Did your dreams come true? Guest Author: Richard Seaton

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Guest Author: Richard Seaton

This week I am delighted to welcome Richard Seaton as my guest author. We have known each other online for about a couple of years now.

My post last week – suggesting a blog post with cartoons in – was the inspiration to invite Richard write for me.

I remember thinking “There’s no way in the world I can draw cartoons – but I know a man who can….” Richard Seaton!

Richard is an online marketer and thoroughly nice guy.

Before Richard started in online marketing he worked for many years in the Health Sector – privately as a chiropractor and Spinal Therapist. Then in 2011 he decided on entrepreneurship as his new career.

Like me, Richard did the rounds of ethical, product based businesses, but never found “quite the one”, but his stated aim is:

I want to show you how to avoid being one of the 98% who NEVER makes a cent on line!

Over to Richard….

We all have dreams – so what are yours?

When I was six years old back in 1859 (or was that 1959?), I used to read the amazing books of Grey Owl, the ‘Ojibwe First Nation’ from Canada, who ended up as the ‘caretaker of park animals’ at Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba in 1931, and then at Prince Albert National Park until his death in 1938.

It turned out that he was in fact an Englishman named Archibald Belaney from Hastings in Sussex, and his whole life in Canada had been a lived-out fantasy. But what a fantasy!

He never even left Hastings for Canada until he was 18, and he even got presented to the Royal Family on one of his UK tours as the First Nation ‘Voice of the Wilderness’.

We can all endlessly re-invent ourselves…

The thing is that I knew all this when I read his books about the frontier, the wildlife and the wilderness. But it only served to heighten my own conviction that we can re-invent ourselves as often as we want. Grey Owl was a great protector of the vanishing wild, despite his idealism and his fraudulent life.

My dream became to build a log cabin in Canada, have my own team of Huskies and to live off the land. So probably fortunately for me, my dreams didn’t come true. The thing about dreams is that they are often based on fantasy, and a desired wish for the world to be different than it really is.

Had I embarked on my dream (and I almost did when I was 20) I am sure that the realities of Canadian winters and sub-zero temperatures would have been my end! I still like to think I might have coped though, but now in retrospect I am glad I plumped for reality instead.

Here’s How Dreams Can Come True

Over the next 20 years, I had many more dreams, and I slowly worked out how to make them real.

“Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”

You see, I was always bored silly in school classrooms, apart from the Art room and in English – both of which I loved. My real passion was always to be outside in the woods, learning all about wildlife first hand, where I would suddenly ‘come alive’.

I would often skive off from school to go and follow the local gamekeeper on his rounds. Ian was very a patient man, although I’m sure I must have annoyed the heck out of him with my endless questions at the time.

The first useful lesson he taught me was that incessant chatter scares away 95% of the very wildlife we are trying to see…

I gradually learned that the art of seeing wild creatures is to let them come to you and not to go chasing off after them. You will see far more by sitting quietly on a log and keeping still; disappearing into the background and becoming invisible.

I eventually found out that I could use my other two passions – drawing and writing – to communicate my love of the wilderness, and make a bit of extra cash as well. This took the form of short stories and cartoons. Later on in my life I found that cartooning was a great way to engage with people and to show them why wildlife urgently needs our protection and care.

“Ric’s Tips” was my first cartooning attempt at this – a series of cartoons about animals getting their own back on gamekeepers.

Funnily enough it got published in some popular Countryside magazines, which is great. Here’s one of the earlier ones.

So what has all this to do with Marketing?

Think about this. If you bake a beautiful cake, or paint a picture and you decide to sell it, who’s going to be the best person to promote it for you? Of course, you can hire a marketer and pay him to pretend to be passionate about your creation, which works brilliantly. After all that’s what they do for a living.

Or you can learn to promote your own great ideas with your own authentic spin and charisma. So much more satisfying in the long run. You did all the work, after all. You learned the stuff, created the product and marketed it. It’s ALL yours. But can that person ever be as genuinely passionate about your painting or your cake as you are? Of course not. They can do a pretty good job, and of course that is exactly what professional marketers do.

Authenticity

The thing is that people can sniff out authenticity a mile off. If it’s all just too slick, too rehearsed, not ‘from the heart’ then they will run a mile. I talk about Passion and authenticity in this short video of a ‘live call’ I did one time on Blab before it sadly closed down last year….

Listen to it all the way to the end because it gets better as it progresses…

Thank you Joy for inviting me to post here, and thank you all for getting to the end of this post – I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. It’s all about Finding that Passion and calling on it in everything you do. Don’t copy other people’s Passion – because we can all see 🙂