music tell me what to do, and let things happen by circumstance. – Jack White

    https://youtu.be/R17ZBXo1oJ0?t=145

    I like to, to me it’s a testament to myself that I don’t tell the music what to do, I don’t tell myself what to do. The music is telling me what to do. I say, Look, let it happen. Just let it happen.

    https://youtu.be/OLhDFSpAvrs?t=299

    Jack White Youtube 4:59

    “Stop! You see what the feeling made me do? That’s what it should do to you!” — Timbaland, from that same Masterclass ad on Youtube. Those Masterclass ads are great. It’s just that I have so many subscriptions already. They’ll probably close me one of these days though. “That’s what I’m here on Earth to do.” ibid.