Yesterday, we had our Day In The Life winner visit the office.  For those who may not be familiar with Day In The Life, it was a contest we ran in conjunction with the release of our new website last year in which the winner got to come spend a day in the office with us and see what Sixthman is really like – totally unrestricted access.  The winner could ask anything they liked of anybody in the office and hang out wherever they felt the urge.

I think it was a pretty successful visit.  We started the day with bagels and coffee for breakfast (thanks, Tara!), let her interview some people from the different departments, and after we had a little lunch, Michael Tolcher came to play a few tunes for us and we did some podcasting.  We finished the day by letting her see what it’s like when we’re putting together an event –first by having her sit in on an Elvis Cruise meeting (so she could see what it’s like before we begin the execution stage for an event) and then on a VH1 Best Cruise Ever marketing meeting (so she could see an event in it’s beginning stages).  And of course, along the way we threw in a little cornhole and then let her raid the Sixthman swag room for good measure.  You’ll get to hear all about her visit, as I believe she’ll be writing a blog about it and we’ll be posting a podcast interview with her later this week.

The visit did get me thinking though…if I could chose anywhere to spend a “Day  In The Life” I really think I would chose to see the White House in action.  And not for any political reasons.  I would want to spend the day observing there whether the president was Bush, Obama, McCain or Nader.  I just think that the amount of information and intelligence that comes in and out of the Oval Office must be dumbfounding.  I can’t imagine helping the President of the United States make the decisions he has to make, nor can I fathom being the person sitting behind that desk, knowing that I would be held accountable for every word I say and every action I take (or for that matter the information you are privy to that no one else knows about).  It’s either the most well run organization on Earth or a total freak show…or both.

So while we aren’t the White House, I hope that Tara (our winner) had a good time with us yesterday and that our Day In The Life of Sixthman wasn’t too boring.  And I’d love to know if you could chose to spend a Day In The Life somewhere – where would that be?

I have a good friend named Rick Smith who is anything but common as his name might imply.   Rick is the kind of guy who has the great ability to make you think about “who you are”, “where you are” and “how you got there”.

He has been working in his lab for the past few years on his new book (out this fall) about finding the intersection where your passions meet your strengths.  Unlike most books that make your brain race with ideas while you are reading them but leave you with little or no direction on how to apply some of the insights, Rick Smith, has designed a free (for now anyway) online test to compliment his upcoming book that I really like.

It’s called the Primary Color Assessment and it will give you a great insight into where you might have the most success in your pursuits.  I am “Ocean Blue” which means I probably wouldn’t do my best work in “Research & Development”.

Have some fun today and take the test.  If you aren’t happy with your color, these are also great names for “Frozen Drinks” and “Brad Pitt Movies.

Good work Rick and thanks for sharing.  You can find more on Rick at his blog.

Last October, I bought my 2nd house just outside of a small neighborhood in East AtlantaVillage. I love the area, and fell in love with the home itself.

I have been blessed enough to have my cousin living with me for the past few months, as she has been going through a hard transition in her life. She is in a great place now, and has purchased her own home which she is moving into this weekend.

Which… leaves me to being on the hunt for another roommate. And i must admit, this whole process has taken a toll on me over the past month! It has proved to be VERY tough and emotional, but for way different reason than I expected.

1. I don’t really WANT a roommate. I love living by myself, and bought this house under the personal expectation that I would live here solo. However, the economy has impacted things a big, and thus I have come to the conclusion that I need one. (blah!)

2. If I have a roommate, I’d like to know them, at least a little. I am out of town traveling a lot with this job, and leaving a stranger in my home while i’m gone, and trusting them to take care of it like it’s their own, is unsettling.

3. I would like them to have a job where they travel a lot too. I mean, this comes back to me wanting to live alone. If they at least travel a lot with what they do, then sometimes I can have the house to myself. Seems only fair, right?

4. I prefer that they have a dog. I love animals, and especially love dogs. I just can’t own one yet – due to the travel and the expensive. (I’m trying to be responsible here, people. I will get one someday when its right!). But a dog would be so fun, I would definitely help take care of it, and would love it to be there as extra security. So, pets preferred in this case!

So… this whole search for the perfect roommate has really been hard. I’m having an internal struggle between knowing I need to have one, and thinking of all the reasons I should be picky. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t done anything. I have sent the emails, and talked to people I know, but who am I kidding. All my friends that fit the criteria above (even minus the dog) are either married, or own a place on their own.

So my question is, at what point do I give up on these criteria? When do I realize that getting another roommate is a matter of necessity, not desire – and how do I get there?

Do any of you have any suggestions of how to talk yourself into something? Or even better, what I can do to keep spreading the word?

You all are great with advice… bring it!

Sixthman team members Steve and Melissa take over this week’s edition of the podcast.  We kick things off with an interview with the Zac Brown Band followed by their in-studio performance of “Tell Lorrie I Love Her.”  Then, we discuss our brand new cruise, VH1 Best Cruise Ever, and talk about an exciting new band joining us on The Rock Boat X.

