As a huge professional basketball fan, I try my best to catch multiple games per week. Most are of my local team (Go Mavs!), but even games featuring teams 2000 miles from here are thrilling to me.
The thrill of the game isn’t by accident. Each team includes 15 full time players of incredible athletic abilities– but athleticism alone will only get them so far. The best players have a discipline for the game that rivals any scholar, businessman, or artist.
As a fan, you’ll hear stories of a certain player arriving to the gym early in the morning and staying late into the evening. Weight lifting, endurance building, and skill training all incorporate repetitive activities that would make the average person lose their mind.
(Sidenote, I wish I could be a fraction as disciplined as one of these athletes. Perhaps then I could actually hit my blog posting goals this year. Hello 2018, can I do it?)
Now, here at Square 205, we can’t claim to be as disciplined as a sharp shooting point guard breaking ankles and dishing dimes every other night. That being said, we do have a few worthy skills crafted over years of practice and refinement.
I’m talking about the communication and technical skills we use every day in our industry, like copywriting, web design, and front-end development.
In addition to hours we spend fine tuning these unique skills, there’s lots of research. Blogs, books, YouTube videos, and online courses are some of the tools we use to keep ourselves sharp and on the cusp of digital marketing and creative trends. I personally try to read at least one entrepreneurship or marketing blog article per day.
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We also send members of our team to various skill-building and inspirational events hosted by experts smarter and more experienced than us.
Recently we hung out with Sarah Forss at a DSVC Monthly Meeting and learned a lot about trusting your creative gut, how storytelling leads to unique ideas, and only creating work you’re proud of. We wrote about the inspiring talks with Sarah Forss here.
Now, while learning from others is extremely valuable, sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty. We actually build most projects with a certain amount of non-billable hours for our creatives to brainstorm, learn new techniques, and try things that may or may not work– all in the name of creativity.
An intentional culture of experimentation and curiosity ensures we avoid stagnation in our techniques, ideas, and drive.
Our culture might be the “accomplishment” that I am most proud of so far in the life of this agency. It’s one that rewards collaboration and constructive criticism. It’s one that says, “Sure, take an hour to explore that off-the-wall idea.” It’s one that tries to give each team member a chance at ownership over some aspect of the company that matters to them.
The reward is then new effective techniques, more and exciting creative ideas, and a drive to do great work that we’re not even coming close to compensating well enough for.
This is the discipline that we’re striving for at Square 205. It’s not about perfection, but about never settling and improving steadily each and every day.
If you’d like to learn more about how we work everyday to win not championships per say, but in the creation of highly effective website designs, branding, and marketing campaigns, contact us or find us on Facebook!
