Tag: Philip Dodson

Borderless world

Posted on by philipdodson

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Tonight I hosted The Art For Work’s Sake workshop at the my coworking space, run by my mate Doug.

Doug’s workshop over 2 years ago was the inspiration for me reigniting my love of art, that had been hidden since my childhood.

The picture above is my creation from the question Doug posed to us ‘what does community look like to you?’

My piece is titled ‘Borderless World’

Community is traditionally seen as a physical thing associated with a local neighbourhood. For me community is a thing that has more to do with shared values, than it has to do with being in close physical proximity to others.

Therefore the whole world can be a collection of communities, or tribes as Seth Godin puts it (sorry Doug couldn’t resist). So the centre of my painting is the world made up of the blurring of all the different shapes and colours that is the human race.

I love the diversity of cultures, languages, food, music, places, stories, traditions and so much more that makes the human race and the world such a wonderful place to be.

What I dream of is no more nations, flags, anthems and borders.

Since the homo sapiens became the only and dominant human species and 70,000 years ago migrated from East Africa all over the globe, they have been exactly that migrants. So the idea that we own bits of the planet and we have to put up fences is to me so wrong.

One human race, one planet, no borders and complete celebration of diversity, difference without judgement, hate or nationalism.

Pitching, what’s that about?

Posted on by philipdodson

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I’m off this evening to do run my workshop on pitching and presenting, as part of Echo ++.

So this is not a shameless plug for my workshop.

The point of the workshop is to focus on being different, standing out and realising everything that we do is ‘pitching’.

What I mean by ‘pitching’ is marketing, and marketing is every single thing that we do in our business. The way we speak, how we answer the phone, our blogs, our social media, our website, our invoices and so on.

It is all about demonstrating our values, being different and articulating ‘why’ we do what we do.

It is not about manipulation and sales, unless all you want to do is build a business on short-term tactics, like price, and run the risk of being out-manipulated by others.

It is about inspiration and creating a situation where people want to be part of your journey and become evangelists for your business. They do it for themselves, as your ’cause’, your ‘movement’, your values, all resonate with them, and they want to be on-board.

Loyalty can’t be bought, it comes from something more meaningful than benefits, features, price and motivation.

It comes from creating our very best work, that is has story behind it, based on values, and is different from the bland mass market.