Sixthman Podcast #27 - Zac Brown Band [ 16:47 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If we’re talking about deciding what kind of latte I want to order from Starbucks I know I want a Grande Skinny Vanilla Latte. If you ask me the best vacation I’ve ever been on, I can tell you it was my 22nd birthday trip to Hilton Head and answer without skipping a beat.  Would I rather have a week in Vegas or a trip to Austin TX? – Austin, no question about it.

Now the other 99%  of the time I need to make a choice, it’s not so simple.  I’d like to think I have a bad case of the “indecise-y’s”.  Decisions scare me and not necessarily the “cup of coffee decisions”, but bigger decisions, the ones that affect me long term, and potentially affect others. The ones with the unpredictable outcomes and larger price tags.

So maybe I am more afraid of the unknown rather than the actual decision making process. Either way it’s caused a fair amount of stress in my life.  There is a little voice in my head that won’t let me make a final decision without the analysis of every possible outcome of every possible decision and then leaves me even more confused then when I started.

I am turning 25 next month and more and more I am faced with decisions that I once relied on my parents and more “responsible” people to make. The ones that aren’t so much about where I want to go on vacation, but more about what stocks I want to invest in and how much of a mortgage I can afford.  I accept responsibility but sometimes it scares the shit out of me (I take responsibility for using that curse word).

I’d like to get better at this part of my life.  I want to walk away confidant and satisfied with my decisions.  There has to be a better process for analyzing and answering these challenges and making solid choices, than my over thinking and constant anxiety of doing the wrong thing.

SO…who has the magic method to answering life’s questions?  I know there’s some natural born decision makers out there!

Melissa

Okay so when I was 15 I had 96 pictures of Michael Jackson on my wall.

“Thrillermania” was in full force. I was already hooked in from “Off the Wall” and therefore, a certifiable MJ super fan. This was before the internet age information explosion so I scoured magazines and the Sunday paper week after week and even the tiniest of pictures made the cut.

It is almost unfathomable to me just how huge Michael Jackson became. The impact he made on music, dance and entertaining is EPIC. (No pun intended on the mention of the lucky record label that released such gems as “Off the Wall” and “Thriller”) I mean Michael Jackson broke the color barrier on MTV. Michael Jackson was an R&B artist who crossed over to pop radio then became its King. Michael Jackson moonwalked across a stage and turned the world on its ear.

And for this, I can only admire and honor him for his art. Yeah, things got weird. But even then, I couldn’t bear to believe it. Instead, I chose to reflect on the path he was on. An incredibly famous and dynamic child star, he grew into an even bigger uber-celebrity when he was a young man. He had people constantly wanting him and grabbing for his attention and maybe he was never able to get grounded, to relax into his being. And as weird as things got, I always maintained the hope that he would be back, that he still had something in him. And maybe just maybe he would hook up with Quincy Jones once again and shoot another album straight to the moon.

I was a shy kid and used to hang in my room a lot. I had my roster of cassettes and my little boom box permanently in the play position. Music has always been my salvation and all these years later “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” are still in my steady rotation. And as I sit in disbelief, the same set of lyrics keep playing in my head. When I was 15, I thought Michael Jackson was singing them to me. Now that I’m 41 and know a whole lot better, I think maybe he was singing them to himself.

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl
No one can hurt you now
Because you know what’s true
Yes, I believe in me
So you believe in you
Help me sing it!
Ma ma se ma ma sa ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se ma ma sa ma ma coo sa….

R.I.P. MJ

-Carla

This past weekend, I read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell as part of my ‘required reading’ for Sixthman University.  In the book, Gladwell discusses the famous midnight ride of Paul Revere, warning the citizens of New England that “the British [were] coming” and effectively preparing them for the surprise invasion.  Growing up in Massachusetts, I’ve known about Paul Revere and studied the Revolutionary War practically every year throughout school.

So it came to my surprise when Gladwell discussed a gentleman by the name of William Dawes who received the same message as Paul Revere, and traveled in another direction to warn of the British invasion.  While Revere’s message reached far and wide, mustering towns full of soldiers in just a matter of minutes, Dawes’s message somehow fell on deaf ears, and most members of the towns he visited didn’t find out about the war until much later.

So what the heck happened? Apparently Paul Revere was quite the popular fellow and knew the right people in each town to reach, while William didn’t have the same level of persuasion and reputation.  Because of his popularity, Paul Revere would go on to become known for his famous role in the American Revolution, while William Dawes would fade into obscurity.  If you’d like to read the whole fascinating account of this story from the Tipping Point, you can read it here.  How about Israel Bissell? This guy rode from Watertown, MA to PHILADELPHIA to warn everybody of the attack, covering some 350 miles in 4 days.  Ever heard of him?  Didn’t think so.

