6100 comments
2357 subscribers
6264 on Twitter
Subscribe! Feed reader E-mail

Enthusiastic rapport with Emmanuel and Rob: movies that motivate

What a day, what a day!

I went back to Second Cup for coffee with Emmanuel Lopez and Rob Schaumer at 3:00 PM. Kevin McIntosh introduced me to Emmanuel Lopez because of Emmanuel’s upcoming series called “Movies that Motivate”. Instinct told me to invite Rob Schaumer (Purpose Realized), whom I had met at the Mesh planning party last November 15 and again at the DemoCamp afterparty. And what a conversation we had! Two hours just flew past, and we all had great fun.

Emmanuel Lopez has been a motivational
speaker for the past three years. “Motivational speaker” is too bland
a word to describe him—hence the moniker, “Motivatorman”. The movie
series this January at the Royal Ontario Museum looks really
interesting. With feel-good and thought-provoking movies such as
Groundhog Day, As Good As It Gets, and Pleasantville, he’ll help so
many people face their challenges and develop themselves. And the
events aren’t just movies, too. He’ll start each event with 30 minutes
for a motivational speech and discussion, and wraps it up with more
discussion and reflection. Sounds like good stuff!

I’m *really* excited about his second project, too: a series of
workshops on self-development for hubs/connectors. With the tagline
“network – interact – share”, it definitely sounds like my kind of
thing—heck, it’s something I wish I could’ve organized! <laugh>
It’s a pity that the first event is in January; I’ll only be able to
make it to the next one. AHA! I know, I can suggest homework…

What a delight! I’m looking forward to inviting the people I know to
those events (even in absentia!), which will help me get to know their
non-work sides too.

And I had *no* idea that Rob Schaumer had a
talent for marketing, but I’m glad I discovered it in the course of
conversation! He suggested all sorts of useful little tweaks for
Emmanuel’s marketing campaign.

He has such a fascinating life history. Self-educated in an Orthodox
Jewish community where most people are expected to complete university
degrees, he really wants to reach out and motivate other people. He
related how motivational speakers tend to break into the profession in
three ways:

  • earn a university degree in it (they have degrees in motivational speaking?)
  • work for someone already doing it
  • prove your worth

Rob decided not to go for university, and ended up building a company
for the heck of it—just to see if he could. (Wow!) The motivational
companies he talked to wouldn’t consider someone without a university
degree, so by process of elimination…. I’ve no doubt that he’ll find
his niche and fill it really well!

Rob’s got such awesome experiences. One of his stories fits in
perfectly with Emmanuel’s focus on movies. He was playing squash, but
he was pretty tired and out of form. He told us how he intentionally
visualized the scene in Superman Returns where Superman flies into
space to recharge, and that just filled him with energy. Every time
his energy flagged, he’d go back to that scene. Because of that, he
played a pretty good game!

We swapped many more tips that I’m looking forward to writing about
over time, but I just wanted to help you get to know some of the
fantastic people I met today. Isn’t life awesome?

Random Emacs symbol: term-down – Function: Move down DOWN screen lines vertically.

On Technorati: ,

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/4069

On This Day...

  • 2012: One to three, that’s all — One to three good pieces of work each day. That’s all I want to check off my list, and anything [...]
  • 2011: Growing as a developer: Automated tests — For this project, I put a lot of time into writing tests. Now they’re paying off. User acceptance testing [...]
  • 2010: Android life so far — It’s been three weeks since I bought my Android phone, and I’m having lots of fun hacking it. Here’s what [...]
  • 2009: How I find and learn from mentors — Would you be willing to describe in more detail how those relationships came to be, and how you’ve gone about [...]
  • 2008: Cintiq 12WX, OpenSuse 11.0, and much pain and suffering — Let that be a lesson to me: Always blog solutions to problems. The cost of doing so is not just [...]
  • 2007: Tips for conference bloggers — Conference reports are a great way to help share knowledge and justify the expense of conference travel, but attendees are often [...]
  • 2006: Stuffing envelopes, writing cards… — <stretch> Halfway through my US/Canada 2006 letters. I’m limiting myself to 100 letters for now, although I *might* send more from the [...]
  • 2006: Learning from the best — I grew up with books and audiotapes of Tom Peters, Zig Ziglar, and Tom Hopkins. I can *still* hear Tom Hopkins [...]
  • 2006: Kudos to Kevin Magee: sales and networking tips — I had a terrific conversation with Kevin Magee over coffee and chocolate chillers at Second Cup this morning. I met him very [...]
  • 2005: Missing — Finals were great. =) Now to figure out where the missing pieces are… I remember going back to my room this [...]
  • 2004: planner tweak: What am I supposed to be doing? — This snippet helps me keep track of what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve bound it to F9 F9. Calling it [...]
  • 2004: PLUG Christmas Party — I would like to invite you to attend and celebrate with us in our upcoming Christmas party and General Assembly this [...]
  • 2004: Kanji sentence — 今年度はデジタル家電の需要の低迷などから1けたの伸びに減速する。 ことしどはデジタルかでんのじゅようのていめいなどからひとけたののびにげんそくする。 減速する。| [It] will slow down. 伸びに減速する。| Growth will slow down. 1けたの伸びに減速する。| Growth will slow down to a 1-digit figure. 低迷などから1けたの伸びに減速する。| Because of sluggishness, [...]
  • 2003: chess.el — Another John Wiegley creation! Mumble mumble… ;)
  • 2003: Natural language processing — http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/11/2358209&mode=thread&tid=106&tid=126&tid=156&tid=185 From Slashdot: Zhang Le, a Chinese scientist working on Natural Language Processing has decided to pack the most important language analysis and [...]

Get the highlights as a PDF!

Stories from my Twenties: Highlights from a Decade of Blogging

Free sample!