Moving beyond the specifics of Paul Revere, I started thinking about all the other poor suckers in history who had a chance at greatness but due to some circumstance never quite made it over the hump.  Two hundred years from now, everybody will remember that Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon.  How many people will know that Buzz Aldrin was the second?  According to Wikipedia (obviously not the most reputable source, I know), the reason Armstrong was picked over Aldrin to be the first on the moon was because they thought Armstrong had way less of an ego.  Just think, if Buzz Aldrin hadn’t been such a jerk playing cards at the NASA space station years earlier, he’d be the one in the history books.  Now, the only Buzz anybody cares about will be staring in Toy Story 3 next summer (wooo Pixar!).

Although Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, his request for “ahoy!” to be the official greeting eventually lost out to Thomas Edison who wanted it to be “hello.”  There are conflicting stories why ‘hello’ won out in the end, I’m just glad it did.  I don’t think Neil Diamond would have been nearly as successful with “Ahoy Again” and we just can’t have that.

Because I’m feeling creative, I decided to make up some famous fake “other guys” in history:

• Christopher Columbus discovered America, and will always be known in the poem “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Did you know Christopher Columbus had an older brother named Biff?  Believe it or not, it was actually Biff’s idea to sail west from Portugal, and he did it two years earlier than Christopher.  Unfortunately, Biff made the trip in a bathtub using a bed sheet for a sail; he only made it 20 yards off the coast before sinking.  Biff wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, if you catch my drift (get it? drift? zing!).
• You’ve heard of Lewis and Clark, the first pair of Americans to travel to the Pacific Coast and back in the early 1800s. Did you know it was actually going to be Lewis and Clark and Griswald, but Griswald was eaten by a grizzly bear two days into the trip when he accidentally ate the bear’s porridge.  History will show it’s not the first time this mistake has been made.

I smell a contest! Leave a comment with your best fake history story about “the other guy” – the one who came in second, the girl who would have won had she not given up, the fad that should have caught on but didn’t, etc.  At the end of the week, the Sixthman team will pick the most clever story that made us laugh the hardest.  We’ll mail some free Sixthman swag to the winner.

Napoleon? Caesar? Plato?  All fair game. Fake historians, let’s hear what you got.

-Steve

Would a BLOG be more popular if it had a different name?

Shakespeare once said “A rose by any other name, would smell just as sweet”.

For the last 77 Sunday evenings, I have welcomed the anxiety that comes with sharing the crazy things in my head each Monday morning.  The anxiety is always eased when I remind myself it’s just a BLOG and how could I let something that sounds as goofy as BLOG does cause me stress.

Well I can’t hold back any longer.  We name things all the time and it is the toughest process we go thru as a company.  After naming bands, events and babies, none of them ever sound good at the moment you finally decide, however, most of them grow on you after a period of time and become perfect.

BLOG is just not cutting it for me.  It even sounds like BLAH and when you say it, your mouth makes the same motions as it would to spit something up.

If the BLOG is going to be all it can be, I think we owe it a new name.

I would like to suggest the following as candidates.

#1 – ZIMA (it’s already branded)

#2 – SHAZAAM (inspired by comic books)

#3 – BOOYA (inspired by ESPN)

What you got?

Are you doing too much?  Right now I’m reading a book by Andy Stanley called,  ”Next Generation Leader.”  I’m only a couple of chapters in and am already learning so much.  Oh, and this is one of the books from Lauren’s blog, Sixthman Book Club.  

Here’s something I’m learning:

1. The less you do, the more you accomplish.
2. The less you do, the more you enable others to accomplish.

It’s soo true!  All through college, which wasn’t that long ago for me, I sometimes had the attitude of, “If you want things done right, do it yourself.”  This woul

d allow me to get good grades, but at what cost?  It took a ton of energy to do the things I hated to do instead of focusing on the parts of the project that I was best at doing; presenting.  Don’t get too consumed by things that are outside of your core competencies.  DELEGATE.

As I move forward with my career at Sixthman, I hope I can utilize this concept a little better than I have in the past.  ”The secret of concentration is elimination.”

Is there anything you might be spending a little too much time and effort on?

I love the band Belle & Sebastian. Now I love them even more, since learning of frontman Stuart Murdoch’s latest project, ‘God Help the Girl’.

He had been writing new music for a number of years, and instead of taking the best songs and hitting the studio with the band, he took it in a completely different direction. 

Here’s how it began:

“I was out for a run and I got this tune in my head and it occurred to me that it wasn’t a Belle & Sebastian song. I could hear female voices and strings, I could hear the whole thing, but I just couldn’t envisage myself singing it with the group,” Stuart says.

It turned into a story of sorts, and he needed to cast characters for the record. Murdoch held open auditions for singers, and ended up with nine different vocalists joining the band to finish the 14 songs on the album. 

I followed the story for quite some time before it came out, which made me completely wrapped up in it before even hearing a single note.  I think what I love the most is that the band put the integrity of the music way ahead of their egos (Belle & Sebastian’s name is not even on the album from what I can see) to create a beautiful record. 

As a bonus, I hear some of the singles are doing quite well on the U.K charts.  It all goes back to doing what you love, I guess! 

Check out some of the questions Stuart has answered on the topic:

http://www.godhelpthegirl.com/qanda

And, let me know how you like it! (Search “God Save The Girl” on iTunes).